5 Tips for Eating Healthy as a Family!

Did you know that March is National Nutri­tion month? I found that out this past week (along with a whole bunch of great infor­ma­tion on shop­ping, cook­ing, & eat­ing healthy with your fam­ily) while on a con­fer­ence call with Michelle Dudash, reg­is­tered dieti­cian, Cor­don Bleu-certified chef and author of Clean Eat­ing for Busy Fam­i­lies. Michelle has joined forces with the Wal­mart Foun­da­tion to help raise aware­ness about the impor­tance of nutri­tion edu­ca­tion.
  
In fact, the Wal­mart Foun­da­tion is giv­ing $6.7 mil­lion in grants to five national non­prof­its that are pro­vid­ing thou­sands of stu­dents access to school break­fast and nutri­tion edu­ca­tion to peo­ple of all ages. This is an impor­tant topic as only 25 per­cent of adults, and even fewer chil­dren, eat the rec­om­mended amount of fruits and veg­eta­bles each day!

Dur­ing our call, Michelle shared some great tips for eat­ing healthy as a fam­ily! So, here are the 5 top tips that I think are espe­cially help­ful in help­ing you shop, cook, and eat healthy:

Spring Clean Your Kitchen

As I’ve found with the pantry chal­lenges, it is MUCH eas­ier to meal plan when your pantry, fridge, and freezer are orga­nized. When I can see what I have, it not only saves time & money, but I’m more apt to cook well bal­anced meals because it’s eas­ier. Every­thing is con­ve­niently located and I know what’s in there. In addi­tion to get­ting the kitchen orga­nized, Michelle also sug­gests toss­ing items with “unclean” ingre­di­ents (lots of processed foods with words you can’t pro­nounce), sav­ing clear jars for great visual food stor­age, and show­cas­ing the pro­duce in your refrig­er­a­tor so you can see it!

Get Kids in the Kitchen

Kids are actu­ally much more likely to eat what they have helped pre­pared. I find that true with our boys. They often get really excited about what they’ve helped make and are always will­ing to try the end result. Thank­fully, our boys aren’t too picky and will eat a really nice vari­ety of food. But, I think this lit­tle trick would be great for those with kids who don’t like try­ing new foods or eat­ing their veg­gies.

Another sug­ges­tion is of course to make fruits and veg­gies fun for kids! We LOVE doing this. From rain­bow fruit muf­fin tin snacks & fun lunch ideas to Easter fruit bou­quets and “dinosaur trees” (what we often call broc­coli around here), eat­ing healthy can be really fun for kids (and adults too )!

Eat “Clean”

If you can read the label and know the ingre­di­ents, then it is clean. If there are ingre­di­ents that sound like lab exper­i­ments, it’s not clean! So, make sure the food that your fam­ily is eat­ing is good for them by read­ing the labels as you buy and pay­ing atten­tion to the ingre­di­ents in your food. Don’t pur­chase things that have too many added ingre­di­ents that you can’t pronounce.

Prep Break­fast Ahead of Time

WAY too many kids and adults are not eat­ing healthy breakfast–or skip­ping break­fast alto­gether. To make start­ing the day off right with a healthy break­fast, you can actu­ally prep so many won­der­ful options ahead of time! Here are a few great ideas:

• Hard Boiled Eggs. Eggs are a great source of pro­tein & very eco­nom­i­cal. You can boil a whole pot of them on the week­end to have handy through­out the week!
• Use left­over veg­gies from din­ner. Instead of hav­ing to chop up items in the morn­ing, just save them from din­ner and pop them into scram­bled eggs, omelets, frit­tatas, or break­fast burritos.
• Break­fast Sun­daes. Layer greek yogurt and frozen fruit like a par­fait the night before. Then, in the morn­ing sprin­kle on a lit­tle gra­nola or almonds! Super YUM!
• Overnight oat­meal. This is SO easy. We’ve done just plain overnight oats and apple cin­na­mon overnight oat­meal. Super easy & you’ve got a hot break­fast ready to go when you wake up!

Meal Plan

Gah! I strug­gle with this! We some­times do great with meal plan­ning and then we’ll some­times go for long stretches with no plan in place. Hav­ing a plan def­i­nitely helps us stay on track with eat­ing healthy and sav­ing money! Michelle sug­gests plan­ning out how many din­ners you will eat at home each week on Sun­day. Make a meal plan and gro­cery shop around that. You can even make it easy and fun by doing things like hav­ing a baked potato bar night, cre­ate your own pizza night, taco bar night, etc. Plus, re-use your meal plans! Swap out recipes for the sea­sons, but keep it easy!