10 Easy Tips for Eating Healthy in the New Year

With every New Year, one goal I ALWAYS have is eating healthier for me and my family.

I’ve been pretty honest about the weight struggles my husband has had throughout the years. The only thing that has continuously worked for him is when our house is stocked with healthy foods. And it’s not just my husband I worry about, I worry about my 4 sons and what kinds of foods they’re putting in their bodies and also my own (especially while pregnant).

I grew up in a home that was always full of healthy foods and drinks. It’s funny, I remember my mother never having soda in our house, and people always coming over and asking why we didn’t. It was just something my mom never had, so I was used to it as a child. But it impacted the way I treated my body throughout my life… my mom always had fruits and veggies and healthy foods in our house. If we had any cookies or sweets, it was always a special treat, it wasn’t anything we were ever used to having.

As my sons are getting older and I’m seeing how fast and furious our lives have gotten, I have completely slipped up lately and have been very careless on healthy eating habits. A McDonald’s stop here. A Burger King stop there. Frozen pizza in the oven for 20 minutes. Hot lunch at school because not enough time in the morning to make a cold lunch. Life just gets crazy… and with that comes not-so-great eating habits.

But with 2013, I’m taking it back.

I’m going to eat healthy and keep my family eating healthy.

It’s not hard to do, it’s just being committed to it and following through.

10 Easy Tips for Eating Healthy in the New Year:

1) Start a Food Planning Meal Menu – Every Sunday, sit down and create a calendar of meals for the week. This will let you see exactly what you have in your fridge and cabinets and also let you have a hand in the planning beforehand. The biggest struggle is when you’re time crunched and just staring into your fridge and thinking, “What can I make in the next 30 minutes?” When I’m thinking that, I usually go and order a pizza. So planning everything out is the best thing to do.

2) Trash the crappy food in your cabinets. After the holidays we have chips and cookies and brownies and just “yucky” foods. TRASH THEM.

3) Do all your prep work beforehand. We love to make stir-fry dishes. My husband will cut up the veggies a day or 2 before… or even in the afternoon after school. It just cuts down on the prep time when it’s actually dinnertime. It allows you not to be overwhelmed when you have some of the work done.

4) Grow a garden. My husband did this this summer and we had cucumbers, tomatoes, lettece, beans, potatoes, onions, peppers, etc on hand at ALL times! It was a great thing for him to do because it made us eat veggies, we had so many, we had to! 🙂

5) Commit to not eating out. If you think you can’t do it for all 7 days, start with something doable – say, “I will not eat out 4 days a week.”

6) Replace certain foods in your house with healthier options. For example, replace your white rice with brown rice. Replace your white flour pasta with whole wheat pasta. Replace your white bread with 100% whole wheat bread. Small changes like that can go a LONG way.

7) Buy a food scale and measure your portions. My husband starting doing this 4 years ago. I’m going to be honest, at first it DROVE me crazy. Everything we eat, he measured. But in all reality, we didn’t know how much a healthy serving was for us. We were eating double what we needed to… so it became useful to see what a “normal” serving was.

8) Have 6 smaller meals throughout the day instead of 3 larger ones. It will keep your metabolism running throughout the day and you won’t be prone to gorging on tons of food during breakfast, lunch and dinner.

9) Find some really great sites and cookbooks that give healthy recipes. It’s not easy to always cook different healthy meals, so having resources to pull from really helps.

10) Always have certain healthy eating essentials on hand for snacks throughout the day, some of my favorites:
Nuts
Peanut Butter
Bananas/Apples/Oranges (etc…)
Whole Wheat Bread
Cheese Sticks
Carrot Sticks
Olives
Cottage Cheese
Granola
*This prevents me from doing a Dunkin Donuts run at around 2PM! 🙂