We all want the best for our families. But sometimes it’s hard to get them to eat the foods we know they should. In this episode, I share some top tips for creating healthy eating habits with your family, all while saving money, and reducing viral exposure during the quarantine.

Feedback: If you’re enjoying the podcast, or have a question, concern, or helpful criticism please drop me a line at dovid@clevelandcreativeoutlet.com.

Please also share this podcast with your friends! Word of mouth is our biggest source for new listeners, so please share and share alike. Thanks.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Email | TuneIn | RSS | More

Links:

1. Fruits and Veggies Study: https://fruitsandveggies.org/stories/buzz-eating-fruits-veggies-actually-makes-happier/
2. How Not To Diet by Dr. Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM: https://nutritionfacts.org/how-not-to-diet/

Transcript:

Welcome to What Makes You Happy, the show that explores our hobbies and pastimes and how they delight us. This is episode number #26 and today we’re discussing Cooking New Healthy Meals for Your Family during the Quarantine.

 

Before we begin, I want to say, I really appreciate your viewership, and I want to know how I can make it better for you. If you have a suggestion, comment, or a complaint, please drop us a line using the Feedback form below. Likewise, if you enjoy this podcast, it’s likely your friends will too. Please share the experience! Word of mouth is our best growth plan, so please share as widely and as freely as you feel comfortable. Thanks so much.

 

With the current state affairs, stuck at home because of the coronavirus and resulting quarantine, with many of us forced to only leave for essential trips, like a doctor’s appointment or to buy groceries, there is additional impetus to eat healthier. Many of us are doing our best not to eat at restaurants for fear of contact with a carrier, or even more likely, to save money. There are a lot of people who don’t have paychecks coming in because the economy is on hold. Eating at home is a great way to save money. Whatever your reasoning, it’s common to desire more healthy, home cooked meals. The reasoning is readily apparent – it’s cheaper, it’s healthier, and it makes us feel good! What’s more, it’s fun! And with a little extra time on our hands, why not put a little more effort in the kitchen than usual? Well, the catch is that most of us don’t eat alone at meal times, and the others in your household might not be as receptive to eating healthier food as you are. As much as you might want to survive on broccoli and quinoa for the foreseeable future, your kids and significant other might not be pleased at the sudden reduction in delectable calories available at each meal. Lucky for you, I do have a bit of experience in this area, so I’m going to go over some simple strategies I’ve found can work in lots of households.

 

The truth is however, I really should credit my amazing wife. Many of you know that I drastically altered my diet from a traditional, standard American diet, albeit a kosher variant, to an entirely whole-food plant based diet. I go into more detail in an interview with my doctor, Dr. David Gutman, in episode #22 if you’re curious. But when I made the change, my wife rose to the challenge and replaced all of our recipes with new ones that fit the required criteria. So the credit for all of the information I have to offer really goes to her. Hi honey!

 

Rest assured however, I’m not going to try to proselytize you into going full bore health nut like me. So I know what worked for me, and the dietary and medical professionals I’ve spoken to have approved my diet repeatedly. But I’m not going to sit here and pretend like I’ve got all the answers and the perfect diet for each individual out there. However generally speaking, we could all do with eating more fruits and veg. Today’s strategies won’t be specific to any one diet, so you should be able to adapt them, whichever eating style you want to follow.

 

I’m also going to make a basic assumption about home cooked food versus restaurant or prepared foods. That is, anything you cook for yourself is inherently healthier. This may be less than entirely true, but for today, let’s allow the assumption to stand. For one, when you cook for yourself, you have complete control over every ingredient that winds up on your plate. A restaurant may be using ingredients you don’t like. This is even more true for packaged goods or processed foods. For another, every time you feel the urge to eat something you know you shouldn’t have, there is the additional barrier of having to cook it for yourself. You’ll likely have it less often if you have to cook it rather than just driving to the store and chowing down on those powdered donuts on the way home from the store. First up, we need to cover some general strategies for finding recipes. Apparently the average American has only about 9 meals in their rotation in order to have acceptable variety. Many of the meals you already know how to make are going to be saveable by making them healthier with substitutions, omissions, and additions of various ingredients. This would be something like using vinegars or spices and herbs instead of extra salt, or blending a portion of a soup and adding it back in instead of adding cream to thicken it. For the rest, I strongly suggest you seek out new recipes.

