A few weeks ago I attended a great RS activity that focused on heart awareness (February is national heart awareness month). We had a great lesson on nutrition and then a fun girl in our ward led us in some Zumba workouts. I am terribly uncoordinated and completely lack rhythm but still had a good time. The lesson instructor had gave us some simple ideas on how to improve our overall health through what we eat and lots of people had some great useful suggestions. Later that day I saw this slideshow on sugar (I didn't fact check this but it seems pretty sound) and decided Mark and I needed to have a discussion about what we could do to lessen our sugar intake (why is something I love slowly killing me? Also why is DARK chocolate the "Healthy" chocolate? Yuck.) and get more nutritious foods in. The problem is I don't like vegetables. They are so unappealing to me. I have been adding in pureed sweet potato and cauliflower into dinners occasionally and feel good about that (I really can't taste them at all it's great!) but need to do more. So after talking to some of my "healthier" friends we came up with some tricks.
1. Use coconut oil. Its great for cooking and so many other things.
2. Flaxseed. Flaxseed appears to be pretty amazing and can be added to so many things so easily.
3. Green smoothies! We aren't going to drink something that is all greens but we can easily add 2 cups of spinach in our smoothies. I know a lot of people talk about the sugar in fruit but I feel way better about consuming that sugar than other sugar. Jared and Lydia love these smoothies and I love that they are happily eating flaxseed, coconut oil and spinach in one setting.
All three of these ideas seem to be pretty popular right now so we hope they are actually helpful. To help further improve our chances of healthy eating we bought a fancy new blender. I never thought I would be okay spending so much money on a blender but it is pretty amazing. I wish I would have had it when I was making baby food for Jared and Lydia. As I type Mark is blending up fresh carrots for carrot juice. He is quite excited about making all these smoothies. We will still try to add vegetables and lessen sugar intake but I really like how these tricks can be easily added to our current diet. The instructor also suggested drinking 100 ounces of water! That is so many! I was working hard to get in 64 ounces a day. I decided I could totally do this though and broke it down into increments. So I drink 32 ounces every 3 hours, 6 - 9 am, 9 - 12 and 12 - 3. Then any more is extra. It's still hard but my Naglene bottle and I are getting some quality time in. I can do this!
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