Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week’s episode of Motivate Me! 

It’s Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat.

Before we start, let’s get into the right headspace. Let’s engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let’s take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me.

Today’s focus is: Improving Your Diet

It’s almost impossible not to discuss diet when looking to make self-improvements.

Before we get started today, I want to call your attention to the idea that diet is not just what we eat. It’s anything we fill ourselves up with: what we watch, what we listen to, what we read, and who we surround ourselves with. These things, as well as food, impact how we progress in the world.

Eating the wrong foods makes us feel lethargic, strips us of our self-confidence, and creates disease, that’s the bottom line. And whether we make small changes or big changes to our diet, any improvement is an improvement. Starting small may be as simple as increasing our water intake by two glasses a day.

One thing I do know is that if I start feeling better, I start doing better. I’m not here to preach to you or to make you feel down about your current physical state. My role is to just share my story and to be as honest as possible with you about what I did to get my head and heart back in the game, and addressing diet when doing this was important for me.

So many health issues can be cured by diet, like diabetes and fatty liver, for starters. But diet can impact your mental health, such as anxiety, depression, and even something like seizures.

I had no idea how much we can control our health and quality of life through diet! It seems obvious, but I just never made the connection.

Let me share a story with you. My husband was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes about fifteen years ago. Diabetes runs in his family, so in our uneducated minds, it was just a matter of time before my husband would get it. He was great about managing his medications so I was not very involved in his process, and we didn’t make too many changes in our lifestyle after his diagnosis because the medicine was doing that for us.

About ten years later, in preparation for our daughter’s wedding, we went on a strict clean-eating, healthy grain diet. I mean, I was measuring everything we ate and we could not have been eating better. We were eating chicken, pork, seafood, vegetables, fruit, quinoa, brown rice, and brown rice pasta. That is pretty much it in a nut shell. I even cut cheese out of my diet. It was during this time, though, that my husband was put on a second diabetes medication. And we thought, wow, this disease is really progressing! We just assumed that this is how diabetes worked, that it worsened over time.

Our daughter got married that May, and over the summer we all pigged out. It wasn’t until that following January that I decided I had to get back on the healthy bus. Our daughter and her husband had returned to California the Friday after the New Year, and my husband was going on a four-night business trip that following Monday.

I had post-holiday blues, especially knowing it would be months before seeing my kids again. I was sad that my husband would be away for most of the next week, and I felt physically disgusting. So that Sunday before he left, I meal-prepped three meals and was determined to punish myself with them.

One of the meals was a vegetable soup and one was ground turkey meatballs, and I can’t remember what the other one was. They were delicious, don’t get me wrong,