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walkitout(1) Offer a variety of real foods. Where real means at least the cook knows where they came from originally. It's not about fat is evil, or sugar is evil. You _know_ where maple syrup comes from, for example.
(2) Keep the portion size small; allow unrestricted additional (small) portions. DO NOT USE EXTRA LARGE DESIGNER DINNERWARE for everyday, anyway. It fucks with everyone. If your larger kids/teenagers want to switch to larger portions/fewer times a day, that's fine, but at least start them out with small/frequent portions.
(3) Do not allow any of the macronutrients to drop to zero (so, nobody is supposed to eat zero-fat, or zero-carbs, or whatever; obviously, if you've got some special medical thing, that overrides).
(4) Establish a "family palate" that runs high-fiber/low-sodium. If you let the restaurant industry define the family palate, you'll sink into the swamp of empty calories faster than you can empty the salt shaker. I'm not saying never eat out; I'm saying when you do eat out, it should taste noticeably different than your usual food, and you should basically prefer your usual food.
(5) Include regular snacks, in addition to "meals".
(6) Make water your normal drink. I'm not saying no coffee, no tea, no soda, no alcohol whatever, but those should be unusual (only in the morning, only in the afternoon, only after 6 p.m., whatever). If you are thirsty, your (as the parent) normal response should be a drink of water.
(7) Be willing to radically modify the way you live your life (commute, where the kids go to school, where your leisure dollar goes, etc.) in support of physical activity for _everyone_ in the family.
This is considerably more complex than my previous rules (Eat what you crave. Eat more than one thing. Try new foods periodically (where new means new-real, not yet-another-processed-x). Stop eating when you are full.), but not incompatible.
One last remark about something that came up again and again in the course of _Teenage Waistland_. I don't _care_ if people in a family can eat 20 pounds of chocolate for breakfast and lose a pound (I would lose more than that; I'd start throwing up after the first 8 ounces and not be able to eat any more), or eat Big Macs three meals a day and not gain weight. These are rotten food choices for _anyone_, and confuse weight with health. The idea that it makes sense for the slender folk in the family to have all this crap around the house in a secret stash when someone else is desperately trying to make more reasonable choices makes me _really_ question who in that family has the food addiction.
(2) Keep the portion size small; allow unrestricted additional (small) portions. DO NOT USE EXTRA LARGE DESIGNER DINNERWARE for everyday, anyway. It fucks with everyone. If your larger kids/teenagers want to switch to larger portions/fewer times a day, that's fine, but at least start them out with small/frequent portions.
(3) Do not allow any of the macronutrients to drop to zero (so, nobody is supposed to eat zero-fat, or zero-carbs, or whatever; obviously, if you've got some special medical thing, that overrides).
(4) Establish a "family palate" that runs high-fiber/low-sodium. If you let the restaurant industry define the family palate, you'll sink into the swamp of empty calories faster than you can empty the salt shaker. I'm not saying never eat out; I'm saying when you do eat out, it should taste noticeably different than your usual food, and you should basically prefer your usual food.
(5) Include regular snacks, in addition to "meals".
(6) Make water your normal drink. I'm not saying no coffee, no tea, no soda, no alcohol whatever, but those should be unusual (only in the morning, only in the afternoon, only after 6 p.m., whatever). If you are thirsty, your (as the parent) normal response should be a drink of water.
(7) Be willing to radically modify the way you live your life (commute, where the kids go to school, where your leisure dollar goes, etc.) in support of physical activity for _everyone_ in the family.
This is considerably more complex than my previous rules (Eat what you crave. Eat more than one thing. Try new foods periodically (where new means new-real, not yet-another-processed-x). Stop eating when you are full.), but not incompatible.
One last remark about something that came up again and again in the course of _Teenage Waistland_. I don't _care_ if people in a family can eat 20 pounds of chocolate for breakfast and lose a pound (I would lose more than that; I'd start throwing up after the first 8 ounces and not be able to eat any more), or eat Big Macs three meals a day and not gain weight. These are rotten food choices for _anyone_, and confuse weight with health. The idea that it makes sense for the slender folk in the family to have all this crap around the house in a secret stash when someone else is desperately trying to make more reasonable choices makes me _really_ question who in that family has the food addiction.
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Date: 2008-05-06 07:54 pm (UTC)School lunch is the biggest problem. I just cannot get one of my daughters to eat anything to speak of at school (I think this is not really a food issue, but a mood issue, insofar as the two are separable), and the other two are erratic about how much they'll eat while there. They all eat breakfast and after-school snacks fine, but 6:30 to 3:15 is way too long to go without significant food. I finally started slipping one of my kids Clif bars, as the highest-calorie "healthy" option I could find. (Honestly, a Snickers bar would be just as healthful as half those things, and a good deal cheaper per calorie.) I've tried making my own, but they disappear too fast, before ever getting to lunchboxes, and therefore save no money. Clif bars are easier to ration. I suppose in theory I could spend the weekend making empanadas or something, but in practice that always seems rather difficult.
Seems to me the packaged-healthy-food folks are missing a market niche: rapidly growing kids who need something with more than 100 calories at a pop. It's no wonder people rip into the chips: again, price per calorie, it makes sense.
yay!
Date: 2008-05-06 09:03 pm (UTC)Cooking at home for consumption out of the home is an insanely difficult task to figure out how to do in a way that makes sense in terms of good-to-eat, keeps-well, economical, does-not-take-up-all-of-the-cooks-time. R. complained constantly about how awful the food was at the cafeteria at his previous job (too salty, primarily, believe it or not, but also just crappy in general). Before T.'s arrival, I'd make him sandwiches in the morning (R. left for work after 9 a.m., so this was no hardship for me). During my first trimester, I was too sick to continue, but by that time, R. was so happy to have a decent sandwich he continued doing so. He slowly (without any impetus on my part, beyond acquiring some better Tupperware) switched to bringing leftovers almost exclusively, rather than us continuing to buy deli meat.
That made a lot of sense because we were cooking large amounts of everything anyway after T. was born because it was easier to nuke something than make something new. But it's stunning how fast food disappears at this point. What might have made a week's worth of dinners for one person is gone, literally, in 2 days, 3 at the most. I've given in to R.'s habit of making an entire bag of pasta, so there are leftovers, and started putting as much rice as our ricemaker can handle at once (it's very small). I'm completely shocked at the amount of bread we go through in a week.
Clif bars make a lot of sense. I switched to Larabars, because they aren't so dry, but I suspect they make less sense in your situation.
For years now I've been making a batch of blonde brownies and freezing them, but again, with T. and I both eating them daily, they go so fast it's spooky. I cannot imagine what would happen in a family of five, three of them active and at an age where they seem like bottomless pits for food. I grew up eating these:
http://www.seanet.com/~rla/cookbook/coconut_drop_cookies.html
My mom would make 2x, 3x or 4x batches -- hundreds of cookies at a time -- and freeze them because we'd eat them by the handful. At some point after I was 25, I did a calorie analysis and nearly went into shock (depending on how big you make them, they run 100+ calories easy, and with all that coconut, the sat fat is frightening). I kept shrinking the batch size, because they were just lethal to any attempt at healthy eating as an adult, and even so, I fed more to my friend B. (who is rail thin and quite tall and active) than I ever ate myself. If I ever find myself in your situation, I'll be contemplating that recipe again, and running numbers to see how the cost comes out.