As lifestyle challenges go, combining earning a living while at the same time home educating your children, has to be one of the toughest. If you’re not one of the few home educating families where the parents can afford to go out to work and employ someone to supervise and home educate their children for them.

For most families these days, school provides a large chunk of free child-care and this is what many parents exploit in order for them to be able to earn a living whilst raising children. So, what do you do when you do not have access to hours of child-free work time each day?

What can you do if you are a single parent and/or home educating very young or disabled children? Tough challenges indeed, but certainly not impossible judging by the number of families I’ve come across who are, apparently successfully and happily, doing just that.

There are many different ways in which families achieve this, although the process of changing their lifestyle has often taken place over several years. How do they manage it?

Balancing income and costs.

In absolute terms, of course, it doesn’t matter how much income we have so long as it is equal to or greater than our costs. Most of us can decide, to a large extent, what our costs will be and therefore how much of an income we need, but if our income drops, then it follows that our costs must decrease too.

When I decided to take my two boys out of school in 1998, I was already running a small business from home, but it quickly became apparent that I would not be able to continue with this. My job, though home-based and part-time, took up around 30 hours per week, some of it spent away from home.

I wasn’t happy spending that amount of time working or being away from my children while they were young (age 8 and 6). So, I quit my job in order to home educate. My doing that left us with one income (I was married at the time and my husband was working) which was not sufficient to cover our bills as they stood.

So, we decided to downshift to a part of the country where it was less expensive to live, buy a much less expensive home and lower our sights in materialistic terms.

During the months and weeks that followed, I read many books and websites on home education and, just as importantly as it turned out, I started learning about something called “Voluntary Simplicity”. The tenets of Voluntary Simplicity are frugal consumption, ecological awareness and personal growth.

However, this change in life path and priorities i.e. my children’s education now rated above my quest for material possessions, felt like deprivation or even poverty sometimes. I realised there were seeds of resentment threatening to germinate as a result of our decision to home educate.

I needed to stop feeding them. I needed a change of perspective.

It was a revelation for me to discover that taking the path of voluntary simplicity was not about poverty at all, but about unearthing a simpler, freer way of living that gave us more time together. I quickly realised that this was really an opportunity for us to lead a much richer, more meaningful life emotionally, physically and spiritually.

For many people the idea of losing weight is naturally linked to dieting. Study after study; however, has revealed that the real key to losing weight and keeping it off is integrating a healthy eating plan in your life.

The problem with many diets is that while they may enable you to lose weight over a short period of time they are often difficult to maintain over the long term. As a result any weight you may losing while on the diet creeps back after you are unable to remain on the diet.

In order to lose weight easy and keep it off over the long term it is important to consider ways in which you can maintain a healthy lifestyle. This includes learning to eat healthy, selecting natural foods that are good for you and participating in an exercise plan on a regular basis.

Obviously, making the change to a natural, healthy lifestyle isn’t easy; particularly if you have been accustomed to snacking on junk food in the past and generally eating unhealthy. The most important step is to recognize that while you didn’t gain the weight overnight, you also won’t be able to make a drastic change overnight. Slow, steady steps are the keys to success. This will help you slowly and naturally build a healthy lifestyle that is much easier to stick with than any crash diet. The good news is that there are steps you can take today, and every day after, to get yourself and your family on the road to a healthier lifestyle.

First, look at ways in which you can cut back on calories. Keep in mind this does not mean drastically reducing your caloric intake. One pound is equal to about 3500 calories. If you cut back on just 200 calories per day, over a couple of weeks you will see some weight loss. That means just cutting out a cola per day, an extra serving of bread or a snack. Even little things can help you lose weight.

It’s also important to begin looking at the actual foods you are eating. While it isn’t necessary to do a complete overhaul of your diet, which you won’t be likely to stick with anyway, consider ways in which you can slowly begin to substitute natural foods into your diet. Instead of reading for a bag of cookies for an afternoon snack or after dinner dessert, try noshing on some fresh fruit instead. Overlook the sugary cereals in the morning and select a bowl of oatmeal or granola with low-fat or skim milk.

Remember that even small steps are an excellent way to get you started toward a healthier lifestyle that you are more likely to stick with and over time, lose weight.