Tags: family meals month

Family Meals Month – What’s Stopping You?

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Family Meals Month- What’s Stopping You?

Making the time to eat together is no simple task. But it’s worth the effort! In fact, it’s so important that we dedicate the entire month of September to family meals. Sharing meals together has been proven to strengthen family bonds, foster emotional balance, and improve nutrition. The physical and emotional benefits of family meals are endless! However, many barriers exist that make family meals tough to stick with.

Time

There never seems to be enough time in the day! Especially when you’re juggling school, sports, and work schedules. Take advantage of your free time during the week to prep meals. I like to call this “being kind to your future self”! Whether it’s cutting up your fruits and veggies over the weekend or throwing together some meals to put in the freezer – you’ll be amazed at how much time you save!

Also, no one said that your family meal must be dinner. Maybe a family meal at your house looks like having breakfast together before school or work! That flexibility with your mealtimes allows you to adapt to whatever the day throws at you. And you can be just as flexible with your meal options! Put together a list of meals that you could make with the ingredients you have on hand, then choose which makes sense for a certain day.

High Expectations

It’s overwhelming to think about having family meals each day. Rest assured, you don’t need to do an overhaul of your schedule to make family meals happen. In fact, as few as 3 family meals per week saw a 24% increase in healthier food consumption.Start small, even if that means 1 family meal per week. Feel free to keep it simple with your food choices, and don’t forget to be kind to your future self!

 

Decision Fatigue

We’ve all been there – it’s 6pm, the family is hungry (including you), and you’re staring into the pantry debating what to make for dinner. After a long day, it’s natural to feel decision fatigue. After all, you’ve just spent all day making decisions! Meal planning and prep alleviates the stress of deciding what to make for dinner. Find what works best for you: That could mean having entire meals prepped in the freezer or writing out a meal plan for the week. Either way, the goal is to make decisions easier after a long day!

Different Food Preferences

Family meals involve balancing the preferences of many. Which poses a huge challenge! Eliminate the fuss by offering well-liked dishes alongside new ones. Children, and yes even adults, will be more willing to try new foods that they see other family members eating. (Another benefit of family meals!) If you’re dealing with picky eaters, keep in mind that it can take up to 10 attempts of offering food for a child to eat it.
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When you prioritize family meals, you prioritize the physical and emotional well-being of the whole family. And we challenge you to give family meals a try this month! Here are some of our resources to help you get started:

  • Healthy Eating on a Budget
  • Meals in Minutes
  • Dietitian’s Choice Recipes
  • Dietitian Tips on Meal Prepping

Happy Family Meals Month™!

-Jess,
Registered Dietitian

Family Mealtime is a Must

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Family Mealtime is a Must

If you had 1 more hour in your day, what would you do with it? Perhaps you take that hour and dedicate it to having one more meal at home with your family. September celebrates National Family Meals Month™ and we’re excited to join the #familymealsmonth movement with many others around the country.

Do you strive to eat more meals together, as a family, but then life gets in the way? Currently, adults say they eat about 59% of their meals together.1 Parents, specifically, express wanting to do so more. Among parents who say they miss some dinners during the week, 86% say they are taking steps to eat with their child(ren) more.1

Eating together is worth the effort. Family mealtime is associated with physical, social, and mental health benefits. In fact, regular family meals are linked to the kinds of outcomes that we all want for our children: higher grades and self-esteem, healthier eating habits, and less risky behavior. And eating at home can be a win-win for both your pocketbook and your waistline, with research showing that people who eat more home-cooked meals consume about 130 fewer calories per day, on average.2

Our Coborn’s Family of Stores (Coborn’s, Marketplace Foods, and Cash Wise Foods) have committed to being an active part of the Family Meals Month™ movement because the health
and well-being of you and your family is important to us. We understand that family meals are important, but that your lives are also busy. We understand that responsibilities to balance and competing priorities can thwart even the best of
intentions. Luckily, we have the expertise, tools, and resources to support you in making more family meals a reality.

Start now with the following steps!
1. Be committed. Pledge to Raise Your Mitt to Commit™ to sharing one more meal together at home per week.
2. Be resourceful. Visit [insert link] to find [insert types of materials].
3. Be social. Follow us on Facebook for family meals focused content, including meal ideas and recipes. @cobornsgrocery @cashwisefoods @marketplacefoodswi
4. Be engaged. Share your own family meal experiences, misadventures, and solutions within your social channels. Remember to use the hashtag #familymealsmonth to be part of the conversation!

 

As the school year starts up again and we get back in a routine, make the effort to enjoy family meals throughout the week. Need ideas? Check out our Meals In Minutes Cookbook for great family recipes that can be made in 30 minutes or less! We also have many other meal ideas on CelebrateMore.com/dietitians.