 

Now, I’m going to address something I don’t think gets covered very often on the topic of recipes, but is vitally important. Different people use a kitchen in dramatically different ways. I, for example, like to experiment. I’m fast and free with measurements, and often cook more by taste and feel than any recipe. I really hate having to refer back to a recipe over and over and over to finish a dish. This is especially true if the recipe is in a book rather than on a slip of paper I can tack to the fridge for quick access. My wife by contrast, is nearly the opposite. Give her a quality recipe, and she’ll make heaven in every bite. But she’s a lot less comfortable making the recipe up as she goes. Of course, once she has the recipe committed to memory, she does her fair share of experimenting as well. Each person develops their own workflow, and what works for one person, isn’t likely to work for absolutely everyone. You need to decide, are you a recipe follower or an experimenter? Perhaps you are somewhere in between. Do you prefer searching Google for recipes, or using a cookbook? Definitely try both! And of course, it’s your kitchen! Freely adapt your recipes to make them healthier. Just because it’s written on the page doesn’t mean it has to go into your mouth. Does your recipe call for a whole cup of coconut oil? Maybe you can get away with less. Does your recipe need you to thicken a liquid with flour? You can experiment with other, more healthful thickeners. My go to is ground flax seeds, which gum up like you wouldn’t believe after a minute or so.

 

Especially with the quarantine on, and with the heightened risk to the older segments of the population, now is a great time to call up your grandma and ask her for those old family classics that you crave at family gatherings. You’ll make her day asking for beloved recipes, you’ll help cure the loneliness you’re both feeling, and to top it all off, you’ll finally have the formula for those nostalgic flavors.

 

Now that you have your recipes, start keeping a list of all your favorite meals. In our family, we have some shared lists using Microsoft To Do, which is a free app with a browser based option if you want to use your lists on a computer. Remember how I said the average American has only 9 meals they keep on heavy rotation? I just counted, and in our list titled Meals We Love, we have 36 individual meals we come back to over and over. We’re constantly trying new things, and at this point, we’d get bored having the same old week in week out.

 

If you already know how to find recipes, and you really just aren’t sure how to get your husband to eat his greens, or how to stop your kids from demanding cream cheese on plain white bread with the crust cut off every night or dinner, short of strapping them down and shoveling them full of kale that is, I have some advice coming up.

 

The first thing I would suggest is to offer multitudes of healthy options at each meal. I can hear you saying, “Yes, but how do I get them to EAT it?” That’s the thing, as long as you’re consistent, meaning, literally every single meal, even breakfast, offering healthy options, eventually the healthy options will get eaten. In our house, we have a simple rule, which you may or may not agree with. Our rule is, it’s the parent’s job to offer good healthy food, and it’s each person’s job to eat. In other words, if there’s donuts and pizza on the table, and my kid eats it, that’s my fault because that’s not what we really want the family to be eating. But if I fill my son’s plate with steamed broccoli, pickled cabbage, savory black beans, and a whole wheat pita smeared with chummus and he eats less than I was hoping, I’m really not worried about it. He’ll eat if he’s hungry, and as long as he’s growing and developing properly, as long as there is no cause for concern, I put the worry out of my mind. Additionally, now that my oldest son is approaching 3 years old, we’ve mentioned this concept, that giving him good foods to eat is his parent’s job, and eating the food is his job. He really likes this idea, and repeats it back to us often. I find that kids like to know the rules. Again, I’m not a doctor or anything, so make your own decisions, but I am a parent, and this approach has really eased the burden and removed stress from our minds as we only have to concern ourselves with the quality, and not the quantity of what our kids eat.

 

My next tip is to realize that often, simpler is better than more complicated. When we’re offering these healthy foods at each meal, they are in their simplest, most basic and boring form. They taste good that way! At breakfast, we offer berries, whole fruit, and nuts or seeds in addition to whatever else is being eaten. At lunch and supper, we put out a plate of crou de tais, which usually consists of some combination of sticks of carrot, celery, cucumber, and pepper. Sometimes we serve it with a bowl of chummus, but often not. By making the options simpler, it reduces the effort on whoever is preparing supper, and it makes the options finger food, which is more appealing to kids. I was shocked the first time we did this and the plate of veggies disappeared before the end of the meal. Put out healthy options, and they will get eaten.

