Other Changes

I had to go back to see what I wrote regarding changes so far.....

Goat milk, farm eggs, organic food as much as possible, kefir, walking 2 miles per day

One of the big things is no more diet anything! No Splenda! No Aspartame! No diet chemicals. No Atkins or man made stuff anymore. No diet soda. If I drink soda now, I drink either real pop with crappy white sugar or I get organic soda (which is on sale at HyVee right now). It has cut down on my intake of soda. If I am going by the weight watchers guidelines, it is only 3 pts a can anyhow. The diet soda's are addicting and actually cause you to gain weight. It tricks your body.... another way to get you to buy more pop from them. They don't care that we are getting fat....as long as we buy more pop. They just had it on the news the other night! Diet pop is just as bad or worse than regular pop.

I have started to drink tons more water. My mom bought a water dispenser for us. Thanks MOM!!! It comes out either hot or cold which is nice. I also bought a water filter for the sink.... it takes out the chlorine they add to the water (bad bad bad for you --- read the splenda article).
I am drinking about about 3 liters of water a day. I try for the gallon but I can't quite get there yet.

Why drink more water? Here are 10 reasons!!!! But the main reason is to help my body get rid of all the toxic stuff that has built up in it. It was difficult at the beginning because I really didn't like water. It is so boring! But, just like everyone who drinks water says, when you start doing it, and make it a good habit, your body will crave it just like exercise or God. You will miss it if you deprive yourself from it. I drink water before I have (organic) coffee now. I always drink water when I go out to eat somewhere.

Camping

This past weekend was my weekend off. We made a plan to go camping which is something Edgey has decided to get into. His grandparents used to go every year and his dad likes to go camping too. Last year for a gift after his grandmother died, his dad purchased a pop up camper for him. It was kind of a memorial gift from the money his dad had received after her passing.
Before that we had gone tent camping but I am not much into the tent thing. I have bad memories of tent camping. I have great memories of camping in a trailer however.

One of my bad tent memories is coloring all day in the pouring rain and getting yelled at not to touch the sides of the tent or it would leak. Coloring was fun but not for hours and hours.

The only bad memory I have of trailer camping is when I was sleeping in the top bunk of my grandparent's trailer and woke up and no one was around. I screamed and screamed until someone came to get me...... I was up so high I was scared to even try to get down without help.

Usually we went to my great grandma's lake house and the whole family met up there on the weekends for camping. I learned lots of important things like how to spit really far, how to fish and paddle boat, never to spit in your uncles face, even when he tells you to. I learned how to play rummy, rook and poker and how to light firecrackers that are left over when the package goes off, how not to get caught riding on the back of a motorcycle when your cousin is driving.... etc...

They always had big fish fry's and tons of cheap Shasta pop. We would go visit my great aunt and see their farm. They had a Tennessee Walker that we could ride and I learned how to kill a chicken to eat.... they run around even after you cut off their heads..... and gather eggs.

Camping now is very mellow compared to camping when I was younger. I bought Edgey a fishing license for his birthday so he got to go fishing for four hours.... he got skunked. Ethan, however, caught the only fish. A huge bass. He was excited. I will have to see if I can get a picture of him with it.

I love fishing but I haven't gone for years. The last time I went was when my grandpa still had his farm and that was over 14 years ago. He had a great pond. I would go down there all the time and fish alone. I am really the type of person that needs to have time to myself. If I can't have my alone time, I'm not much good to anybody else. I think that is one of the helpful things that motivates me to go walk every day also. I can think and pray and be alone.

The Challenge

So there I was challenged, because I knew in myself, I wasn't being the best that God wants me to be. There is so much more to being a living sacrifice than just offering up your worship.....

I mean things like ... your finances. Have you given up all of your finances to God. They are His anyway. One of the guys in church said one time, "We know God gets the 10%. That's a given. But what about the other 90%? That's God's too." So how are we being good stewards of the other 90%? You have to get past the mentality of I'ts Mine! Just like a little kid with a toy. They don't always like to share. We have to train them to share and they will be blessed. We have always told our children. Their toys are all God's and everything we have is God's and they are required to share. I think that God sees us as little kids who need to grow up and he is training us that it's ALL His, money, house, vehicles, everything. We are just stewards and we need to change our mentality.
I just heard a financial advisor the other night.... say, " I remember back when I was in church and the older folks would stand up to give a testimony and say Praise the Lord He paid my light bill! At the time I thought it was a miracle, but now God has showed me there is something wrong there. It's a slap in God's face that we are a child of God and we don't have control of our finances...that He has to intervene to pay a light bill because we are so messed up that we can't pay it ourself. What kind of a witness it that?"
Why would any outsider want to be a Christian looking at that? Yeah! I want to be a christian so I can be broke and drive a dumpy car that has trash all over it.

