My mission for this year and the rest of my life

My name is Catherine, most people these days call me Cat.  I am about to turn 33 this month.  I have three kiddos, two boys ages 5 and 3(this month) and a baby girl who is almost five months now.  I have been a vegetarian since age 15 and the influence of dissecting the fetal pig, which I refused.  It took me a long time to come to the point I am now.  Its hard to know what you are doing food wise as a teenager.  I was a junk food vegetarian for a long time and my body shows that.  I am overweight and on a mission to look and feel better in all aspects of my life.

In photo: That is me, multitasking as always.  Sewing up a storm while enjoying my morning cup of coffee and entertaining my daughter who was next to me in her bouncer. 

This blog is to help me on my journey and possibly inspire and help others along their journeys.

I first tried to be vegan my first semester at college.  It was very hard eating on campus, and i had no idea what i was doing.  I basically cut out cheese and milk, thats it.  I have become a lot more awaresince having children, about what we, humans, put into our bodies and what we should be eating.  Im not a diet kind of person, but i have tried different ideas that are out there.  I had to go on a low fat diet while pregnant with my first son because I had horrible gallstone attacks.  It was awful and i was always hungry.  The plus was that i only gained 15 lbs during that pregnancy and by the time I was a week postpartum, I was back to pre pregnancy weight.  Although, the starvation mode I had been in caught up to me and I started eating everything after my gallbladder was removed.  I gained 30 pounds over the next few months.  By the time I got pregnant with my second son, I was up to 285 pounds, the most I had been in my whole life.  I ate well during pregnancy, vegetarian, but I made it up to 302 at nine months pregnant, which was tough, but I was nine months pregnant!  I was quickly down to pre pregnancy  weight again.  

When Sawyer was four months old we discovered he had an allergy to milk protein and egg whites.  Since I was exclusively breastfeeding, I had to go vegan for his health.  Sometime, I will post all about the difficulties I had with his eczema and how it turned me onto all natural solutions to clean
my home with.  I really owe a lot of my realizations to my son, Sawyer.  I hope that one day I can thank him for that and he appreciates it.  This was my first real attempt to go vegan.  I learned a lot.  I read labels and learned about ingredients I was unfamiliar with.  I started to cook with whole grains and make my own hummus.  I slowly over a year lost 20 pounds and then got pregnant with my baby girl.  During that year, once my son stopped breastfeeding, I slowly added cheese and eggs back into my diet.  I truly wish I had not.  In January 2012 I decided to go back to being vegan, but then I realized I was pregnant and I threw that idea right out.

Im not sure why I have gone back and forth, oh wait, I do, its called CHEESE!  I love the taste of cheese, but the more I read about factory farms and animal cruelty, I do not want to eat it.  There are so many tasty alternatives to cheese.  Although, I notice that the longer I go and remain vegan, the less I crave it.  They do add things to cheese to make it addictive!  Of course not all farmers do, but some.  Cows milk is meant for calfs, not human consumption.  More posts on that subject later.

So, here I am, going vegan for the final time at age 33, Mother of three.  Trying to not go crazy, help my family be safe, healthy and aware as well as continue to be artsy and crafty.

Me and my cutie pie, Lillian.