Food Makeover for myself & my family... Need Suggestions

[Joyfullyblessed]

Hello,

 

Alright, I have decided that our pantry, fridge and freezer needs a major overhaul. A "food makeover" is what I am calling this idea. :)

 

We need to eat healthier and get the junk out. I am asking for people to share healthy food ideas that they have in their own home. What do you buy for yourself and your family that you really enjoy?

 

I am looking for foods that taste good, yet are healthy. I need good swaps for some of the not so healthy stuff too please.

 

I need ideas for my pantry, fridge and freezer foods. Please help! I am going to be making a new food list soon and hopefully going shopping for everything before too long.

 

Thanks so much! Everyone have a great day! :)

[missmoe]

We enjoy home made salsa and hummus as snacks. We eat these with cut up veggies, pita chips, or tortilla chips.

 

We make our own lemonaide to drink or drink water.

 

We have at least two bean meals a week, and one veggie based soup meal.

 

Often for breakfast we enjoy a shake made of yogurt and frozen fruit, or we might have whole wheat toast with a yummy nutbutter (cashew or almond maple or sunflower seed butter).

 

Is this what you were looking for?

[meggie]

It's kind of hard to say unless I know what kinds of things you are eating now. "Healthy" food means different things to different people.

 

To me healthy eating is more fruits and vegetables, whole grains instead of white, and real food as opposed to processed stuff. We do still have some processed stuff, but I'm trying to wheedle it down as we go. Here are some of my suggestions for meals based on this ideology.

 

~Roast chicken with roasted carrots, onions and potatoes. We don't eat much of the chicken at the first meal, but after we're done, we'll pick off the rest of the meat and save it. I boil the carcass and use that broth for chicken noodle soup. For the soup I use TONS of carrots, onion and celery. It's more of a stew than a soup.

 

~Chicken tacos with lots of red pepper and onions. I use a little season salt for spice. Mine says there's no msg in it, but I don't know how much I believe that.

 

~Turkey Broccoli slaw stuff- I take some ground turkey from Costco, brown it with a chopped onion and garlic. Add in some chopped water chestnuts and bamboo shoots and a bag of broccoli slaw and cook for another 3ish minutes. Add 1/2 cup of teriyaki sauce. Can be served over brown rice or chopped spinach.

 

Oh and green smoothies. I'm trying to eat one a day. The amount of veggies you can hide in with the fruit is amazing.

[HSinNH]

Throw out the microwave popcorn, ice cream, popsicles, and chicken nuggets in a bag.

 

Instead, buy a bag of popcorn and make your own on the stove top. It is very easy and quick.

 

I found a Cuisinart ice cream maker at a consignment store for $15, barely used, now make all our own yummy, healthy ice cream. No nasty chemicals that make it not melt. Have you ever left a bowl of store-bought ice cream on the counter? It does not melt...gross!

 

Make smoothies with whatever fruit/vege, yogurt, and juice you have around, then freeze the left-overs in popsicle molds. No more frozen sugar water!

 

Lastly, buy chicken breast, cut them into chunks, and dredge in flour/breadcrumb mixture with whatever spices suit your fancy that day. Bake at 375 degrees until no longer pink.

 

IMHO, the closer you can get to eating food in it's natural state, the healthier you will be, even if it is cream in the ice cream! Also, buy LOCAL!!

[aggieamy]

I was in your position a few months ago and here are a few things I did that helped:

 

- I got a vegetable cookbook from the library and picked a new vegetable a week to try. We've done beets, turnips, parsnips, all sorts of things that changed things up. I like The Garden Fresh Vegetable cookbook because it has veggies grouped by season.

 

- Pick a week and try a new style of cooking. This week I've only cooked vegetarian things which has me doing a lot of cooking with beans and lentils. I've never done that before and it's helping me try new (and hopefully healthy!) things. DH is a total meat and potatoes type guy and he hasn't noticed that we're only eating vegetarian.

 

- Try to add in different ethnics foods. I bought some Garam Marsala at the store and attempted my first curry. It was interesting.

 

- Make a point to make a salad and interesting dressing every night to go with dinner.

 

My goal was to try to eat more vegetables and well balanced meals. We were doing a lot of starch and meat dinners.

[Mom-ninja.]

I just read a book that had a good suggestion. Base your meals around vegetables. You don't have to be vegetarian, but just make veggies the main focus with meat, beans, and grains as a minor role.

 

I'm phasing out commercial cereal. We buy gluten free cereal and it is so expensive. We don't need it. We don't need fast breakfasts in the morning. We home school. I've branched out in the breakfast arena. Smoothies are my favorite. My boys love love buckwheat or brown rice hot cereal with any toppings you can think of.

 

I second the suggestion of getting an ice cream maker. Then you can make yummy natural ice cream for special treats.

 

My boys love kefir. They drink it straight, eat it with granola, or in smoothies.

[myfunnybunch]

We started changing our table by committing to nightly salad plus one other vegetable each night. We also started visiting the farmer's market often and subscribed to a weekly CSA veggie box. The CSA changed our eating habits the most, because we had a large box with a variety of vegetables, some unfamiliar, that we had to eat.

 

Pantry:

Dried fruit and granola instead of chips, processed fruit snacks, and breakfast cereal.

We eat more rice and less bread than we used to.

No cookies. If we want cookies, we make them from scratch, which means we only eat cookies when we've got the time and inclination to make them.

 

Freezer:

We buy at the local butcher, in bulk, and stock up when they offer sales.

We started using recipes that use less meat.

We pick and buy fresh fruit all summer and store it in the freezer to use throughout the winter. (We save money, too, as we're buying when the fruit is readily available instead of paying winter prices.)