@CobornsGrocery | @CashWise | @MarketplaceFoodsInc 

@cobornsgrocery | @cashwisefoods 

 

Happy National Family Meals Month!
Amy, MS, RD, LD

1. FMI Foundation. Power of Family Meals 2017: Desires, Barriers and Directions for Shared Meals at Home, 2017. Accessed at: https://www.fmi.org/docs/default-source/familymeals/fmi-power-of-family-meals-whitepaper-for-web.pdf?sfvrsn=13d87f6e_2

2. Wolfson, J. and Bleich, S. Is cooking at home associated with better diet quality or weight-loss intention? Public Health Nutrition, 2014.

Around Our Family Table

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Around Our Family Table

By: Ashley Kibutha, Supermarket Registered Dietitian & Mother of Two

At our house life is crazy as is the case in many of your households. We now have 2 kiddos, a 3-year-old and a 3-month-old, plus I work a full-time job and my husband works a full time and a part time job! We love to stay active in the community and be social with lots of friends and family.

As a dietitian, I strive to serve healthy meals for dinner (at least most of the time). Of course, there will be a random night here or there where we have pizza and wings but that is not the norm – everything in moderation and proper balance! So how do I do this? First of all, every Sunday I create a menu for the week and go grocery shopping for just those items. I look in our cupboards to see what we have available to serve as components to a meal so nothing will go out dated.

For example, I see spaghetti noodles in the pantry – great! That means spaghetti is the entre for one night and that’s a rather simple meal to make, so I will put that on for Monday in case it’s a hard transition to work from the weekend. Then I always think about the rest of the components of the meal using MyPlate… do I have all the food groups? Fruit, veggie, whole grain, protein and diary… So, for spaghetti I will have:

  • whole grain pasta
  • lean beef for the protein
  • Dietitian’s Choice tomato sauce (such as our Four Brother’s brand)

Then I will add extra veggies like:

  • frozen spinach
  • sautéed onions (already diced from the Chop Shoppe at my Coborn’s store)
  • minced garlic (in the jar, pre-done of course)
  • squeezable cilantro so I don’t have to cut it (always makes such a mess!)
  • precut mushrooms in the package
  • diced tomatoes in the can (no salt added)

Then we always have a side salad using pre-chopped lettuce from the bag – how easy is that!? I always like to add:

  • nuts
  • craisins (50% less sugar)
  • Bolthouse Farms dressing

For dessert, I will have a fresh berry blend over a Dietitian’s Choice Greek yogurt to get in the rest of the MyPlate components. There you have it! Simple and easy, I try to cut corners and save time by getting prechopped and canned items.

Another huge piece of family meals is that you need to make cooking time part of family time. I love multitasking this way because I am spending time with the kids and my husband as well as making a nutritious dinner. I always feel a sense of accomplishment plus I feel like a good mom and wife. I know I am also helping to meet my goals of returning to that pre-pregnancy weight. 

You are probably thinking where are these kids that sound so peaceful and perfect?! Don’t worry, it can be chaotic at our house too! A baby and a toddler – need I say more? We involve our toddler in many of the meal prep activities. He gets his step stool and watches us chop up items or prep the food. He has a cute little plastic toy knife, cutting board and veggies and likes to be a part of the meal prep by mimicking us and “chopping” up his toy veggies! Then we let him do age appropriate tasks to help us, i.e adding the vegetables in the pan, mixing, and pouring in the noodles. [See the backside of our Picky Eaters Handout for how kids can get involved in the kitchen.]

If he’s having a bad day or a melt down then we put on music and let him dance and play in the kitchen with his toys, or color or do play playdoh at the table so he is still a part of this and we can have family time. My husband or I are with the baby, depending on who is cooking. I am still breastfeeding so I breastfeed in the living room while my husband cooks and observes our toddler, keeping him engaged. We have a small house so we are able to hold a conversation while he is cooking in the kitchen and I feed the baby in the living room.

Yes, it may take longer to cook if our toddler is helping but remember you are prepping a healthy meal and having family time all at the same time! Yes, your toddler is probably starving after daycare and so are you, so you can have an appetizer of veggies with hummus or a piece of fruit. When dinner is ready we all sit down and enjoy our family dinner including the baby. We set him in a bouncer near us so he is a part of it all too! If it’s an exceptionally good day we even get to sneak in a glass of wine while the dinner is cooking while playing a memory game with our toddler!

So, think of cooking as time together with the whole family – rather than a mundane chore. Keep it exciting with new meal ideas and recipes! We have lots of great Dietitian’s Choice recipes right here on CelebrateMORE… so make sure to check those out to help make your family meals nutritious as well as time well spent with the whole family. 

Peace and wellness,
Ashley, RD, LD