As you all know, I’ve been following the Shaklee 180 program to lose some much needed weight! I’ve been doing well on it, but I’ve found that I’m getting bored with my food choices. Don’t get me wrong, I love the simplicity of having a shake and/or a meal replacement bar for two of my meals each day, but my other choices (i.e. snacks and dinner) are the boring part. I tend to always grab for the same things because I know how many calories they’re worth.
3 cups of lettuce with salsa as the dressing is 30 calories.
an Orange is about 80 calories.
a boiled egg is about 80 calories, too.
a small banana is close to 90 calories.
You get the point. I typically eat one or two of those things each and every day.
Any time I’m on a new eating plan while trying to lose weight, I feel that I tend to obsess about food more than I should. It’s not been as bad while on Shaklee 180 because I know what to have at breakfast and lunch, but I still tend to think about food A LOT. (I guess, maybe, I’m always thinking about food, but I just notice it more when I continually tell myself I can’t have everything that I want.)
Recently, while trying to figure out why my daughter’s face is paralyzed, we began to seek out alternative ways of healing her body. One of those ways is by eating a more nutritionally dense diet. I’m all for good nutrition (although I do love my junk, too), but I feel very conflicted when learning of the best things to feed yourself and your family. Depending on who you’re listening to, there can be so many rules!
- You can’t eat any fruits or vegetables that are not organic.
- The animals that your meat came from can’t have ever had antibiotics and must be grass fed or free range.
- All milk is bad as it’s been heated (pasteurized) and destroyed the good in it.
- Forget about OTC vitamins….they’ll cause even more problems than they’re solving.
- Corn is out of the picture because it’s all genetically modified, unless you special order it.
- You really should eat all of your fruits and veggies raw or it will destroy the enzymes and not digest well.
- Gluten? It’s bad, really bad. Cut all wheat and gluten products out of your diet. (and I completely understand that there are many people who are intolerant to this and MUST cut it out of their diets!)
- High Fructose Corn Syrup causes every disease imagineable, but…I guess all of the above does, too!
If you follow all of those rules, it means that you can’t eat more than 10% of what they sell at the grocery store, if that. It can be frustrating trying to figure out what information is correct and what isn’t. While I believe that every one of those statements above has some truth in them, I don’t think that we all have to follow each and every of those things to be healthy. We pick and choose from the things that make sense to us. Sometimes we choose based on what we can afford. There’s no way my family could afford to eat all grass fed beef unless we were severely limiting our meat intake. My husband wouldn’t go for that. Most men wouldn’t.
The point I’m trying to make is that we all have a different standard of what healthy eating is to us. We learn as we go and we make changes as we go as well. This is what healthy eating is to me. Ask me in a year and I may have added something to it.
- Cut out prepackaged/processed foods.
- Cut way down on sugar and desserts
- Increase vegetable intake
- Buy organic fruits and vegetables if you can afford it to eliminate pesticide consumption (I don’t do this THAT often)
- Drink half your body weight in water ounces per day (although I must admit that I’m happy when I get 64 oz in and I don’t weigh 128 pounds!)
- Watch your calories (thanks to Shaklee). I’m currently eating about 2000 calories a day and still losing weight.
Each person alive has different nutritional needs. Some will be affected by the things they eat more than others. It’s important that we each evaluate our family’s own personal needs and make our choices wisely. If you need help with some of those choices, you may want to check out my go to book, Prescription for Nutritional Healing. Any time I have an ailment that I want to correct, I look into that book. It tells me what foods to avoid, what foods will help and what vitamins and herbs will help as well.
Now that I’ve told you about what healthy eating looks like to our family, it’s your turn!
What does healthy eating look like to YOUR family?
[box] For more information about the Shaklee 180 Program, click here. This is a sponsored post as part of the Shaklee Corporation blogger program. I have
pounds per week.
This is Day 1 in a 10 day series I’m doing on Healthy Eating. I’m doing this series along with the iHomeschool Network. There are many topics to choose between. From Becoming Healthy & Fit to Teaching With LEGO to New Experiences, there’s something of interest to everyone! Click the picture below to see the rest of the topics!
