Take Back Your Health for You and Your Family

Hi I’m Kristi and I am a certified Physician Assistant and a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of two kids who are four and five years old.

While working as a Health and Wellness coach for 3 years I began to see a pattern with my patients. Inevitably a patient would come in to see me, complaining about how they’re struggling to lose weight or make healthier choices with their diet.

I would begin my spiel and eventually get to the part where I would ask questions to help them uncover a new regimen. By the time we would get to the end these words would more often than not escape their mouths, “I mean I know what to do, I just am not doing it.”

Remarkable! Just about every patient I saw “knew what to do” to get healthy. So I would ask them, “then why are you here to see me?”

And that’s when the oh-so-familiar-to-all-of-us litany of excuses would pour out:

— “I don’t really have the time to do it.”

— “Is it really that detrimental to my health to eat the way I do?”

— “I’m just too tired at the end of the day.”

— “It’s so much easier to stop by the drive-thru than to go home and cook.”

These are all the things I would hear on a consistent basis, and if they didn’t say it out loud, I could tell many of my patients were thinking it.

“WE ALL KNOW WHAT TO DO, RIGHT? BUT FOR WHATEVER REASON IT’S SO MUCH EASIER TO STAY IN THE UNHEALTHY RUTS WE’VE FURROWED.”

Couple this with the growing demands of family, the kids’ extracurricular activities, church involvement, time with your spouse and what little “me-time” you’re able to scrape up, and you have a full plate with no room for the healthy eats.

I started my health journey at the age of 17 simply because I wanted to improve in the sports I was involved in. At that point I definitely thought that a blueberry muffin was healthy because it had blueberries in it. Why wouldn’t a fruit-based muffin be healthy? So of course I had a lot of learning to do. But as I became more educated on the topics of health and wellness, I gradually went from being body image conscious to health conscious.

Fast forward some 15 years later I find myself still diving into books and articles in my down time just to learn more about my body, my mind, and my wellness. Now I am not only focusing on my health and wellness, but also my family’s. I believe being health-conscious is more than just a fad or a trend that has recently emerged in our culture. I believe it’s a calling from scripture to steward the life God has given us here on earth by keeping ourselves healthy over the long-haul so that as a family we can make the biggest possible eternal difference in this world.

My four-year-old boy has enamel defect and the first time we took him to the dentist they told us that he had seven cavities. My five-year-old girl was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder at the age of 15 months. As you may know, autoimmune disorders have no cure.

There is certainly an array of autoimmune disorders out there that people live with daily and, unfortunately, they are resigned to only cope with it. So as a healthcare provider I’ve researched every angle possible in order to get under my daughter’s particular disorder, desperately searching for a way to find or create some kind of cure for it.

Of course I haven’t come up with anything that would fully cure what she has . . . but I have found some ways to help prevent flareups or the progression of her disorder. To my surprise, the answer to keeping her symptoms at bay lay buried in her diet and nutrition. Thus began our holistic health journey.

You may think I’m over the top or “extra,” but because of my findings — many of which I will share with you here along the way — we are now on a mission to rid our household of any unnecessary toxins. I’ve been asking myself and our family questions like, “what products do we have in our house that contain unnecessary toxins,” and “what beauty products, cleaning supplies, normal household items and . . . you guessed it . . . food are subtly eroding our quality of life and destroying our efforts to steward and finish well our individual God-given callings?”

So I invite you to come along with us on the journey. I’ll be writing all about food, family, fitness, and faith, sharing with you secrets I’ve learned along the way. I know, you may be saying, “You don’t understand. I don’t have the time to overhaul my life. Family and work are enough to juggle. Another failed fitness plan is the last thing I need.”

Take it from this gal who was once a single mom while in PA school, it can be done. You can live a cleaner, healthier life on a budget. You can feel better, live better . . . and, hey, why not, even look better, all by taking a closer inspection into what we’re putting in our bodies, homes, and souls. Looking forward to spending more time with you, friend.