 

Next up, we have the concept of hiding healthy foods. There are lots of ways to bake in healthy foods to dishes that stubborn palates accept more readily. There are whole cookbooks devoted to this concept alone. I know that Jessica Seinfeld has a book on the topic called “Deceptively Delicious.” It’s on Amazon for $11. And yes, that is The Seinfeld. But you can come up with your own ideas. In our house we routinely use bananas or dates to sweeten dishes, blended beans to add thickness or creaminess to dishes, or some other vegetable blended into a sauce. If you’re family members really are that stubborn, and unwilling to try new flavors or textures, to the point where you are reasonably concerned about their nutrition, this may be a strategy you want to try. But it’s useful for the rest of us too. I’m always looking for more ways to fit beans into my diet, and the day my wife discovered black bean brownies was a game changer. It can be used to make foods that seem like an indulgence entirely guilt free.

 

Here’s a tip that may be more applicable to kids than a spouse, although if your significant other goes for it, all the better. Load their plates for them. Put a selection of whatever you are serving for supper on their plate. Don’t ask, just put in front of them. Placing the food in front of each person does a few things. Firstly, it gets everyone to the table at the same time, which can help make trying new foods an easier, shared experience. Second, it removes the chance that someone might refuse to even put it on their plate. Especially for toddlers, if you ask them what they want, they’re liable to say no to everything, even if they really did want to try that pot pie. Now on the topic of toddlers, if your tiny tot is anything like mine, he’ll see something on his plate and try to get rid of the stuff he doesn’t want. Maybe by dropping it on the floor, maybe by throwing it, or sometimes by pushing away the whole plate. Some basic, firm rules are in order here. We’ve been dealing with these issues for a while. My son is a great eater, but some days he just flatly refuses to even try what is being offered him. What helped us with him is repeat exposure. He may have said no thank you to broccoli twelve times in a row, but eventually he tried it. Small steps are all we’re looking for.

 

To some of you, setting rules for meal times may sound beyond basic – it’s common sense! Well of course it’s common sense, but so is eating a healthy diet, and how many people do you know violating that? Setting rules can be hard for meal times. I suggest setting basic, easy to follow rules at first. You can always expand or alter them in the future, but I would encourage you to remain firm in the rule. A good starting place would be to outlaw pop at the table (or soda, whatever it is you want to call it. I’m from the midwest, so sue me). Make the only drinks available water or seltzer. You can even experiment by offering a lemon wedge to each person to squeeze into their drink. But the point isn’t to just to lower the number of calories, it’s to not over-indulge your taste buds. Without the intense sweetness of a soft drink, peppers will taste sweet. You will taste caramelized onions in new fidelity. So replacing standard drinks for the Diet variety isn’t a winning strategy at meal time. Just drink water. Offer ice, offer bubbles, offer a stra, just not juice, not pop. Maybe unsweetened tea.

 

If you thought anything I said so far was controversial, prepare to have your socks blown off. In diets, more extreme approaches often work better, and are easier to stick to than more mild approaches. Hold on, there’s a big however at the end, keep listening!

 

When you’re trying to improve your diet, drastically changing it nearly overnight might be better than small improvements over time. If you think about it, it kind of makes sense, right? If I’m used to having double cheese burgers daily, and I only take off the cheese, I’m still having double burgers, which is a lot of calories, and so I might not see the results I want to see. Plus, since I’m still having the burgers, now I really feel the missing cheese. This all adds up to a discouraging experience. No, my own anecdotal experience is that a dramatic change is more sustainable long term, and more enjoyable. Is there an adjustment period? Sure, but until I’m used to it, the results on the scale are encouraging enough to make it through. So you may have heard me recommend big changes in earlier episodes where we touched on diet or lifestyle changes in general. However I must mention a big caveat this time.

 

Extreme changes should be used with caution with a family. Beyond simply choosing a healthy diet and lifestyle for your family, you also have to consider how imposing these changes on your family will affect your relationship with them. True, you value their health and well being. But it won’t do to sacrifice your healthy relationship for a healthy body. You want to have both, not one or the other! So be your own judge for your situation. One approach I might try for a whole family might be to start with basic rules like those mentioned above. Even if your kids drink pop, only offer water or seltzer at meal times. While they’re getting used to it, start mixing vegetables into dishes they’re used to – bonus points if they can’t tell the vegetables are there. Once they’ve gotten used to drinking water at meals, start trying new recipes, leaning towards a more healthy diet now. Don’t go too crazy with it – don’t start serving lettuce as a main dish. But you can try new cuisines that you may not have ventured to try before. That’s a great way to introduce new healthy dishes. It’s new, so there are no preconceived notions of how it should be. If your kids baulk at the new dishes, demanding other foods or worse, refusing to even sit at the table to try the foods, institute a 10 minute rule. Everyone has to sit at the table for 10 minutes before they can be done with the meal. In that 10 minute period, they often will realize they’re hungry and end up trying something.

