KarenI have been the same clothing size for around 10 years. It bothers me intermittently and I will halfheartedly take up Slimming World or Couch to 5K, but it hasn’t ever been something that’s constantly at the forefront of my mind. Lately though I’ve been more conscious not of my size or of the numbers on the scales, but of my actual health and well-being. My physical and mental health.
My husband and I are very different – he has a very active job while I am often sat at the computer or driving, or sat in a hall or a waiting room after running the boys to their various home education activities. But we are both aware that we need to look after ourselves a bit more to have the best chance of being around when our children are older, so we’ve made some changes to our lifestyle.
Last week I joined the gym. Again. I put the children on my membership this time though so we can go together. I’m hoping that taking one or all of the boys with me with give me the motivation to go more often. There are kids classes on at the same time as some of the adult ones, so in theory I could drop the bigger two off for Karate or Kid Fit and attend a class for myself too. Plus, the two bigger boys can just about manage to not drown eachother while I do a few lengths of the pool, so we’re all getting some exercise in.
We’ve always been an outdoorsy kind of family but you’d never see me running or climbing a mountain (though we did do some backpacking once). So while we do spend a lot of time outside it isn’t really effective, exercise-wise.
We are trying to spend more time walking, and have vowed to make better use of our memberships to National Trust, RSPB Woodland Trust and our local Wildlife Trust. With all those we shouldn’t ever be home!
The other big change we have made as a family is to have assessed what we eat and drink. We have almost always cooked meals rather than bought processed pre-packaged ones, but we have broken that down further by cutting out things like jars of ready made sauces. We have drastically reduced the amount of meat we eat too – generally it’s just free range chicken getting cooked here these days, and a few meat alternatives such as Quorn mince in the cottage pie and veggie sausages.
We’re making quite big changes but so far it seems to be going well. I’m hoping that by Christmas we will all be more active, and generally healthier as an entire family.
What other small changes can we make? Have you ever made big lifestyle changes and stuck to them? I’d love to know in the comments or over on the blog facebook page.
