Module 4 – Maintaining the Journey
Everyday Life – Acknowledge and Celebrate your Effort
Once you and your family have committed to your new lifestyle, you will be thinking ahead all the time, every day of the week as to what you are going to eat at any given time.
No longer on weekends will you casually leave the house and go to the park, zoo, football game, town fair or swimming pool with the children without a healthy packed lunch.
Water, fruit, salads, wholegrain sandwiches full of goodness and healthy treats will be packed, organised and served when the team is hungry.
Dinners will be prepared from scratch and your family’s wellbeing will not be left to chance.
You as parents will work as a team, committed every day.
At times when you revert back to old habits, you will rely on each other to remind yourselves why you need to put in the effort of prepping food for the family all the time.
Parents, be proud of what you are creating; healthy lifestyle choices and habits for your whole family.
Stand tall and tell yourself that what you are doing is so worth it. As you change your health and wellness goals it might also be time to evaluate if there is anything else you would like to improve in your life.
Maybe a passion has never been realised. Maybe the stay at home parent has a passion or hobby they would like to turn into a part time job? Maybe the working parent always wanted to study part time?
Whatever it is, you may feel that it is time to consider some dreams that you never had the energy to explore before.
Happy Thoughts and Beliefs Create Good Habits
At times, life keeps us busy to the point where we are not only exhausted mentally but also fatigued physically. The big question is, how do we maintain our new routine?
Let’s face it, taking short cuts can seem easier than cooking from scratch, especially when we are tired. We often don’t want to put any effort into shopping, washing dishes and the rest, which all comes with cooking at home.
Stay committed. You have everything to gain by working as a team.
The single most important thing for your family’s health is to eat healthy wholesome foods every day.
We need to remind ourselves of our promise to feed ourselves healthy foods. We also need to slow down a little and enjoy the fun that life has to offer. Too often we forget to simply sit in our gardens and on our balconies and enjoy what is around us and think about all the good things we have in life and what we have that is so dear to us.
We forget to pat ourselves on the back, and as a couple express our excitement when achieving small goals. This needs to change, and now that your top priority in life is a healthy lifestyle, you need to start reminding yourselves to continue with this goal and at times, discuss your small steps of success in achieving this.
Maybe during dinner or while cleaning up in the kitchen, you might talk about what steps you made that day as parents to improve your and your family’s health and through these daily discussions acknowledge that you are on the right track.
Activity – Reminders
As a family, come up with ideas to remind yourselves to maintain your new lifestyle journey.
This could be hanging a small poster or card in the kitchen with a phrase that encourages and motivates you.
In the family car you could hang a trinket on the mirror that reminds you to eat fruit every day.
Place a sticker on bathroom mirrors that reminds you all to exercise.
Recognise that you are doing a great job and take pride in your effort.
Teach Your Children Cooking Skills
Children love to cook, they will laugh and smile non-stop if you give them the opportunity to join in and help.
Cooking with parents not only teaches them valuable skills that they will use for the rest of their lives, but also teaches them to enjoy eating wholesome healthy foods.
I understand that by letting your children help in the kitchen, it may slow down getting dinner on the table. It may also take some energy, patience and enthusiasm to teach your child how to cook.
But the beautiful thing about letting your child help cook the family dinner is that by doing so it instils the foundation to eat healthy and wholesome foods from an early age.
The fact that they make it themselves and feel part of the cooking team creates an interest, as well as providing the parents with a wonderful opportunity to spend some quality time with their children, giving them some healthy attention, which, we all know, children love.
The earlier we can teach children good eating habits and involve them in the process of cooking, the more interest they have in eating healthy food. When parents take their kids to the markets and educate them as to where the produce comes from, and cook with their kids – it is pure gold. It encourages the kids’ interest in good health that will be a foundation for them for the rest of their lives.
Remember – Your Children Learn From Your Actions
Children learn mostly from their parents, they study them and all of their actions from the day they are born and when they are young, they want to be just like their parents. As your children grow up and see that home-cooked meals are the norm cooked by the family, the chances are, they will adopt this behaviour when they leave home. This is such a great lesson for them to learn in life, and set them up for success if in the future they start their own family.
Kitchen Motivation
Where do we find our motivation to spend time in the kitchen?
Motivation reading and activity
Excess Sugar Revisited
You are well on the way to helping your family lay great foundations for healthy home-cooked meals becoming the norm in everyday life. And the aim is for you to continue this journey every day of the week, all year round.
Having taken some of the steps in this program, you know that this is the way forward and as you slowly progress along on this journey, an important aspect of our modern day diet that needs to be addressed by all of us, is sugar consumption.
To say that the average modern day family’s sugar consumption is out of control would be an understatement. It is off the scale.
Children are getting way too many sugary treats way too often and we adults are drinking and eating too much refined sugar as well.
Now, we have all heard this before – it’s not a new problem. The question is not why we consume sugary foods and drinks, the question is how do we cut excess sugar out of our diets?
Sugar is made up of two molecules: glucose and fructose. Fructose is almost exclusively metabolised by the liver, so when you drink a sugary drink, the liver is flooded with fructose and it then goes into overdrive and thus turns the fructose into fat, hence we become overweight.
It’s not easy to eat five or six oranges in a row but it is pretty easy to drink a glass of orange juice.
Eat an apple and you are likely to feel full for a while. But eat some lollies, an ice cream or a bar of chocolate and you can still eat more if it’s on offer, and the problem is that it is always on offer and you don’t stop because you don’t feel full, the craving never ends.
