Monday Nutrition Tip of the Week

When I first got serious about trying to clean up my diet, I remember feeling very overwhelmed. There were so many rules! How was I supposed to remember all of them, and I was going to miss all that food that I wasn't supposed to eat!

Instead of getting frustrated and mired in the minutiae, I decided to take baby steps. I didn't take a look at my pantry and clean out all the bad stuff at once; instead, I took it one step at a time. Once I'd mastered (or at least improved) one area, I moved on to the next.

So the tip of the week is: Baby Steps. Take a look at your diet, and see where you might make small changes for the better. I mean really small. For instance, I stopped putting sugar on my cereal. I used to love putting copious amounts of sugar on my cereal so that I'd have nice sweet milk to drink at the end. But when I wanted to cut down on my sugar intake, that was a natural place to start. Most cereals are sweet enough on their own, and if they're not, I add fresh fruit, or raisins, or some cinnamon.

Here are some other things you might do:

• Swap your white rice for brown rice.
• Use wheat tortillas instead of white (and wheat bread instead of white, while you're at it!).
• Eat baked crackers instead of chips.
• Move from 2% milk to 1%, or from 1% to skim.
• Buy plain yogurt and sweeten it yourself with honey or fruit, instead of buying already sweetened yogurt.
• If you're baking sweet bread or muffins (like banana bread), substitute half the fat (usually butter or oil) with applesauce.
• Cook with olive oil instead of vegetable oil.
• Sprinkle flax seed on anything and everything: on cereal, in smoothies, in tuna, in pancakes, etc.
• At a Mexican restaurant, request black beans in place of refried beans.

By no means am I a perfect eater, and I am definitely not good at counting calories. But through a bit of reading I've learned some tricks of the trade to help me pick foods that are more nutritious than the ones I'd been choosing before. 

I've been pleasantly surprised to find out that I really like most of the replacement foods! Black beans are awesome, olive oil is fantastic, and plain yogurt has all kinds of uses beyond just eating it as yogurt with my lunch. I use it in my chicken salad now to cut out some of the fat from the mayonnaise. 

Once you master the baby steps and start to see the side effects (like lost weight!), you'll probably be ready to implement more changes. Just yesterday morning I conducted an experiment to make strawberry syrup out of agave nectar -- my kids love pancake syrup, but I hate feeding them high fructose corn syrup first thing in the morning. It was a big hit! 

So try to make one small change this week, and see if it inspires you to make another!