Reprioritizing My Life and Relieving Pain

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The life of a blogger can be a bit crazy. You start working the moment you get up, and many days, you don’t stop working until 2:00 in the morning. Things go wrong all of the time:  my laptop sometimes decides to go haywire, my hosting service can make things challenging, I have to continually find truly creative ways to write my posts for multiple days in a row, sometimes I have allergy issues, and many, many times projects I am blogging about go terribly wrong (or take waaaay longer then I thought they were going to).

Then throw in the fact that I run a furniture business, and then things really start to spiral out of control.

This being said, many nights I just don’t have time to make a proper dinner. Last year, there was a lot of take out brought in, frozen pizzas being made, or sometimes even cereal for dinner.  As far as the gym went, I couldn’t even remember my passcode — if that tells you how long it had been.

By the beginning of the year, I knew things had to change. As a blogger I spend a lot of time sitting behind a computer, and the pounds were slowly creeping up, so I knew I had to force myself to get active. Topher has been traveling more and more for work, and it is sometimes hard to eat healthy when grabbing something at an airport. As far as the unnamed child goes, I don’t think that I have to tell you that teenagers usually have the least healthy diets on the planet, and now that her and her friends can drive it is fast food city. They come over here eating french fries dipped in ice cream [cringe].

So we sat down as a family and made a plan.

We all had to get more active. The unnamed child wasn’t going to the gym unless I did, so I knew I had to go for her sake, as well as my own. Everyday when she gets home from school, we go to the gym — even if only for 30 minutes. We also have been taking the dogs out on more walks too. Since Topher gets home late, he decided to start working out on his lunch hour.

We decided that we were going to sit down on Sundays and map out our meals for the week and do all of our grocery shopping. That way we wouldn’t have the excuse that we didn’t have the ingredients for something and just grab Chinese instead.

Topher and I also both suffer from auto-immune issues, and we have been doing more research finding that diet can be crucial in making your symptoms worse — if not being at the very root of the disease. So for the last couple of months, my late night ice cream treats have been replaced with fruit smoothies. You all know that nothing green ever passes by my lips. With the smoothies, though, I have been sneaking in spinach — and I can’t even taste it.

We have also got back into the routine of taking daily vitamins. With so many vitamins on the market, it’s hard to know what to take. Some are so large they are hard to swallow, and some smell so putrid you just can barely gag it down. The vitamins we have found that work best for us are Walgreen’s Multivitamin A thru Z.

They contain 31 different nutrients and have smaller sized pills.

When picking out our vitamins, the unnamed child went with me and decided that even though she is no longer a child, she wanted the Walgreen’s children’s Gummy Multivitamins. She loves them … and apparently so do her friends. I walked into the kitchen the other day to find five teenage girls eating dinosaur shaped gummies. We might have to discuss providing vitamins to all of her friends.

If we do fly though the vitamins, we won’t take such a hit since for the month of March, Well at Walgreen’s products are buy one get one 50% off.

It is handy that we have a Walgreen’s only 5 minutes away from us, and I don’t have to run all across town anytime we are out.

Even better is the Walgreen’s Way to Well Commitment.  Beginning February 1, 2011 through December 31, 2014, 1¢ from the purchase of every Walgreen’s brand Health & Wellness product (up to $3 million annually) will support bringing preventative wellness services to local communities through the Walgreen’s Way to Well Commitment®.

Just in the last couple of months of these simple changes, we all have noticed how much better we are feeling. I have lost 4 pounds, the unnamed child is happy because she is feeling more confident about her body going into swimsuit season, and Topher is now taking CrossFit classes.  I have less of a brain fog feeling, and my joints are hurting less.

If you keep the junk out of the house, then you won’t be tempted to eat it. Forcing ourselves to take time out of our busy lives one day a week to plan our weekly menu, adding physical activity, and adding Well by Walgreen’s vitamins into our lives has really turned things around for us.

Well at Walgreen’s helps people get, stay, and live well by providing convenient and accessible healthcare solutions and products at a great value.

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