Inside out

For years, I believed that being healthy was about how much I weighed.  I had never really had trouble with weight until I had Madolyn.  After a child comes along, everything in your selfish world comes crashing down and mom and dad's needs take a back seat to baby.  It happens and it is not the end of the world for most people.

But it seems that the struggle to lose weight just never ends.  I did well on Weight Watchers a few years ago.  It is a great program if you are willing to stick with it, but I wasn't really happy with all the 'diet' food I was ingesting. The past few years, I've kind of had an overhaul on my perspective of good health.  As I'm creeping up on 40, I'm figuring out that the numbers on the scale do not determine my health.

When God created the earth, he gave Adam and Eve everything they needed to survive.  Food and water.  It was freely available, without having to search it out or work for it.  Before they sinned by eating the forbidden fruit, there weren't even weeds in the garden.  Can you imagine a garden without weeds?!  That first sin messed everything up.  We now have weeds, painful childbirth and are inclined to wear clothes (okay, maybe that was a good thing) among other things.

Following Adam and Eve's lead, Man came along and decided that the fruit, nuts, plants and meat of the earth wasn't tasty enough and they started adding things to make it yummy and more enticing. Plain water was boring and tasteless, so they had to doctor that as well.  And here we are...in a world full of unhealthy, over-processed, artificially-flavored, sugar-rich food.  And we are a sickly bunch... overweight, tired, suffering from pain, weakness and other unexplained symptoms.

In my humble opinion, it all ties in to what we put in our bodies.

I'm not a poster child for clean eating or healthy living by any means, but I'm slowly trying to become a step-poster child for it.  I would have to say I began a few years back when I kicked the Diet Pepsi addiction to the curb...only to replace it with something not much better, Crystal Lite with Caffeine (and the nasty artificial sweetener).  I weaned myself off of several Crystal Lite drinks a day to one first thing in the morning and felt pretty good about it.

I tried hard to like coffee...and I just couldn't.  I drank it for a few weeks off and on at work, straight, trying to force myself into that addiction.  Why?  I don't know except that I wanted another drink option.  I was sick of water.  That was a few months ago.

Now, I'm loving my water.  Weird, I know.  I've pushed my artificial sweeteners almost entirely off this mountain.  I still enjoy a Diet Pepsi at Monical's with pizza or at a Mexican restaurant (where I know the pop is so good), but that is it.

I never thought it was possible that I would drink water, almost exclusively.  Not for me at least.  I'm working on getting healthy inside and out.  Sure, I'm hoping the scale numbers fall a tad, but that isn't my number one goal anymore.

During this process, I recently stumbled onto Plexus.  I will be sharing about my Plexus journey over the next few weeks.