Making New & Healthy Changes

If you have read my column before you will have a good idea what it is about, so I will keep my introductions brief. If you are reading this for the first time, I write about trying to live healthier, more sustainably; something we have been doing more of in the last year or two as a family. I write about the things we have started doing to make better choices for the environment, our health and our finances.

Like many people we decided to do “dry January” in our house; a month without alcohol. It’s always an eye opener to realise just how much alcohol you drink casually. Alcohol is one of those things that creeps up on you without you realising. Why? It’s easy to get, for many living busy stressful lives, it takes the edge off and it’s not illegal (unless you are underage). That glass of wine on a Friday to finish off a busy week quietly becomes a bottle and for many it starts to spill over into the whole weekend.

Cutting out alcohol wasn’t difficult; we are not dependent. What we the benefits? I had a lot more energy, meaning I found the time to do some things that I had become frustrated about not having the time to do. I started losing weight (alcohol has a lot of calories!), and we saved the worth of a bottle of wine each a week in our budget.

Even buying budget wine, that is approximately £40 a month and £480 a year.  That is a win-win! What were the negatives? One of the downsides was the realisation that you take away your winding down mechanism. Without the switch-off and the winding down, I found myself feeling a little more stressed than usual. In hindsight, that’s not such a downside because I became aware of it and had to find other ways to wind down instead (and work out what was creating stress and deal with it instead of ignoring it).

We have a teenager in our house who’s too young to drink alcohol, so he wanted to do his own version of dry January and decided not to eat meat at home (and only if offered when out at friends to be polite). So, we had to get creative and start thinking about what we were cooking, although not huge meat eaters, we ate meat at least five times a week; chicken, minced pork, sausages and bacon.

What did this adventure teach us? Firstly, even though veganism and vegetarianism are extremely good from an environmental perspective on many levels, if you buy processed, ready-made and unnecessarily packaged items, the commercial market that is pushing plant-based trends in itself is not particularly environmentally friendly. Ready-made foods can also be high in salts and preservatives, and so are ultimately not very good for your health either.

Luckily, I was taught to cook from scratch from a young age, so we started exploring chick peas, lentils, nuts, seeds and reduced our alternative vegetarian options to Quorn (although that sounds a bit daunting, there are some really good cookbooks out there, and always an easy to follow recipe at the end of a Google search). Shopping without meat in our diets hasn’t been too difficult, and just like cutting out alcohol it has also saved us some money in our budget as well. With those savings we decided to start buying more organic produce which means less chemicals in the environment and less chemicals in our bodies.

This Spring and Summer we are hoping to start growing some of our own vegetables and fruits in our garden at home. Like everything else we do in our house, with health restrictions, we will do this one bed at a time, so we don’t over stretch ourselves physically or financially. This way, we can work out what will grow well where we live and add to it year by year. I will keep you posted with what we decide to do and share some photos of our progress throughout the year.

If you are interested in gardening and growing there are groups in Carmarthenshire, such as Incredible Edible Carmarthenshire (easily found on Facebook), and a range of allotment spaces where you can meet other, more experienced growers and learn as you go.