Over the past year J has been monitoring his blood pressure. High blood pressure runs in his family. We have always known it was borderline high and have made half-ass attempts to keep it down, like not adding salt to anything we cook and exercising occasionally. When J had his annual check-up last year, the doc told him he didn't want to put him on blood pressure medicine because of how young he is, so he would give him a year to make some lifestyle changes and see what progress he had made.

So over the past year J has monitored his blood pressure at home a couple times a week and written it down so there would be a record of the highs and lows. Some days it was ok and some days it was high. Stressful day at work = high, weekend where we get in a hike at our favorite park and cook a nice dinner = low.

Over the last few months, starting around the Thanksgiving holidays and going through Christmas, J's blood pressure went up and never went back down. The true scare came last weekend while we were at my Dad's and his blood pressure reading was really high. Like should we rush him to the emergency room, the man might self destruct.

I tried to calm him down by explaining that everyone had probably eaten too many sausage balls, dips with cream cheese, and drank themselves loose over the holidays. It tis the season. Not to mention, hearing my daily rants over all the things on the Christmas check-off list that must get done and will never happen, could send anyone over the edge. But quietly to myself, I worried as well.

On Monday morning J called the doctor and went in that day. His heart reading at the office was high as well. Our doctor did tell J that since he had seen him last year, he had gained 10 pounds. He also asked J if he had been exercising (raising his heart beat for a minimum of 30 minutes) 4 to 5 days a week. Ummm, no.

He wrote J a prescription and said that he was going to have him take the meds for a month, just to help get his blood pressure back into a normal range. He also wanted him to cut way back on his salt intake and exercise 4 to 5 days a week. In a month if his blood pressure had gone down, he would have him slowly get off the medicine and see if it would stay down with a good diet and daily exercise.

Overall I feel like we eat better than most. I am committed to buying many organic products, we eat lots of vegetables, and we don't eat fast food. We only eat meat occasionally and it is always lean. When J got home that night we went through our pantry and read the labels. Making sense out of food labels is extremely difficult to do.

What we found is that most boxed food items, our weekly frozen pizza, the vegetarian chicken nuggets, salad dressings, even some organic cereals, have a lot of sodium. Especially when your daily intake should be around 1,000 to 1,200 milligrams.

So our diet is going through some reconstruction. My grocery shopping trip took twice as long as it normally does . I was able to find some cereals that are low in sodium, but found it nearly impossible to find any salad dressings that weren't out the roof. I guess we need to start making our own dressings. If you have any recipes, please send them my way.

J made the commitment to change as well. He went to the gym at his work and ran on the treadmill every day this week. This has been a bone of contention with me for years. His company has a gym for their employees, yet he could never find the time to exercise. But I will let that go, I want to be as positive and supportive now as possible.

The motivation to be healthy has always been a murky idea lurking out in the distance, but with roo on the way, it is front and center. With this new life growing, moving, kicking inside me, it brings all those things that we used to be able to push off into the future, glaringly to the present. The time really is NOW, though in reality, it always has been.