Interesting Thing...

As you all know, I have changed how and what I eat quite a bit. And you might be wondering how this all works with preparing meals for the family because the last thing you want to do is prepare two meals for the family. So I am going to tell you what I have done. As far as dinner goes, what I usually do is prepare a normal meal - meat, vegetable, and some sort of starch. Initially, when I was trying to get down to my goal weight, I would just skip the starch part of the meal for myself, but I now have added it back in at a smaller portion. I eat lots of vegetables and salad, and I am also a little more picky about the kind of meat I choose. We eat a lot of chicken, fish and pork - I try to stay away from the fatty meats. On rare occasions, I will make myself something different than the rest of the family, but for the most part, we all have the same thing, I just change my portions of each food group. I know, this isn't very interesting - I haven't gotten to the interesting part yet...

We still do Subway when things are a little tight time-wise in the evening. We still do pizza usually once on the weekend. However, the kids get what they want for pizza and I get my own pizza. I usually have veggies, no sauce, no mozzarella, sometimes ricotta and then Parmesan cheese. You might think it's a little weird with no sauce or mozzarella but it's actually really good. It's not greasy or soggy which I love. There's nothing worse than opening up that pizza box and seeing all the grease on the bottom of the box or worse yet, soggy dough from all the watery sauce. I have ordered this pizza when out with a group of friends and at first they look at you like you are a little crazy, but when they try it, they like it!

Now here's an interesting thing that has happen with breakfast - yes, I'm finally getting to the interesting part. I was buying my kids the "sugar cereals", Lucky Charms (a favorite), Cinnamon Toast Crunch - you get the idea. One day, Rachel and I were talking about this and she basically said all those cereals were junk (I may as well give them a bowl of sugar for breakfast) and the kids should be eating better cereal. She brought me in a sample of Kashi Go Lean Crunch for both kids to try. I gave it to them and they tried it and said, "it's not horrible" - well that was good enough for me. I decided from that point on, I would no longer buy "sugar cereals". I loaded up on various healthy cereals (with Rachel's help) and placed them into the cereal cupboard. Now we probably had 5 or so "sugar cereals" that were more than half way full. I told the kids they could finish up what was there, but then that was it, no more sugar cereals. I also explained to them why they needed to eat something healthy in the morning and how they would feel better throughout the morning because they were eating better. I received the normal moans and groans about how the cereal tasted like cardboard and "why do we have to eat it, I don't feel any different".

But here's the interesting part (I know, you've been waiting a long time to get to the interesting part), the "sugar cereals" that were about half full a month ago in the cupboard, are still half full. The kids, on their own, have chosen to eat the healthy cereals instead of the sugar cereals. They still occasionally complain about it, but I think maybe they just like to complain about it. They are choosing their own cereal and they can choose the "sugar cereals" if they want - they are right there in front of them in the cupboard - but they don't. I think it's time to throw the "sugar cereals" out, they're not eating them!