Making Changes to our Nutrition
Posted On May 9, 2023 By Joel Flint
Article # 2 in our Healthy Habits Nutrition Series
By Clinical Nutrionist, Tammy Spiller
Transitioning your eating habits to more healthy options or a ‘whole food’ approach isn’t always as simple as shopping the edges of the supermarket. When I moved our household toward this approach it took a couple of years to complete. Why? It involved me stopping the reflexive shopping habits I had developed as well as re-educating (dragging) my family along in the process.
Feedback from clients over the years has highlighted the following as the biggest hurdles:
Cost of buying new ingredients –
We commonly have large pantries and a few things in the fridge. A wholefood approach is the opposite, we have very full fridges of fresh food items and limited pantries, with lots of herbs, spices, olive oil and staple grains, maybe a few rice crackers and tins of beans, tuna or tomato. This set up initially comes at a greater cost and less efficiency as we are not practiced at using all the fresh food. We may see some waste, till we get used to understanding the best way to build a healthy plate and feed our family without packaged foods.
Often, I see people start with meal plans and buy everything on the list and then do their standard shop, which can lead to a large increase in your weekly grocery bill. This reflex to make sure you have the regular things can occur as a safety net, so your kids don’t feel deprived or address the fear that there will be nothing to eat. It also acts as a back-up, just in case you don’t know what to eat after the meal plans.
When they look in the fridge, they don’t see any ‘meals’ to eat, just ingredients.
Their family or kids resist the change because ‘snacks’ as they know it have gone.
Some tips for Success
Start by meal planning for three days each week, including snacks. Only buy the items on that list, building slowly the store of whole food staples. This will increase your whole foods and reduce the pantry items to the essentials. Try not to make it too rigid, pick the vegetables and proteins you want to use and keep it simple.
Focus on increasing the use of fresh and dried herbs, spices and making your own dressings. While there is an upfront cost, they will make many, many jars of dressings or add to many dishes before they need replacing. Expanding this part of your fridge and pantry is key to taking fresh food and making food you actually want to eat.
Start with one meal per day – usually breakfast. Transition to oat based recipes instead of boxed cereal. Experiment with soaked oat/bircher style breakfast, granola, fruit and tub yoghurt, savoury breakfast of eggs, toast and a side.
Slowly cut down on packaged foods and offer only rice cakes or corn chips and nuts as the options outside of fresh fruit, carrots, hummus etc. Take an audit on what is actually eaten in the pantry. Find the items that have been there the longest and try to use them up before buying new ones.
Leftovers as lunch meals.
Transition your family with healthy pantry swaps before you try meal planning – see image below.
Focus on vegetarian cookbooks. They do the best things with vegetables and really hero fresh produce in your meal. Most protein sources go with just about anything, think of this last.
Remember we often see ‘food’ as the things that come prepped from our pantry and actual food as ‘ingredients’. Except for the initial cost (this diminishes over time as you use these items regularly in your meals), the main hurdle to overcome when starting a ‘wholefood’ plan is the one we battle with internally, in our minds and with our families. It’s the social conditioning that means we forget that a carrot, apple, nuts, slices from a block of cheese or some yoghurt with frozen fruit is a snack or even dessert. We worry about our kids not eating or fitting in or wanting to give them a treat.
Lastly, it might be worth thinking about how you link events and food and see if you can start to decouple it. This adds additional budget and nutritional stress to your diet. For example: movies and popcorn, drink or candy or for adults – wine and cheese in the evening followed by more food at dinner. This type of snacking really adds up and leads us to miss or underutilise our fridges.
Don’t expect the change to be a straight line. My household transition involved a number of forward and back steps over 2 years to get to the stage I’m happy with and more importantly is sustainable for my family…. And it isn’t one where I spend every weekend and a whole day making meals ahead.
What does your Nutrition look like?
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