This post will be much shorter than the previous one and involves your participation...or at least your brain to ponder a few questions I'm curious what people consider to be "healthy eating"?
- Is it only eating salad & drinking water?
- Do you consider some veggies healthier than others?
- Are you more concerned with how your food is prepared vs. what it contains?
On our quest to eating well, we're phasing out processed foods. This, of course, is hard to do if you consider baking supplies - white sugar, enriched flour, etc. etc. - to be processed. However...is white sugar healthier than fake sweeteners? And if you know what's going in your food, does that make it healthier than the unpronounceable ingredients, or preservative forms of the same thing?
It is our goal to cut down, dramatically, on the fake food...but it's a work in progress Being able to name your ingredients is HUGE! Making meals out of 'whole' ingredients as close to their natural form as possible is important to us. My pantry no longer contains pre-packaged food or mixes...and I'll admit it - it's intimidating that if you want something to eat you have to CREATE it...from scratch!
My definition of eating healthy is progressive...it will take time. It's a lifestyle change that will take practice. We want to eat 'whole foods' - so that we know exactly what is going into each dish.
Once we have that mastered, we want to eat lean...cut back on some of the proteins that we consider 'heavy'. Pare down on the veggies that have more carbs than we care to take in. Reduce the amount of overall sugars being consumed.
Finally, we need to remember to incorporate our mission of doing all this on a budget! Is it even POSSIBLE to live that lifestyle on the national average?! What are your thoughts, predictions, opinions? I'd love to hear them!
As a side note: I am planning to have a whole tab dedicated to the recipes that I am making (some healthier than others, some less healthy but super yummy). As I am new to this blogging format, I have to watch a tutorial on 'how to' create these tabs...which I am hoping to do tomorrow so that I can share the recipes I have already started this week. In the meantime:
- A rare occasion to catch up with a friend over coffee prompted the even rarer occasion for me to bake a scrumptious breakfast treat - coffee cake! This version is by far NOT the healthiest that can be found on the web, BUT it's a rare treat, made from scratch, and was just TOO spectacular to pass up. Check out the original recipe from The Pioneer Woman (reduced to half, since there were only two of us!) HERE
As an additional side note: Obviously this post was not as short as I thought it would be. Sorry!
I plan on being your side liner, but looking forward to it.
ReplyDeleteI think homemade is ALWAYS better, but for me I find it hard to always do homemade especially with Andrew and I's work schedules. Homemade tends to make more, so I love the leftovers, but if its just me eating them until they are gone, I get bored with it, and tend to throw it away, which I find wasteful. In trying to lose weight we are trying a new technec of grocery shopping. We have our monthly budget, so instead of going once a month, we have budgeted a weekly amount, so as to eat fresher foods and maybe save money. I find having a meal plan each week helps save money too.
ReplyDeleteI consider healthy eating to be lean protein, lots of fruits and veggies, moderate whole grains and very little sugar. Oh, and lots of water! How well do I implement this ideal into my life? Better now that I'm pregnant but I have plenty of room for improvement. I really think that lots of things are ok, but moderation must become one's mantra. I think you are on the right track with menu planning- you can easily make sure that you don't have too many pasta meals in one week or too many desserts or whatever else. Something that a lot of people might think is odd that I think is healthy is that I don't eat red meat but once or twice a month. I've read and heard several things about how too much red meat is not good for our bodies and I decided to agree. Before I got pregnant, I actually preferred not eat much poultry either. A few times a week, naturally, but I really do enjoy non-meat meals. The danger side to that, though, is that I probably over-compensated just a little with dairy products :-} I guess my biggest hang up with healthy eating is variety and how much effort is involved in achieving variety. As Americans, we have become so accustomed to having so many choices that we have imparted this mentality to just about every aspect of our lives. If I could only overcome this to a degree, I think it would help me be more successful with eating healthy.
ReplyDeleteIn answer to one of your other questions, I am way more concerned about what is in my food as opposed to how it was prepared. There are just certain things I won't eat and other things that I'm sure if I really knew what they were, I wouldn't want to eat that either. As to whether sugar is better than artificial sweeteners, I think that sugar is better. Of course, the less processed it is, the better, but I just can't see how a chemical or a petroleum by-product could be healthier that something that comes from the ground. But again, moderation, moderation!