My Health & Wellness Plan
After giving birth to my last child two years ago, I am ready to get my body back on track to support a lifetime of health. I’ve been doing well with my green smoothies for breakfast, salads for dinner, and finally scheduling appointments with a physical therapist to get my back on track.
My next goal is to figure out healthier dinners. As a vegetarian, it’s really easy to default to unhealthy foods: pasta, cheese, bread–oh, my! If I were a meat-eater, I would cook grilled chicken and a vegetable almost every night. As a vegetarian, I eat way too many carbs.
A quick search led to the concept of “clean” eating. It’s a 21-day cleanse with a smoothie for breakfast, a gluten- and dairy-free meal for lunch, and a soup for dinner. I decided to see if the women in my family (my mom, my aunt, and my two cousins) would be interested in taking on this challenge with me. They all agreed!
Right after Christmas (December 26, to be exact), we are going to start the cleanse together. We are also going to work through a series of exercises to uncover and address the roots of emotional eating from the book called: Stop Eating Your Heart Out.
I’m really excited!
In the meantime, I am going to slowly start replacing our 30-or-so go-to meals with 30 clean recipes. This week, we are going to try:
As a reminder, here’s how I do my meal planning. If I can identify (slowly, over time) 30 new recipes that can be my go-to meals, my family and I will be on a pathway toward better health.
Looking forward to it!
4 Comments
Kelsey
I want to recommend a book that has a huge impact on my motivation to eat healthy and to know what to eat: The Good Gut. It's all about how important our gut health is to our overall health and explains how the food we eat effects our gut bacteria and therefore our overall health. Understanding the mechanisms of how food works in our bodies has me so motivated to eat very healthy (lots of fiber!) and it helps me choose better foods. And I don't think it's the carbs that are so much an issue as it is eating refined flour and not whole grains. If you make all your carbs whole grains then you are getting fiber and protein and those are great for you!
Sara E. Cotner
That's really helpful advice, Kelsey! Thank you! What are your preferred whole grains?
Kristin Scheel
We do a ton of Buddha Bowls. Found some great sauces at Ghandi Bazaar grocer in South Austin, and the Indian rice OMG so good. We like a green Thai curry paste I found at Wheatsville with homemade coconut milk (blended coconut + water), and tahini miso sauce I adapted from Veganomican years ago. I started buying paneer as an on hand protein. It helps me get real excited for Budda bowls.
Kelsey
Lately we have been doing a lot of barley or farro (high protein and high fiber, trader joe's has awesome quick cooking varieties so they are easy for a weeknight), always getting whole wheat bread and whole wheat pasta and also quinoa. We just about always opt for quinoa/barley instead of rice but if we ever do eat rice it is always brown rice. Oh and always whole wheat tortillas and we usually just stock whole wheat flour at the house so anything we make from scratch is also whole grain.