Most people don’t name February as the most exciting month of the year, but it can be a great opportunity to improve your family’s health. While a consistent day-to-day routine may feel repetitious, it also offers something valuable for healthy intentions: stability.
Predictable routines of school, work, and errands can provide the framework you need to add in healthy habits if they’ve been lacking. When daily life is habitual and automatic, it’s easier to layer in small changes that support health. When you take small steps that fit into your repeating schedule, these steps can build on each other for lasting change. Kids and parents can grow used to healthy choices in everyday life.
Here’s how you can take advantage of February’s predictable routine to support better nutrition, increased activity, and more healthy habits for kids and parents – without much effort or stress.
Let Healthy Foods Live in Your Home
Keep only healthy foods in your home so that the home becomes a place for healthy eating. Your kids may get junk food from other places, but you can’t control that. What you can control is what you choose to keep in your home. Having healthy foods at home enables you and your kids to eat well, and it teaches your kids what to keep in a kitchen. They’re learning from you!
When nourishing snacks and meals are readily available, healthy eating becomes natural. Kids can eat when they’re hungry without you needing to try to decide whether they’re physiologically hungry, or whether they’re claiming hunger so that they can get to the chips or ice cream in your home. By keeping chips and ice cream to special occasions, and stocking up on healthy foods, you’re avoiding negotiations over what to eat. As a parent, having healthy foods around, without processed snack foods, lets you avoid temptations that will get in the way of your energy levels and health.
Include a Vegetable (Or a Few)
Eating vegetables helps with weight control, lowers risk for diabetes and heart disease, improves cholesterol and blood pressure levels, and adds to daily fiber counts. Most kids and adults are missing out on these benefits because they’re not achieving daily goals for vegetable consumption.
Aim for at least 2-3 cups per day of vegetables. A strategy for adults is to fill up half your plate or bowl with vegetables at each meal. For example, have a large salad with some protein and a starch, half a plate of steamed vegetables with some salmon and brown rice, or eggs cooked with a handful of spinach leaves.
Kids may need a little more creativity to get their vegetables. They may feel overwhelmed if half their plate is half full with vegetables. It’s good to serve a small serving of vegetables as a side at most meals to normalize vegetables, but you can also try sneaky ways to get vegetables in. Chunky marinara sauce on whole-grain pasta, whole-wheat pancakes with zucchini and onion, and whole-grain macaroni and low-fat cheese sauce with pureed squash and broccoli florets are examples.
The more consistently you serve vegetables, the more you will eat, and the more your kids will grow used to them. Go here to read more about how kids fall sadly short on vegetable consumption, and how to get more.
Maintain Predictable Meal Patterns
Kids and adults both thrive on stability. When kids know what to expect, such as when meals and snacks will be served, there are fewer power struggles. For adults, predictable meal patterns lower stress. For both kids and adults, having consistent meal and snack times improve hunger and fullness signals to help with weight control.
Ideally, the family sits down together for dinners, and maybe even for breakfasts. That’s not realistic for all families. You may not be able to prioritize every breakfast and dinner as a sit-down family meal, but you can have patterns so kids know what to expect. You might, for example, find that you need to eat sandwiches on the road on Tuesday evenings due to soccer practice, but other nights can include dinners where you sit down as a family. The trick here is to have consistency and show your kids that you prioritize family meals.
Have a Backup Plan for Busy Days
The only thing predictable about life is that it’s unpredictable. Add kids, school, and work into the equation, and there are sure to be days when Plan A goes out the window. Plans B, C, and D may also fall through.
On days like this, you may need a fallback plan – and hopefully one that doesn’t involve takeout burgers or pizza delivery for dinner. Make your default backup plan easy, quick, and appealing. In particular, make your backup plan doable no matter what the circumstances are.
Keep these foods on hand so you can eat well on busy days
- Keep frozen vegetables on hand for quick thawing. They’re great for sides and in soups, eggs, casseroles, and stir fry.
- Have lean proteins available. Frozen skinless chicken, fish fillets, and veggie burgers make quick dinners. Canned or pouch tuna or salmon, low-fat cottage cheese and yogurt, low-fat cheese, and eggs are simple and quick.
- Pantry whole grains include oatmeal, brown rice, whole-grain cereal, and whole-wheat pasta. You can also freeze whole-wheat tortillas, English muffins, bagels, and sliced bread.
- Other pantry staples are peanut butter, olive oil, canned tomatoes, and spices.
A healthy breakfast, lunch or dinner is only moments away with ingredients like this.
In late winter, while life is as routine as it ever gets, try to add some nutritious habits to your family’s routine. With some consistency and planning, they may stick so your family becomes healthier over the long run.
How do you use the quieter days of winter to improve health?
