Welcome to my blog!
Okay so here it goes. First blog post. It’s been really hard to sit down and write this because I am scared to death to put myself out there. BUT, I have had this desire for a while to create something that helps people find out what is healthy and how to actually live a healthy lifestyle. HEALTHY DOESN’T HAVE TO BE HARD. I come from a different place than most Dietitians/Nutritionists out there. I would call myself a Real Food Dietitian. You will learn more about that in future posts. I do strive to eat real foods in my life, and that is what I recommend to others. However, we are all in different places and walks of life. Being healthy might look different for you than it looks for me. Healthy for you might be fitting in a workout once a week and trying to eat a piece of fruit every day. That is OK if that is what works for you right now. It’s all about baby steps. I think that we get so down on ourselves when we see fitness gurus and nutritionists who seem like they are perfect (believe me, they aren’t). We see that we don’t workout 6 days a week and we don’t get our portion of fruits and veggies every day and we ate that cookie yesterday, so we give up completely. I am here to tell you that it is OK. We need to start making goals that are attainable instead of unrealistic. Everybody’s life looks different. If you make goals that are achievable for you, then you will feel successful and you won’t keep feeling inadequate.
I’ve thought about the many different ways I can help educate people on health, and a blog seemed to be the best way to get this message out there. I want to provide resources for people and in turn they can take the information and apply it to their lives in a way that works for them. Not everyone can eat a Paleo diet, but maybe you can try to eat “real food” 3 days a week. Maybe your goal is to get your kids to eat one vegetable every day (I know how hard this might be), instead of trying to control everything that goes into their mouths and not letting them eat a single goldfish.
Not only do I want to help you find what works for you, I want to also bring awareness to what we are putting in our mouths. I am so passionate about this because I believe that so many health problems can be AVOIDED completely if we only knew what to eat a lot of and what to eat less of. We should strive to live a FULL life and we can’t do that if we are hindered by our physical status. Now, I said above that it is OK to not be living a dream-world healthy life. This is way different than having a chronic illness or something that is affecting you every day (insomnia, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, auto-immune disease, etc.). In this case, you are probably not OK and you should probably look at getting the help you need from a professional in order to live a higher quality of life.
If you have lived a certain way for a long time I know that it can be hard to lose weight and eat healthy. Some people are gifted with discipline and passion to exercise and live a healthy lifestyle, but others just really love to relax and eat “yummy” food. My husband and I are on both of those spectrums to the extremes. I’ll let you figure out which one of us is which. ☺ I am here to tell you that healthy food CAN be YUMMY and I just want to teach you how to do that. It doesn’t have to be hard. My husband will testify to this!! Now, the exercise part, you’re just going to need a little bit of discipline for that to get off of your butt. ☺ Just kidding, not really. Anybody who knows me knows that I am not afraid to be a little blunt and tell you like it is. It’s not easy to live this way, but this is why I am here to help! I will be talking about exercise on this blog and give you ways to add it into your life that you might think is enjoyable and WORKS FOR YOU (not for me or anybody else). But in the end, you just have to DO IT. If you set your mind to workout 1 day a week, you have to DO IT. Discipline trumps motivation. And when you do it, pat yourself on the back and realize that you accomplished YOUR goal. Not anybody else’s.
So many people ask me to make a meal plan for them, ask me about what food is healthy, how to grocery shop, or how they can lose weight. Well, this is going to be my resource for you. Most people don’t know how much time and effort it takes to write a “meal plan”. It all depends on your height, weight, what your goals are, what you like to eat, what you don’t like to eat, how many times a day you eat, what your budget is, if you have any food sensitivities, etc. You get the picture! Anyways, I would LOVE to write a meal plan for all of my family and friends who ask, but there just isn’t enough time in the day! I also don’t think meal plans are going to solve your problems. This is why I am going to hopefully give you all the tools you need here on this blog to be able to do that on your own. I hope that this will be educational and eye opening so that you can decide for yourselves what to put in your mouths and how to get your body moving in YOUR life, which will look different than mine.
Whew. Sorry if that was a lot. My fingers just kept typing because I am just so excited and passionate about what I am going to be sharing with you all. I want to encourage you. I want you to know that eating healthy really isn’t hard and you don’t have to “make everything from scratch”. I will go into detail on how to fit “healthy” into your life in a way that works for you (have I said that already? 🙂 )
I know I am not the smartest Dietitian in the world, but I do know a lot of good resources with a lot of helpful information. I just want to share what I have seen work in real life and hope that it will work for you. I am not much of a writer so I am definitely going out on a limb with this one and I am sorry if there are grammatical mistakes because I’m sure there will be ☺. However, I hope that what I write will get the point across and be beneficial to you. If you have any ideas or questions, post in the comments below and hopefully I can write something on the blog about it! This is a new adventure for me and I have no idea what it will look like but I’m so excited.
Rebekah ☺
I have also started a YouTube channel and I hope you will check it out! Below is an introductory video to my channel.
Get to know me and my philosophy (https://youtu.be/syWRoON5TIs)
Love this Rebekah! Any chance you would email me your meal plan sheet? I can recreate it but if you are willing why would I? I am so excited to share this with my friend Todd. Former Young Life Staffer with me. He has been asking for my help and I simply have not had time. He will really benefit from this. I love you sweet lady! Rhonda
Thanks Rhonda!! YES! You can actually download it directly from my post! It is a PDF (just make sure to print double sided!) Here is the link.