It’s a beautiful day here! Sunshine always seems to change my outlook — sort of, no matter what I’ve got to do, if the day’s a sunny one, generally, my attitude is sunny, too! It’s taken me all these months of ‘working at’ the Trim Healthy Mama plan to get confident enough to begin sharing some of the different recipes or how I’ve learned to use the different recipes in the book — but every day I learn something new! Ever a “free-styler” I have to really work at following the recipes. But I’ve come to see and really appreciate the beauty of the THM plan is that once you have the basic understanding of meal guidelines, you can adapt the plan to your personal tastes, etc — and the recipes can be tweaked to fit your personal THM-style. I have begun to call THM a method rather than a continue reading
View Article...Monthly Archives: March 2014
Month: March 2014 THM = preparedness; sincerely.
NEW! TrimHealthyMama Online Store Many women are enjoying great success following the Trim Healthy Mama book & eating style or plan. But many women aren’t. I notice this many times as I read the different posts on the Facebook THM group “encouragement page” [my description] and the number of comments that are either negative or reflect a lack of being able to stick with the THM meal plans. Many women are simply feeling defeated as they try to “stay on plan.” I don’t know why this is, exactly, but I think it has a lot to do with the proliferation of diets, programs and diet foods many women have tried (and failed) or have tried with some success but as soon as the diet was ‘over’ or abandoned, the weightloss was erased and the weight increased. Again. There’s some strange psychological phenomenon that seems to occur with weightloss — especially continue reading
View Article...Month: March 2014 Someday an Heirloom Marriage
Someday an Heirloom Marriage by pamela spurling written year-2000 I pray as we sit here at the kitchen table, that what I share with you today will be a blessing to you and a blessing in your home—I pray it will maybe even change the way you look at your marriage and perhaps it will never be the same again. So… Your Marriage is an Heirloom. An heirloom that, depending on its value, will be passed down for generations… I think most times, women don’t have any idea the value of what they have in their hand and that it is quite possibly one day going to be an heirloom: a treasure passed on to someone else. Think of all the things you love that once belonged to someone else… things that at the time, probably had little monetary or sentimental value to the owner. Think of treasures from your continue reading
View Article...Month: March 2014 Blue & White
I love blue and white things. Blue is my favourite colour. It’s not my favourite mood, though I struggle with that one. Sometimes, a lot. Blue is my favourite for hydrangeas, dishes, gemstones, berries, skies and seas. And though I mostly prefer to wear pink and black now, navy clothing has long been pretty much the only colour I’ve worn. So you can imagine, that when I went to my first Basic seminar (wearing my favourite colour and that favourite colour was the colour of my dress), I felt right at home that night. I hadn’t learned yet that how things feel and seem in a situation are both critically important to me—and bcz of this, I, early on, was taken in by all the new information, all the new approach to life. All the blue and white. A few years later I would be sitting in a Mother’s continue reading
View Article...Month: March 2014 More ATI / IBLP Baggage & Freedom
A continuation of posts in a series of thoughts looking back on our life and experiences with the Advanced Training Institute and the Institute in Basic Life Principles (hereafter, ATI / IBLP)… I want to say at the outset, that it wasn’t all bad — ATI / IBLP — for I cannot really accurately recount the good things we learned in the ATI / IBLP years in our family or the blessings we reaped from what we experienced. And I don’t want to belabour an increasing list of negative points or excuse some of the more egregious errors in the teachings and programs — this isn’t an airing of dirty laundry or a rant of yet another disgruntled ATI family indulging in mudslinging. But error is error and a whole lot of error causes a whole lot of problems — error begets error and down the way a bit, error continue reading
View Article...Month: March 2014 Unpacking The ATI / IBLP Baggage
What I’m writing about these days isn’t sensational and isn’t unique to me. It’s not isolated and it’s not rare — at least not in homeschool and/or conservative Christian circles. It’s probably going on all over the place to one degree or another. Most everyone who’s been caught up in a particular group/movement/method comes to a day of reckoning and has to unpack the baggage they’ve intentionally or unwittingly picked up and carried as their own along the way. And it’s in the unpacking that some things — some ideas or ideals — are seen for what they are: good or bad — valuable or harmful, truth or lies.It’s my hope that the unpacking of some of the ATI / IBLP baggage will be a freeing experience — that it will be an encouragement to other women to be done with wondering if you’re doing the Christian walk right enough continue reading
View Article...Month: March 2014 The ATI-IBLP Mess
Every once in awhile there comes a stir on the internet about Bill Gothard or ATI (the Advanced Training Institute) or IBLP (the Institute in Basic Life Principles). Welp… things sure are a-stirring… and seem to have finally come to a point of boiling and bubbling over. If you’re not familiar with all this, then this mess probably will just seem like yet another airing of grievances by former ‘cult members, or grown children of ______ parent(s), or divorced people talking about their former mates. I chose those different categories bcz most of us have either been in those situations or are intimately familiar with one of all of them. As the Bill Gothard – IBLP – ATI mess unfolds (again!), I’m mindful that there are a whole bunch of things — failures, systems, legalism, fears, formulas, etc., etc., that happened to, or in, people’s lives that may well continue reading
View Article...Month: March 2014 ATI / IBLP Tangled Web
Consider the spider who spins a web and yet begins with no thread. My friend, Margaret, told me that a long time ago. I’ve considered it many times. I’ve considered other sorts of webs through the years, too. Webs of good intentions. Webs of ignorance. Webs of deceit. Webs of understanding. Webs of desires. Webs of guilt. All sorts of webs in our lives… these are the webs that connect good things and blessings to other blessings, lessons learned, desires realized, etc., etc. But there are also a lot of tangled webs that only eternity can sort out. ATI/IBLP is probably one such web. What’s to follow is sort of a synopsis of some aspects of our ATI days. Man was it a sticky mess sometimes. Problem with good things is that they are so often a substitute for best things—good things are so often the enemy of best things continue reading
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