As we start on this journey of eating healthier we came up with a few rules that we wanted to eat by. We believe in progress in our journey toward eating healthier, not perfection. We will break our rules on occasion. I would never ask a friend or family member to ad-here to our rules of eating when we visit their home. Nor can we always follow them when out of the house. Anyone who knows us well knows we are Disney nuts, we visit Disneyland frequently. Let me tell you that place is not real food friendly, of course we have ways of making that better too, but that’s another topic altogether. When we are home we follow these rules though.
- We drink water and lots of it. We have always been water drinkers and we purposely started our girls out that way too.
We start with two big glasses each day when we wake up and try to drink half of our body weight in ounces each day. We will occasionally have hot tea. Every great once in awhile we will have coffee, but this is not any every day occurrence, and I would drink my water in the morning before I had the coffee. The girls do enjoy water but we do occasionally give them organic juice, this needs to be 100% juice though don’t be fooled by the packaging, read the ingredients. Even with this it is the exception, water is the rule. - IF I can’t pronounce it, I don’t eat it. When it comes to food ingredients I want them as close to nature as I can, that means minimal processing as well. I don’t want something that was designed or “perfected” in a lab. If I have to ask what is that, I probably don’t want to eat it.
- Keep the ingredient list to five items or less. In general when you see a long ingredient list that’s because it is full of things made in a lab. Again not a hard and fast rule, but generally if you pick something and see a huge list of ingredients it is full of junk.
- Meat should be organic and grassfed. We keep our beef grass-fed and organic, we do this even out the house or we just skip it altogether. We keep all of our chicken organic, antibiotic and hormone free. We have a local butcher who has all of his meat this way which we love, but we also buy these items at Costco.
- We keep our vegetables and fruits organic whenever possible. We have a few great markets that use local organic farms to supply their fruits and veggies. Even our local Albertsons have a surprising amount of organic produce from local growers. We also enjoy visiting our farmers market each week. Eating fruits and vegetables in season helps us to keep our meal planning fresh too. We also will supplement with organic frozen fruits and veggies.
- 50% of our plate is vegetables. You may see many pictures of recipes from me, but I can assure you that if there isn’t 50% vegetables on the plate we have a huge salad on the side. This was a big shift for us, we love our starches. We don’t deprive ourselves of them but they are no longer a staple in our diet, they are a side dish.
- We have a green juice or smoothie everyday. We love to juice, we have done plenty of juice fasts in the past. The whole natural nutrients you get from this each and everyday will make you feel amazing. You will find the body craves it!
So these are our 7 Real Food rules we follow. How about you, do you have any additional rules you follow with your family?