 

I find that sometimes my son has trouble even starting to eat, and to get him started eating, we need to offer him something he’s likely to eat, even if it’s less than perfect nutritionally, so that he is more willing to eat other things. Again, I’m not looking for perfection. I’m looking for small successes.

 

Eventually you will find that your kids will be more willing to try new foods, your spouse will expand their palate. But it’s not like everything will magically change over the course of a few weeks and suddenly your family will be a health-conscious, crunchy-granola, athletic and trim-bodied bunch of cover models. No more than likely, you will still have certain dishes that your kids absolutely refuse to eat, and some comfort foods will refuse to disappear. That’s okay! Healthy eating for a family is as much about education as it is about the nutrition itself. I think that teaching our kids how to eat a variety of foods, and that eating healthfully can stave off disease and an early death is possible is one of the most important roles a parent plays in the life of their child. We want the best for them. That means happiness, health, and wealth. Nutrition is a big part of that. So don’t sweat the small stuff. It doesn’t have to be tremendously hard. It absolutely does have to be consistent. While it may be more work at the beginning, one day you’ll look back and realize how much better off your family is today than you were a year ago, and then you’ll realize that it’s gotten to be part of your routine. You may not see a lot of success right off the bat, but eventually you take some baby steps towards your goal. Small victories repeated over time lead to big success.

 

I know you can do it.

 

Happiness Statistic or Fact

• Surprise surprise, eating fruits and vegetables actually make you happier. In a study using data from 2007, 2009, and 2013 and over 12,300 randomly selected adults in Australia, they found that increasing fruits and vegetables, which are rich in antioxidants, fiber, and packed chock-full of vitamins and minerals, increased the participants’ life satisfaction, well-being, and happiness. What’s more, these changes took place over a short period of time, and the affects got stronger over time!
• https://fruitsandveggies.org/stories/buzz-eating-fruits-veggies-actually-makes-happier/
• Reading the article I found no surprises. Listen, at the end of the day, there are lots of ways vegetables can make you happier. They can stabilize your blood sugar and stop you from those nasty mood swings you get between meals. They can make you feel like you’re doing the right thing for your body, which is a good feeling in itself. They can help alleviate symptoms to a variety of illnesses. Not having pain is a great reason to be happier. Whatever the reason, I think it’s safe to say, when it comes to fruits and vegetables, eat up, to your heart’s content!

 

Inspirational Quote

• “The point of dieting is not to fit into a skinnier casket.” – Dr. Michael Greger, How Not To Diet
• Dieting implies that what you are doing is temporary. If what you want is long lasting changes, what you do to improve your health must focus on more than just your waistline as an end goal. Living a longer, fuller life, with more healthful years is the dream for most of us, and the evidence is mounting towards diet as the key to improving these elements for us. I think the idea of a skinnier casket is hilarious, if morbidly illustrative. Many of us want to be a healthy weight, which is an admirable goal, but our lost weight cannot come at the cost of our overall health.

 

Time for a Joke

• Time for a good joke to brighten your day. Remember if you share it, the joy doesn’t stop with you.
• What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy? Don’t know, don’t care.

 

Something I’m Curious About

As you well know, I’m a curious fellow who’s curious about a great many things. This time, I’m curious about debates. The idea of being able to reliably make a convincing argument or even better, convince someone of your point of view seems extremely difficult. It occurs to me that there must be some sort of method to debating effectively, and I’d be interested in discussing how that might play into getting along with others better. If you know anything about debating, please send me any details or reading material using the feedback form in the show notes. If you are an expert and would like to be featured on the podcast, please drop me a line using the feedback form, and hopefully we’ll get that set up. Thanks so much!

 

Question For The Audience

Well folks, what do you think? Will my strategies work for helping families to eat healthier? If you have any insight, or you think I missed something, or maybe I’m just flat wrong, let me know using the feedback form using the link in the Show Notes. I’ll be sure to read the responses promptly.

 

Closing Thoughts: That’s all for today. This has been What Makes You Happy, the show that explores our hobbies and pastimes and how they delight us. To all of you at home, thanks so much for tuning in, and remember to share the podcast with all the people you care about. Until next time, remember that happiness is a way of travel, not a destination.

 

Hosted By: Dovid E.Z. Stern [Ph. (216) 526-6641, Em. dovid@clevelandcreativeoutlet.com, URL www.clevelandcreativeoutlet.com]