keeping healthy
choices handy
The first step to being successful in healthy eating is to make sure there are good options available when you get hungry. We have settled into a pretty good routine at our house. Because we eat so much fresh food, we do make frequent trips to the store for produce and we have found a rhythm for making those shopping trips count.
At least twice a week, we get bananas which stay in sort of a queue — some may be green”ish”, some ready to eat now, and those spotted ones that are ready to freeze, which will be used in smoothies and “nice” cream. We also get whole pineapples and line them up on the counter to ripen. Avocados are similar. I refer to them as the now and later queue. They can seem slow to ripen, but when they’re perfectly ripe, they are glorious, so we try to buy a few at various stages of ripeness to keep one or two ready to eat almost every day in our salad or along side a Mexican dish.
We also keep a variety of fruit on the counter for eating/snacking and in the freezer for smoothies, “nice” cream and toppings for waffles or french toast. Dried fruit like dates, figs, cranberries and currants go in everything from muffins to oatmeal. Then there are nuts which we both love. I keep most of them in the freezer to preserve their freshness.
Most of the recipes I make at home last us two to three days. For instance, I make a vegan chili that we love and we generally get at least four meals out of one batch. It helps that my husband actually enjoys repeating the same dish several times in succession. I just tried a new chili mac recipe this last week and he has asked me to repeat it even though it took three days to eat all of the first batch.
In the first few weeks of our new eating lifestyle, I felt a little overwhelmed at being responsible for preparing every single meal every single day. I was so excited that Mark was on board that I was careful not to show my growing fear of failing to prepare enough variety and keep things going, Even though we use them rarely, I was so relieved last summer when we found a “safety net” to keep me from feeling so much pressure. We found a place that will ship a box of 20 delicious frozen dinners which we keep on hand for those rare days when I just can’t get anything prepared. (Like a good many days last December.)
Twice in the last year or so, I have emptied my pantry and cleared out everything that isn’t consistent with our eating lifestyle. (Except for the two small shelves devoted to my grandkids.) There’s no reason to keep temptation staring us in the face when we’re hungry.
I know everyone’s situation is unique and for us, we actually enjoy healthy food. One of our greatest challenges was conquering the convenience factor. That is, the challenge of having convenience food (restaurants) on every corner on our way home from an exhausting day and the temptation to just relax and let someone else prepare our food and determine our food choices.
Now, we really do prefer eating at home and even with so many trips to get fresh produce, we are still saving the money we would have spent eating out.
Next Post…. Eating Out — just ask