Stewardship - that's a living sacrifice

Changes:

So I have started making some changes in my life.
I had started doing weight watchers because I know I am too heavy to be healthy. When I started I was 100 pounds more than when I got married. I gained 50 the first year we got married. I mentioned that in a post somewhere before this. Then I gained 40 more the second year because I got pregnant with Ethan. I lost a little, gained a little, etc., etc.... I started losing again after I had Elizabeth and started feeling better, but then got my Jesse surprise. So back to the top again.
I had just learned to live with it. God wants us to renew our minds so I started retraining my mind. I have been reading a lot of books on health foods and healthy ways of thinking, especially bible based ones. That has been a huge help for me.
I lost 15 pounds with the weight watchers and then I got stuck for about 6 weeks at the same weight. I was disgusted and discouraged. But this time, where before I would have given up and went back to Egypt where the food tasted good, I stuck with it and asked God what to do. I ran across another book and another and another and learned a lot.

The next change was to mostly organic food and kefir. I also found a place to get some raw goat milk. Goat milk digests in 20 minutes instead of all day like cow's milk. Kefir is a special processed milk that has a huge amount of probiotic stuff for your digestive system. Used when there was no refrigeration because it keeps. I can't always afford to buy organic but I try to get everything fresh or frozen. At any rate it has to have 99% of the ingredients real... like God made. That is my mentality. If God made it, it's better for me than the other crap I have been eating for the first 1/2 of my life. I get farm eggs (organic) from the goat lady too. Sam's club has organic mixed greens and spinach and strawberries. No more sweetners except real stuff. Not even processed sugar if I can possibly help it. I use Agave, Honey or raw sugar or Stevia.

When I changed to organic stuff, I lost another 5 pounds very quickly. Then it has been about 2 lbs a week since. I also have started walking a couple of miles a day. I have only missed one day this month when I felt horribly sick with a headache. I was probably detoxing..... So a total of 27.5 lbs so far.

I still have potato chips, but I buy organic or natural chips. You know, they really do taste much better than the Doritos or Lay's. You know why you crave them? Because they have MSG which is an excitotoxin and makes your body addicted to them.... that's why you have to eat a whole bag. You know why they put that in there? So you will be addicted to them and crave them and want to buy more.... so they can make a huge KILLING profit.

Ok... enough of that now.

New Stuff

I keep wishing somebody would write on here so maybe I would feel more obliged to check the blogs every day, but the newness must have worn off..... I decided to delete some of the favorite blogs if they haven't posted since before Dec of 06. Of course, I left my kids on there in case they decide to get a wild hair and post something.

Updates......
Jesse Ray turned 7 this July. He is really growing up. He loves Star Wars and his video games. He is in first grade this year and has been reading really well. I am encouraged by his progress in his school.
Elizabeth is in 2nd grade and Ethan in 7th. Wow, where does time go?
I turned 40 this year and so did Edgey. I started feeling really old.... then I decided I needed some changes in my life. I was reading a book by Jordan Rubin and he challenged me with something he said in the book. Oh, and if you don't want to feel convicted, you might as well just quit reading this post right now...

last chance....


"People who don't eat healthy are not thriving the way God wants them to. It's my strongly held belief that if Christians were healthier than the general population - and we're not, in my estimation - then our churches would be overflowing on Sunday mornings. Why? Because people would be drawn to learn more about why we are so different. I want them to think, Oh, there are a couple of Christians. Look how healthy and vibrant they are. I want what they have....... I believe people from all walks of life would break down the doors to learn more about what God says about living a long and abundant life and ultimately come to know Jesus as their Lord and Savior."
His core message is derived from two scriptures. "I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God - this is your spiritual act of worship." (Rom 12:1)
Are you presenting your physical body as a living sacrifice? Can you say, "This is the best I have and I'm giving it to the Lord"? Are you an example of God's best. Can others see your vitality?

The other scripture is Gen 1:26 "Let us make man in our image."
You were created in the image of God. Do you properly reflect his image?

Anyway, I was challenged.

More later