Editorial
Front Page - Friday, February 4, 2011
Living wholesomely and frugally simplified with Wholesome Mommy
Erica Tuggle
Wholesome Mommy, Denise Sawyer, started her blog in an effort to change her family’s own eating habits and to make the most of their income. On her blog she posts recipes, tips and her own family’s journey of eating healthy and living frugally.
- Erica Tuggle
Denise Sawyer is not only a mother, teacher at Battlefield Primary and a college supervisor for student teachers in Hamilton County through Barry College, but she also writes and maintains a blog called The Wholesome Mommy.
Sawyer started blogging before her son was born, because she knew she wanted to be home with him and heard that blogging might be a way to make extra income. She found a group of bloggers that were extreme couponers and realized she could apply their methods to her own grocery bill for savings. This is how her first blog, “The Sensible Sawyer,” came to share this knowledge. Yet the work behind this blog was enormous and after almost two years with it, Sawyer decided she couldn’t raise her son and continue the blog.
About the same time, her family started changing their eating habits and decided to stop consuming processed food as much as possible, try to cook things from scratch and eat more whole foods. Sawyer says she decided to start a new blog on living wholesomely, and if her followers followed, then she would continue, and if it didn’t go over or she didn’t enjoy it, she would quit. Luckily, her followers picked up her Wholesome Mommy blog and she gained new readers, too. She was even chosen to be a Wal-Mart mom, in which public relations companies would pitch information about different things and allow the mom bloggers to test products.
As a part of this, on Sawyer’s blog there is the Fresh Start Campaign, in which she updates her followers about her family’s New Year’s resolutions of making healthier lifestyle choices and getting on a tighter budget. Wal-Mart has also given her small exercise merchandise, an Xbox Kinect with fitness games and healthy food options to try and then decide whether to include in her blog or not.
Sawyer has also been working with ConAgra this month to learn more about the Share Our Strength and Cooking Matters charity, which teaches those from low-income situations cook-
ing skills and how to use their budgets toward healthy food op-tions. Next month, Sawyer is reviewing the Ringling Brothers show coming to Atlanta as part of showcasing ways families can make moments together.
Sawyer’s criteria for choosing the products, recipes, reviews and other information she features in her blog all depends on if they are a good fit for her blog’s message and the lifestyle her family is trying to lead.
“With the circus, part of the blog is about making family moments, about living on less, and trying not to buy a lot of things, but rather spend money on things that would help us come together as a family, like shows or even things that are free, like going to the park for a picnic.”
In keeping up her blog, Sawyer has had to learn more about organic food and how to live wholesome on a budget. Using her couponing skills in a totally different market, Sawyer shops at Earth Fare every other week, purchasing meat, dairy and “the dirty dozen” fruits and vegetables, which are a list compiled by the Environmental Working Group of the fruits and vegetables with the highest load of pesticides.
“By buying the things I feel are most important in organic at Earth Fare and buying the rest at conventional grocery stores, I save a lot of money and can be healthy, too,” she says.
Another way she saves money, is partnering with other families to purchase a grass fed cow. Because meat is one of the most expensive things to purchase organic, Sawyer found she could get the meat a whole lot cheaper by going directly to a farmer who would raise a cow only on grass and slaughter it for the families.
On her days at home, when not working on the blog, Sawyer loves to bake with her son. She also enjoys making meals that take a little longer on days off, or being able to throw a meal together in 30 minutes on workdays, and all without using processed food.
“People are surprised in always having used these processed foods, and the words ‘[from] scratch’ seems so scary,” she says. “With the way society is so busy, our generation is kind of lost as far as cooking goes, so we have lived fast-paced, fast-food lives, and no one learned how to cook. That’s been part of the blog, too, in education.”
Her blog has a little bit of something for everyone, but don’t be surprised if you see a recipe with the occasional processed food item.
“Wholesome Mommy is not
all about having everything or-ganic, not about not ever using canned soup or anything processed. It’s for the person who is trying to make better choices,” Sawyer says. “We do have busy lives, but there are baby steps you can take to live more healthy and more wholesomely.”
Visit Sawyer’s blog at www.wholesomemommy.com.
|
|