Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Healthier eating

This morning at Y Neighbours we had a presentation from a dietician from Youville Centre, and it really got me thinking about our eating habits.  I think we do not bad with what we eat, but there are definitely lots of areas where we could improve.  And as the person who does the grocery shopping and meal preparation in this house, it's my responsibility to make the necessary changes.  However, I think if I try to make too many changes at once it will be too hard to stick with, so I'm going to try to make one or two changes a week.

My change for this week is to eliminate juice boxes.  I was actually planning to do this anyways, since they're not really necessary and just create extra garbage.  I usually give Annika some juice with her afternoon snack, and at first I would give it to her in a reusable juice box, mixed with water.  Somewhere along the way, though, she discovered juice boxes (possibly last summer for going to the lake?) and she got hooked.  However, there's really no reason why at home she can't drink juice from a cup or the reusable juice box, and then I could go back to mixing it with water (as long as she's okay with that, now that she's had "full strength" juice). 

My other goal for this week is to start baking one homemade "something" (cookies, muffins, granola bars, etc) each week.  I think it's okay to still have goodies like cookies around, but I'd prefer them to be homemade, rather than store-bought.  It just seems healthier to me, plus it also eliminates the garbage that comes with all those "individually wrapped" treats.  I enjoy baking (and eating freshly baked treats!), but I don't do it very often because I hate cleaning up afterwards.  Also, since Emmett came along, I find that it's harder to find the time to bake (plus do the clean up!).  So I'll have to find a way to get over those hurdles.  The good thing (or perhaps the challenging thing) is that Annika loves to help out in the kitchen, so I'm sure she'd love it if I started to bake on a regular basis.

So those are my goals for this week.  I'll let you know next week how things are going, and what my next changes will be.

1 comment:

tammi said...

Haha, after mowing lawn and running errands this morning, I was treating myself to a can of Coke and a package of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups while sitting here at the computer. This post title caught my eye... ;)

These look like good first steps and should be relatively easy to implement. Could you bake in the evening, when your husband's home to help keep the kids occupied? (Or with the clean-up!)