Hello! My name is Elisa. I am a happily married mom of five kids. I grew up in the Seattle area of Washington and moved to Utah during my college years.
My health journey began in 2008, after the birth of our third child and continually developed over the following years. What started as a reason to lose the baby weight that wasn’t coming off with exercise alone, turned into something so much more.
Around that same time, my mom was diagnosed with cancer and changed her diet. She would send me articles on health and nutrition. What I learned about food and it’s correlation to wellness, or sickness, was very interesting, and I wanted to see if making these dietary changes would also improve my family’s health.
I started by cutting out things like gold fish crackers, Jif peanut butter, hot dogs, and Dino Buddies(aka chicken nuggets) all of which were staples at our house. You know, the standard American diet foods. We switched to things like natural peanut butter, hummus, raw nuts, a lot more fruits and vegetables, drinking green smoothies regularly, and making a lot of our own meals from scratch instead of opening cans and packages. Our oldest daughter, who was about 4-years-old at the time, had the hardest time with this change because of her age, but through experimentation, which usually ended in more tears than smiles, we came up with lots of recipes that even she loves!
After about a year or two of living this new lifestyle, I realized that not only had I lost my baby weight but that our family had been surprisingly healthy all year and that none of our four children(the oldest being seven, the youngest being one) had a single sick visit in over a year. Zero! That was HUGE for us considering prior to this time, the doctor’s office felt like a second home with all our visits for ear infections and feeling like we needed antibiotics to fix our sicknesses. I wish that my children’s doctors would have talked to us more about nutrition and the important role it plays in maintaining good health, rather than just prescribing more antibiotics which I’ve learned should be the very last resort.
Through our experience, and through reading many books and research articles, I’ve found that by eating real foods, we can achieve great health on our own. We need to be responsible for our own health by making real food choices. This blog will be a means for me to share some information on nutrition as well as our family’s favorite real food recipes that we’ve gathered over the years and that even little children love. And please, feel free to comment and share your health tips/advice/recipes or email me at elisa.g.smith[at]gmail[dot]com
Real Foods Mom 
I enjoy reading your posts. We’ve started drinking green smoothies and although we have yet to convert fully to natural and whole foods we are getting there. We very rarely go to the doctor and I agree that our diets play a large part in how healthy are bodies are. Keep it up!
I’m glad to hear you’re doing green smoothies! We love green smoothies and I notice a difference in my body on the days when we don’t. I have even been able to get Scott to take green smoothies to work with him in a coffee mug :).
I’m at the beginning of this journey myself! So fun to read about someone out there who came from such a similar place but is a little further down the line. I’m going to make the sweet potato fries recipe you posted next week. I’ve starting doing the green smoothies for me and the kids’ afternoon snack (I had GSG as a professor at BYU–my husband and I actually give her credit for us getting together since she put us in a group together). Anyway, I’m working on switching to all real food dinner recipes and getting rid of the processed foods (I’ve switched to real food for breakfast–do your kids eat cereal? My husband and my kids still eat honey nut cheerios for breakfast). Anyway–it’s rewarding but tough because, as you know, our generation grew up in the heyday of processed foods. So even though I feel great about it, my husband sometimes feels like i’m going off the deep end by taking away all he knows and loves. 🙂 So we’re doing the best we can.
Lisa, my family eats a granola cereal that I made each week (it’s on the blog, under the breakfast tab, titled ‘granola’.