A Healthy New Year can be as attainable as taking a new perspective and adopting a few new ways to obtain it. Let’s Do This Together!
New Healthy Mindset
It would be easy to spew out all that was wrong with 2020, or any year once we can look back. Often things we are still living with until it can fade into our distant memory.
As time continues, I have come to believe that it serves us better to use negative experiences to sharpen, teach and change us. Ways in which we might be able to benefit.
There is one very powerful mindset we can take, no matter the year or circumstances; ‘I Can Change Little Things’!
It All Starts At Home
As a single mother of four, now grown, with families and lives of their own, spending time together is something we each love to do.
While it was not possible to do in 2020, something very beautiful transpired among my little family that brought to life something a parent rarely gets to witness.
Many of the important things I taught them while growing up, kicked into action:
- The mindset of survival
- How to do most anything yourself – Color Your Own Hair, Repurpose An Old Dining Chair,
- Keep a positive attitude – Create Restaurant Dining At Home to help out your New Year budget
- Stay connected to each other
Healthy New Year Mindset
I was once asked, ‘How do you always seem to have such a great attitude’? Having already explained that, I have had more than my share of difficult times in life. Let’s face it, anyone could guess the obstacles I confronted as a single mom of a large family.
But, when she asked the question, I knew exactly what the answer was; “I have found the approach to this life is to look back to see how far we’ve come, then look forward trusting it will continue”!
In 2020, I went nearly one year, as we all did, and couldn’t have quality time with my family, none of them. And then… I just looked back on 2022 and there is all was! One year of beautiful quality time together and, I published a second cookbook, spent the summer on television doing my first cooking series with PBS and took individual trips with each of my children.
Healthy New Year Mindset, each January is the only way to dive into a new year!
Plant Therapy
Not only did all of my children and their families cook every meal from scratch and elevate their food preparation skills, but some of them actually took to ‘dirt’ for the first time in their lives.
Yes, dirt! They began to grow things; herbs, vegetables, fruits and found a great satisfaction in the art of self sufficiency.
They discovered just how satisfying a few pots of dirt gave them. I can’t tell you how proud I was/am.
Health Habits
If there was one Google search that out numbered most in 2020, it had to be ‘healthy immune system’! Yep! You Googled it too? Man oh man did I reach into my inner ‘hippy’ and create recipes to strengthen the immune system or help with symptoms once illness struck!
It’s odd how we become so busy with our everyday lives and rarely take time to develop healthy habits. Then suddenly when we get sick, or the fear of getting sick, we refocus our priorities.
Every year, on New Year’s Day, many people make a resolution for their health. Of course, a New Year Resolution can’t have sticking power if we don’t really know what or how to go about it.
As we each are entering 2021 or beyond, examining beneficial perspectives, we fast become aware that it will require new ways of doing things.
New Year New Norm
I have often wondered, this year, as we all became mega-germaphobes, if we will all revert back to the way we once did things.
Research has given us some inside perspectives on the time it takes to change a habit. It is said that it is much easier to start doing something new than to stop doing something habitual, without a replacement behavior.
For it to become a new way of life, the magic number appears to be 66-days. We’ve been at this new way of living for ten months already.
Food As Medicine
Have you given thought to new ways you might want to eat this new year? Maybe you always ate healthy but have other health concerns that caused you to fear the ever-lurking virus.
Two of my children have suffered asthma since they were very little (as do some of my grandchildren). They eat healthy, both of them cook extremely well, but the fear of already weakened lungs, caused them to be most cautious during 2020.
As I found myself sharing many quick, easy and cost affective health based recipes with my family, I couldn’t help but think that others would benefit too.
Many of my new and dear friends on social media, might also find some of these Immune boosting recipes and food choices beneficial in your own lives.
So, I got busy focusing on how I could help others by using food as a kind of preventative medicine.
New Year – New Approach To Health
I am a weird ole gal of 68 years, have been a health nut my entire life:
- Have worked in the beauty industry for 40 years
- Am on zero medications
- Have never wrestled with my weight
- Have birthed 4 children
- Never eat fast-food or pre-pared grocery items
- Rarely eat processed sugar
- Have drunk a liter of water a day for the past 40 years
- Never suffered menopause symptoms (do you hate me yet?)
- Made many of my beauty treatments for hair and skin since I was 16
- Sleep 8 uninterrupted hours every night
See? I am a weird ole gal! Please forgive me as I am not boasting and only seek to share some of my secrets with you. It’s all about ‘loving yourself’.
Here are just a few things I like to make plenty of come January of every year to start my year off right.
- Detox Green Smoothie
- Immune-Boosting Onion Soup
- Egg Muffin Cups: 3-Ways
- No Bake Energy Bites: 4-Ways
Health Is Colorful
It is said, that the more colorful your food, the healthier you will be. Ugh. So much for pasta, bread, fried foods and other very yummy foods we all love to eat.
Since I don’t want to give up some of the colorless foods I enjoy eating, I decided to balance them with colorful foods I could also love to eat.
For this reason, I am focusing my New Year Periodical on New Perspectives New Ways. I hope I am able to inspire you to join in with me, try a few new ways of switching up old habits, and feel much more confident about your health.
While I am not going to tamper with an evening meal, this time, I do hope to inspire you to rethink breakfast, lunch, snacks, even desserts and yes… they are all going to be healthy, easy to prepare and COLORFUL!
I believe the table... that place that draws people to gather, is the most powerful symbol of togetherness. All that happens before the table is set, the planning, the gathering, the preparing, are all an intricate part of the dance that create the mood of celebration to share with friends and loved ones.