Homemade Johnsons: How We Got Here: The Homemade Lifestyle

Since moving to Nevada, Donald and I have taken a particular interest in being more self sustaining and living the homemade lifestyle in order to become healthier and save money. I'm sure many of you have seen the postings on my Facebook about homemade this and DIY that. Being so far away from many of our family and friends makes it difficult to share this new lifestyle we are so thrilled about, so we started talking about a blog.

Our inspiration for this kind of lifestyle really was inspired by us moving in with Bryan and Becca (Donald's brother and sister-in-law). We lived with them for our first 8 months in Nevada. Becca introduced me to a diet (more a lifestyle) called the Weston A Price diet. It is based around eating whole foods and getting back to some of the more traditional dietary practices. Becca and I also spent time discussing different DIY projects we'd seen on Pinterest. They piqued my interest, but I didn't do much with them at that point. At the same time, I started working for a great family who ate the Paleo diet, which has a lot of similarities to the Weston A Price diet. After hearing and observing so many of the benefits to this kind of lifestyle and being sick of dealing with my own chronic illness issues, I made a drastic step. I cut out almost all of the processed foods I was eating and switched to a whole foods diet. I also stopped using the conventional medicines I was taking for my chronic illness and switched to a combination of homeopathic supplements. Within weeks, my chronic illness went from almost everyday flare ups to one every week or two (and eventually got to the point of only one or two flare ups a month).

I also started losing weight! I didn't watch my calories or start working out. I just ate clean, which included a lot of healthy fats! My weight loss started in January and as of October 2nd, I have lost 51 pounds!

All along, Donald was open to the idea of eating clean. He was very supportive and proud of my efforts. When we moved into our house in August, I decided to turn things up a notch and start making almost every meal entirely from scratch. It was at this point that Donald decided to fully commit to eating clean and he has lost 20 pounds since then!

After moving into our new house, our jobs did not worked out quite as we expected (which now looking back is quite a blessing), so our budget was tighter than we had hoped. I had been looking for more work, but was having difficulty finding it and Donald's promotion was postponed. So I approached him with a money saving idea: homemade and DIY as much as possible, everything from household cleaners to toiletries. He told me to go for it and was excited to see what I came up with. With a little help from Pinterest, I found and tweak recipes to meet our specific needs. I started making things like homemade deodorant, stain remover, fabric softener, and decided to try the no-shampooing challenge myself. Even as our budget has gotten a little less tight, we have no desire to go back to buying commercially made products. In fact, we have made plans to continue to expand our self sustaining ways! We love this homemade lifestyle, with the health and savings it has given us!

Many of our family and friends have expressed interest in the recipes we use and how we have achieved our weight loss. So this is where we plan to share them and hopefully inspire others to take the homemade lifestyle challenge themselves! Here are just a few things you can look forward to seeing in future posts: