It is What You Choose Now That Matters Most

This July was my 18^th anniversary of surviving non-Hodgkins Lymphoma.  Some may say it is a miracle seeing that I was given two weeks to live in my twenties but I think it was more than that.  I believe I survived because of the choices that I made after the diagnosis.  I never believed in the death sentence, instead I looked for the message that the cancer brought me.  So was my surviving a miracle? You bet, but if I didn’t step up to the plate as well and make different choices for myself, I don’t believe I would be here today.

That is the reason I have spent the last two decades teaching and coaching about making healthy choices.  I truly believe that the decisions that we make every day, the small and large ones, add up to us going down a path of health or disease.  It breaks my heart to see how this generation of kids is sprinting down the path of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, obesity and a shortened life span.

I spoke to a group of girl scouts last spring and there was an eight year old girl that caught my attention.  She was so afraid of getting cancer like her grandparent that she asked my exactly what she should and shouldn’t eat.  I didn’t want her to approach food fearfully so I called her mom and left a message. She never called back and I don’t think it was because she didn’t have her child’s best interest at heart. I came to find out that her mother has a very busy job and feeds her daughter pizza and baked chocolate chip cookies almost every night for dinner.  I don’t think the mom wanted to hear what I had to say.

In my experience, many busy parents think the junk and processed food that they feed their kids either won’t hurt their child’s health because they ate it growing up and they are fine, or else they really just don’t want to think about it too much because it adds up to one more thing to do and they already have an overloaded plate. I created the Build Healthy Kids program for exactly this type of busy parent. I spent three years researching and creating a plan that would not overwhelm parents or their children.  All a family has to do is to focus on making one change a month and by years end they will be living a healthy lifestyle; one that promotes health. All it takes is to make one choice at a time.