stuffing ourselves with goodness.

I listened to this podcast on Power of Moms a few months ago and it has fundamentally changed the way we eat around here. And I love the change.  I feel so full of good food all the time, yet my body has been getting stronger and shedding extra weight.   And my kids have been eating differently too.  We’ve never really had a ton of junk or processed food in the house, but we haven’t always had a TON of deliciously nutritious and healthy food in the house either.   We’ve had just kid of so so stuff around here, stuff to get us by, but not to necessarily stuff us with goodness.

In this podcast April Perry interviews Jonathan Bailor who wrote a few best selling books about food/diet.   There’s lots of good stuff they talk about, and I’m sure his website and books and whole big plan are great, but what I took away from it all is that we should be stuffing ourselves with real, living food every day.  He challenges people to eat not just 5 servings of fruits or vegetables, but ten!  Double digits servings of non-starchy vegetables a day.   So that’s what I’ve been trying to do.   Rather than worry about calories or limiting sugar or carbs I’m just trying to make sure I get all those veggies in my body each day.  I find that when I do that I don’t really have space for too many empty carbs and my sweet tooth is too busy chewing up celery to care much about treats (aside from dark chocolate which I've declared to be ok). 

The other thing I took away from listening to Jonathan and April talk is that I want to fill up my kids and our house with real foods. The way he talks about processed foods like pretzels and crackers and chips and stuff makes them sound so unappealing.  They are all dry, dead foods.  So I've been trying my best to just not bring that many of them in the house. 

And the best part about it is that my kids haven’t really noticed a big change (diet changes are sometimes traumatic for them!).  They have noticed that I’m eating really healthy, cause I talk about it all the time, and they make fun of all my arugula eating.  But they haven’t noticed that they are also really eating healthy.  The green smoothies are getting more green and less sweet, there’s no longer sugar in their yogurt, just frozen berries, I’m most often sending an apple or orange or banana for snack instead of a Chewy Granola bar.

Just after listening to the podcast I considered making a big deal over this new eating healthy challenge.  A TEN VEGGIES A DAY challenge or something like that, to do it all together and make it fun.  But then I decided that for my kids it might be best to just not say anything but change a lot of behind the scenes stuff.  And I think that was the right choice for us.  Not a lot of complaining, but a lot more good eating.

We haven’t perfected this yet.  And I have to say that discovering Google Express has been a big setback (free same day delivery of non perishables from Costco made it super tempting to buy easy pre-packaged and processed snacks).  But we have come a long way and I think we all like where we are. 

So, if you want a little push to up your game in the whole foods/healthy eating department I recommend that podcast.  It was super inspirational to me.

I’m going to try to start posting a few of the things that are working around here to keep us stuffed with goodness.  Sharing always helps me to stay motivated.  So stay tuned.