 

Make your own. What do you buy that's nearly as easy to make? For example, I just discovered that ranch dressing is ridiculously easy: Garlic, a little chopped onion if you like, mayo, buttermilk, sour cream, lemon juice, salt, pepper. Blend. Voila! If you like bleu cheese dressing, blend in a little gorgonzola or bleu cheese into that mix, add cheese crumbles when you're done.

 

No juice, no soda. Drink milk or water, mostly water.

 

:) And take your time. We changed our diet gradually by focusing on one change at a time. I think we started where you are, by stocking the house with less junk and trying to find healthy substitutes. We're not uber-healthy eaters, but our diet is much more healthy than it used to be!

 

Cat

[Joyfullyblessed]

Thanks so much to everyone who has offered up suggestions.

 

You know, I guess I am actually trying to figure out what "healthy" would be for us.

 

I just think that our food choices are not the best. We do have quite a bit of processed food in our kitchen which I know is bad. Yucky things like Poptarts, chips, packaged muffin mix, etc...

 

I guess I am thinking we need to eat more fruits and veggies. Also, we do ground turkey instead of ground beef quite a bit now which I think is a good thing. I have found that I only enjoy the ground turkey in spicier foods though (tacos, chili), but I don't like it in a spaghetti meat sauce for some reason.

 

We tend to be snackers, so I need healthy snack ideas. I know fruit, but what else is there?

 

My son eats apples like crazy, at least two a day so that is great.

 

We do actually have a few healthy things happening. :)

 

I think having salad at most every meal may be a good thing. Of course, we always have apples. My son enjoys pears, but only out of a can (no heavy syrups though). He will also eat purple/red grapes. I like strawberries and my hubby likes bananas.

 

We are not popcorn eaters at all. I do buy the Rold Gold tiny pretzel twists which I think are better than chips. For my childcare kids I will get goldfish crackers and the crunchy "veggiesticks" that they sell at Costco.

 

We are at home all day, every day because my husband works from home and I run the childcare business from my home too. I have to be able to make a list of foods that is not only healthy choices, but that won't kill our budget, especially since we eat all meals here the majority of the time.

 

Anyway, I am rambling. I am just wondering what everyone else buys. I really need to lose weight and get healthier, and I know that if I can make some changes it will benefit my family also.

 

Thanks so much!

[Mom-ninja.]

No juice, no soda. Drink milk or water, mostly water.

 

 

We consider milk as a food not a drink. My nutritionist told me that. We use all varieties of milk as well. Cow, almond, coconut, and rice. I tried goat milk once.....I need to work on that one. I think I'll try it in ice cream and baking before trying it straight again.

 

Coconut milk in smoothies or over hot cereal is so good.

 

For drinks we drink water 98% of the time. I buy grapefruit juice and OJ regularly, but I don't really buy other fruit juices. Once in a blue moon I buy apple, grape, cranberry, and such. Juice is expensive....well, 100% juice is. We also drink herbal tea either hot or cold.

[Jayne J]

Snacks around here include hummus and "stuff," meaning anything we can dunk--carrot sticks, bell pepper strips, celery, snap peas, pretzel sticks, pita chips etc. We also do cheese chunks, yogurt with fruit or honey, and fruit itself.

 

I am also in the place where I am looking into the cupboards and seeing too many boxes and cans. I'd love to hear some places to find great whole food-type dinners and lunches, especially if your picky kid will eat the food! For some reason breakfast and snacks I can manage, but come lunch and especially dinner...well, I need some encouragement!:tongue_smilie:

[myfunnybunch]

We tend to be snackers, so I need healthy snack ideas. I know fruit, but what else is there?

 

Cheese. It's more expensive than goldfish/cheese crackers, but more filling and lasts longer in the tummy.

Dried fruit. It's sweet, so if you've got littles with a sweetish tooth, dried fruit can be pretty satisfying. Mix with some nuts to makea homemade trail mix.

Nuts. Again, more expensive, but also more filling and long-lasting. A handful of almonds is pretty satisfying and can go a long way.

Veggies: Carrot sticks, celery sticks, snap peas, broccoli.

Nut butter on a cracker or served with apple slices or the sliced veg.

Mini-muffins or mini-scones. Even healthier made with some ww flour and added veggies--I sometimes mash leftover squash or sweet potatoes, or add leftover oatmeal to the dough.

 

Oh, and a glass of milk. Like Kleine Hexe, we tend to treat milk as a food served at breakfast or for a snack rather than a drink. :)

 

Muffin mixes are a lot like salad dressing, super easy to make on your own and way more healthy because you control the ingredients. You can even mix up a huge batch of the dry ingredients and put them in the pantry for easy access. Just measure your mix and add your wet ingredients in the morning, or the evening before, and you've got breakfast. I've also been experimenting with freezing breakfast things. Now when I make a batch of breakfast scones, I make a double batch. I serve one, and cook the other about 3/4 then let them cool, freeze, and when I want to serve them, they go from freezer to yummy scones after ten minutes in the oven.

 

Hopefully this helps a little. :) I know it feels really overwhelming to try to figure out how to make this transition!

 

Cat

[Mom-ninja.]

I'd love to hear some places to find great whole food-type dinners and lunches, especially if your picky kid will eat the food! For some reason breakfast and snacks I can manage, but come lunch and especially dinner...well, I need some encouragement!:tongue_smilie:

 

The cook book Saving Dinner is great. Every recipe is whole food only. Plus all the planning is done for you with weekly meal plans *and* the recipe lists already in the book. I hear you can go to the website and print out the lists by plugging in which week you want.