Let me first tell a bit about our family. My name is Gulhan. I am 34 and working full time as a software engineer. My husband is also a full time software engineer. We have 2 kids, a 3 year old daughter and a 4 months old son. Actually my son’s birth is what finally triggered this blog. He was only 3 weeks old by the time I first drafted my first post. But you know, it is hard to find time with a newborn so it took me several weeks to actually get a domain and publish it. 🙂
Having kids brings lots of responsibilities. But I have always believed that the biggest responsibility of parents is taking good care of themselves. This is something I decided long before I became a parent myself, during the days while I was seriously concerned about my dad’s poor health. I so envied my friends who didn’t have such concerns. And add to that the desire to raise the kids with healthy habits, and suddenly the “healthy living” became one of our biggest priorities.
To form a baseline, I don’t think we as a family are doing terribly bad. We don’t eat too much fast food (define too much, right? :D), we eat some amount of veggies and fruits (not nearly enough though :/), we buy stuff organic/grass-fed/free-range as much as we can. We know how important sleep is (though we don’t respect is as much as we should). We don’t smoke. We have alcohol only on special occasions, maybe once a month. And our life is not terribly stressful.
And here comes the part that needs improvement. The number one is that we are not active. We feel lazy and tired often. We prefer watching an episode of Friends for the 36th time over walking to the neighborhood park in the evening. We don’t go to gym or do another kind of exercise regularly. We talk about hiking all the time but actually go for a hike maybe once or twice a year. We eat a lot of meat and not a variety of vegetables. We don’t track our blood pressure or cholesterol levels despite knowing that we had issues in the past.
Now I need to come up with a plan. 🙂