Make your New Year's Resolution one for the Whole Family

This New Year get the whole family on board and make your resolution one that involves everyone evolving into a healthier lifestyle. It will make it much easier for you as an individual if you are doing it together as a supportive family unit.

How do you do this? With baby steps!

Going cold turkey OR the All or Nothing mentality most times just leads us back to our old habits. The best way to about it is to work as a family to set some attainable goals. Once you have mastered each goal as a team, you move on to the next goal. Here are some goals to start with:

1) Reassess your lifestyle and find one or two nights/days a week where it's family only time. During these nights/days cook healthy fun meals together that will last you a few days or can be frozen. Take it one step further and turn them into movie and game nights/days to reconnect and destress. During the other days of the week find time to prep quick healthy meals and have healthy snacks ready on hand to grab and go, a bag of veggies, fruit, nuts and seeds are great. Be sure to be consistent with family days or evenings and put your foot down when other things try and impede on these nights/days.

2) Reduce your reliance on processed foods (frozen dinners, dinner in a box, dinner in a can), take out or restaurant food. They are generally very unhealthy and full of hidden ingredients. Focus on those family nights/days to prep a few meals ahead of time as a family. There are quick, healthy food ideas all over the place and leftovers make great lunches the next day.

3) Now that you are making your own food, you are in control of what ingredients you use. Use quality ingredients and limit the 5 white enemies; white sugar, white rice, white flour, white salt, and milk. Reducing sugar is a major thing especially with young children and those with chronic health conditions; you can reduce the intake of sugars and replace sugar with Stevia, pure maple sugar and honey in moderation or mashed fruit. White rice can easily be replaced with brown, wild or any other exotic rice. White flour products can be replaced with whole grains and by that I mean anything but flour, baked goods and pasta from flours even "healthier" flours should be limited. Try using sea salt or Himalayan salt instead of regular table salt and try to limit the amount you use. Milk is linked to a lot of diseases including prostate cancer, type I & II diabetes, and really is not as good for you as they want you to believe. Milk is really not a necessity in your diet with the exceptions of infants, who should be ideally consuming breast milk to the age of weaning between 2-4 years of age or longer.

4) Get out and have fun by playing, it helps get your entire family moving. They also get to see a part of their parents they generally don't get to, the playful child they once were.

There is much more to incorporating  a healthy lifestyle; however, just starting with the above will make a difference . To find out more about incorporating a healthy lifestyle or to incorporate more ideas that fit with your family and each individual member contact a qualified health practitioner.
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Dana Clark, CNHP, CHN, CHC owner or From the Roots Holistic, Certified Holistic Nutritionist at SBJJ & Muay Thai Academy. ​