You know how every once in a while you’ll see an article in a celeb magazine where some TV or movie star is asked to describe their eating habits in one word?
Well, my word would be “careless.”
It’s not that I don’t give a lot of thought to food – I love cooking, and take a lot of pride in pulling together nice dinners for my family – but when it comes to my own eating habits? Nutrition falls so low on my priority list that it’s practically off the radar entirely. I eat what I feel like eating when I feel like eating it, and if that means chocolate-chip cookies for breakfast or a massive steak for dinner or skipping lunch entirely because I’m just not hungry, that’s generally what I do. Dinners aside, my eating habits over the course of the day rarely follow anything that could be considered a “schedule,” and the amount of thought I give to creating a balanced diet for myself is zero.
In some ways, this is a good thing, since it means that I’m listening pretty closely to my body wants in terms of how often and how much I eat…but it also means that I often find myself subsisting on nothing but junk until it’s “family meal” time, or running out the door having not eaten breakfast and then resorting to a drive-through so I don’t turn into an angry gremlin.
It’s nice that I’m prioritizing my family’s health…but I should be prioritizing mine, too. I know that; of course I do. It’s just a hard thing to do.
So here are some small, easy changes I’d like to make to improve my own diet in the coming year:
- Take a freaking multivitamin. I have no idea what is wrong with my head that I cannot remember to take a multivitamin, but I’m going to try gluing the bottle to my hand to see if that helps (or maybe just putting the bottle next to the coffee machine, because you know I’m going to remember that part of my morning).
- Junk my do-nothing-for-me-except-deliver-sugar cereals in favor of ones that contain protein and fiber, like Fiber One Protein Maple Brown Sugar or Nutty Clusters & Almonds.
- One shot of orange juice every morning. My mom did this when I was growing up – a shot glass’ worth of OJ first thing when she wakes up; no more, no less – and I did it for a while, and it always was just such a great start to the day. And if I go for an OJ brand with pulp I’ll get additional nutritional benefits, so there you go.
- Keep healthy snack foods on hand that I can grab when I’m running to the car so that I don’t go for either cookies or nothing at all. The problem is that I know myself, and if all that I have on hand is stuff that I don’t like, I’ll just skip the snack entirely. Fiber One’s Meal Bars are delicious enough that they don’t feel like an “oh well, I guess it’s this or nothing” choice; they feel like a treat (that happens to be good for you (particularly the Dark Chocolate Almond bar, yum yum yum).
- Add flaxseed to everything I can. It adds just a little bit of nutty flavor, and I already add it to my son’s food…so I’ll just throw it into mine, as well.
- Search for more meat-free ways to add protein to our meals (like the recipe pictured above, which I made on Saturday night and which is a delicious reminder of how good meatless – or mostly-meatless – meals can be). Kendrick is always asking me to make more veggie-heavy dinners, but I just don’t have all that many in my repertoire. Time to hit The Googles.
Any more ideas? Recipes? I could especially use a few more good veggie-heavy winter meal suggestions.
Disclosure: This post is part of a collaboration between Fiber One and SheKnows.
