I guess my mom had taken a class or something to do with cooking at home, because when I was growing up I learned that if I ate packaged food I was basically digging my own grave. Wow, talk about some crazy nutritional parenting. It was that serious in our house to cook from scratch. I did not understand why she felt that way, but I never experienced eating packaged food, so I was okay I guess, as I didn’t know anything different.
I did not eat fast food growing up either, so that was a concept I did not understand. My food intake was all cooked at home and what I would consider free of additives and preservatives. There is something about eating food that is cooked from home on a regular basis, it literally changes the taste, habits and food buying decisions we make. I never thought of eating premade food from a box, and barely ever ate anything else that was in a bag.
My friends drank large sodas after our sports practice when I was in high school. I remember being offered a sip of their sodas after practice, we would go to the local 7-11 corner store where many of my friends would buy big gulps. When they offered it to me and I tried it, I literally got sick and would spit it out. I only wanted water and that taste so wonderful to me. Again, it was just the habit of eating natural home cooked meals.
When I was 18 I moved in with one of my siblings, and this was the first time I had to think about what I was going to be eating. As I had graduated and moved out of my home.
I remember getting critical feedback that I should not eat this and I should not eat that. I was a pretty healthy person and did not understand why my sibling started to give me a hard time about my food choices. I was taken aback that the food I liked to eat when I was young was being now attacked as an adult.
Unfortunately, I did not learn much about cooking for myself as a child or young adult, I only learned by watching my mother cook and practicing a few dishes now and then.
When I was in college and on my own, I would try to find the food that was the healthiest I could find. I would read about nutrition and continue to make healthy choices for myself.
Somehow I slowly started moving into making different choices when I got married and then when I had children. I remember feeding my children, and focusing on them and their nutritional needs and beginning to forget about all of my needs. It had more to do with time, stress, and not knowing how to continue to take care of myself and ask myself for what I needed.
I always felt that I should be in a state of taking care of my children, and not thinking of balancing my children’s care with my care. Then we had all the outside influences and responsibilities. It all became very stressful, and the more I would not balance my life and practice proper self-care for myself, the more I went into a deep hole of getting away from my overall health.
To add fuel to this spiral of losing my self-care balance, when I did try to get some outside help from the experts, what I found was tons and tons of differing and confusing information. It would simply add to the pile of stress I was already feeling. Let alone, the challenges of being a parent to growing children, who also have all of their own milestones, and real needs.
Fast forward, I literally had to say to myself, I asked myself to take care of myself, to get my balance back, to give myself a proper self-care system so that I could be a role model for my children, myself and my husband. I will say it is not easy to make that commitment to yourself, but it sure is worth it. There is nothing more important than your health. You can tell when you are properly taking good care of yourself, it just makes everything easier and your relationships so much for enjoyable.
And there goes why I am learning how to cook and doing a 1% improvement to get to my true healthy self again, and have a proper self-care habit, and creating rich life habits. I want to live my life lit up – you’ll.
