Making Healthy Food Changes for Your Family

Making Healthy Food Changes for Your Family
Crystal Miller

One of my focuses on diet change for my family was to change to food that is “real food”. I want to eat more foods that are closer to the way God created them; less chemicals, less preservatives, less additives, etc.. I think meat, butter, olive oil are good foods to eat. They are real, margarine and many of the oils out there are not real but man-created substitutes that are not good for your health. God gave us good foods to eat.

When the time comes to make changes to our diet it can sometimes seem overwhelming. Where do you start? What do you start with? How will the family react? My best bit of advice to making permanent, lasting change is to go slow. Make changes one at a time and don’t get caught up in what you are not doing. Don’t look at all the needed changes and become frustrated by what you are not able to do, but look at each step no matter how small as a step in the right direction to improved family health.

There are still things in our diet that I would like to see improved and I still work on areas as I can. My desire in this would be to encourage every small step you take in improving your family’s diet.

I know in the past I would easily get discouraged by what I was not doing and just give up. But this time I started small and it grew from there. Yes my children rebelled at times, they complained at certain things. In response I tried to meet them half way by realizing that change can be hard on everyone. As well as taking heed when I heard someone say, “No food is healthy if no one will eat it!”.

What I have learned about making these changes is that it does not have to happen over night. I want to share with you how I made some of these changes, what steps I took and am still taking to assist you in making better food choices for your family!

The first thing that I did was to start to tackle the sugar issue. I read a book called “Sugar Blues” by William Dufty (here is the condensed on-line version of it: http://www.nexusmagazine.com/SugarBlues.html ) and I was very convinced of the fact that refined sugar is very bad and I needed to make a change. My children gasped in horror as they felt their cookie, Kool-aid, and soda pop addictions were going to be taken away from them :). So instead of focusing on “taking away” I began to discuss with them ‘why’ we needed to make changes and then focused on the “replacement” of favored things. I stopped buying cookies and Kool-aid.

I started buying 100% fruit juice and club soda. We would mix the juice up with the club soda instead of water. They only drank soda once in awhile so this was an acceptable compromise. I bought more fresh fruit. It was spring time when I made these changes and so there was a nice variety of fruit in season. I left it out for them to munch on as much as they wanted. I bought mixed nuts and would bring these out for snacks as well as popcorn.

Sugar is an addicting thing. My children as well as Tobin and I did deal with sugar withdrawals and the extra, healthy food around to munch on did help. For those times when we really wanted something sweeter I made cookies and cake made with real butter, whole grain flour, and honey or organic sugars. You can find my dessert recipes HERE.

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