There are some simple tips to adopt, such as drinking a large glass of water and eating a piece of fruit before you go shopping. When we are hungry and dehydrated we shop with our stomachs and not our common sense. We end up with too many processed foods, sugary drinks and snacks that we don’t need and that are not on our shopping list.
If there was ever a place and time to stop the family’s excess consumption of refined sugar it is in the supermarket.
Because quite simply if you don’t buy it, you can’t eat it!
A few years ago when the children were very young, Michelle said something to me as I was leaving to go to the supermarket. She asked me “please don’t buy any ice cream or snacks”.
My reply was “Really? Nothing?” Michelle confirmed… “Yes, nothing”.
It started a discussion about her concerns about eating too many ‘treats’ both at home and also at work.
As we had just swapped roles and she was now the full time working parent she had started to gain weight. We have always eaten well at home, but as she returned to the office five days a week she noticed how the many office celebrations, lunches, fundraising treats, birthday cakes and the rest were on offer daily. This was making it hard for her to maintain a healthy weight.
Having a tub of ice cream in the freezer and some chocolate biscuits lurking in the pantry at home did nothing to help either of us maintain a low sugar diet. So we discussed whether we really needed any treats in the house at all. We both agreed that a couple of squares of dark chocolate after dinner and a few biscuits for the occasional coffee break were OK. But apart from that? Nope, we decided we didn’t need it.
And we’ve stuck to it – for the past three or four years we have only bought two or three tubs of ice cream a year and drastically reduced all other snack foods. Michelle also explained to her colleagues at work that she was off sugar and was happy to celebrate with them but asked them not to be offended if she said no to birthday cake.
For me, spending more time at home, I noticed how hard it was not to snack. At work running around in a busy kitchen my half hour break was always used to eat my healthy homemade packed lunch. Now that I was at home, some days it was hard not to look in the pantry to see if there was something nice to snack on, a treat to kill time.
It took a little while to get used to being a bit more self-disciplined. I’m not going to tell you that there weren’t times when we both dreamed out loud about how much we would love to eat a big bowl of ice cream!!
But if there was one thing that has always kept us on track, it has been our unwavering support for each other. We would dream about the ice cream, have a laugh and then make a cup of tea and get over it, maybe give each other a compliment about how impressed we are by the progress we had made.
We are still young Michelle and I, and we want to do everything we can to reach our twilight years in as healthy way as possible. Fate will determine much of our health journey in the future but we choose to support each other daily now to give ourselves the best chance possible of a pain and disease free life as we age.
Activity – Reward and Recognition
Think of compliments you can give each other every so often. If you notice some changes in your partner’s appearance, maybe their jeans are looking a little loose, or they have more energy, or they have shown some impressive restraint at a time of major temptation…mention it to them. Tell them they are amazing. Tell them how much you have noticed and how inspiring they are to you. Don’t miss an opportunity to reward each other with the love and support that you both need. It is such a precious gift.
While you’re at it…
Being a chef with a strong interest in maintaining good health, I often go to seminars with health experts and I like to read articles about food and health.
Last year I attended a seminar where one of the last questions from the MC to the panel members was about which ingredients and foods they would recommend to audience members to cut back on or replace with a healthier alternative.
The usual suspects (fat, sugar and salt) were mentioned of course, among other things. So I went home and did some research to shed light on some of these foods. I also spoke to some fellow health conscious friends about what they were eating these days as a family.
It’s only when we seek, that we find answers and now that you are truly established in this program, I encourage you to take an interest in the topic of healthy eating. You don’t have to invest a lot of time and effort into this but start taking some interest in reading and learning in regards to the matter of nutrition and family health.
This can be as simple as buying a newspaper and reading about tips and ideas to creating healthy meals. Or you might go to your library and browse all the books under health and wellness and find a couple that inspire you to make healthier choices every day.
At the end of the day, kitchen dream teams that learn to cook confidently and have an interest in cooking, cooking techniques, health and wellness, new foods, healthy ingredients and everything kitchen and food related will succeed in maintaining a healthy diet for life.
How to Become a Half Decent Home Cook Fast
Cooking at Home
When we move in together early on in our relationships, each partner has a different level of skill when it comes to cooking. But for family teams especially, there are basic cooking skills needed to maintain a healthy diet in the family home.
- Cooking techniques
Understanding the main basic cooking techniques frees your mind to create your own recipes and dishes without forever looking at recipes. Confident home cooks can switch from one technique to another and understand how to intensify flavour, add texture and create amazing dishes from normal everyday ingredients that they have in the fridge.
Understanding elements in cooking techniques like heat, moisture, reduction, timing, seasoning and all the other elements of cooking from scratch is the foundation for enjoying cooking and also makes it easier to get on with the job at hand.
If you need help learning the basics, look for a cookbook like our excellent e Book called Cooking Techniques, a fast track to cooking perfection, this certainly will fast track your cooking knowledge. It will change the way you think about cooking forever. - Kitchen equipment
Learning to use the right kitchen equipment for your dish is very important; cooking a stew in a thin-bottomed pan will burn if not stirred constantly, however a thick-bottomed pan will be more forgiving. But perhaps making a decision to cook the stew with the lid on in the oven might be preferable. Using the right equipment will increase your enjoyment in cooking and make it easier to get dinner on the table.
Some gadgets and equipment are useful for some cooks, but others might prefer to use different utensils when creating meals. But studying and learning about kitchen equipment is important so again go and do some research to help you enjoy cooking and have success when cooking different kind of dishes. - Recipes
Most of us love recipes as they encourage us to try something new, be it a new cooking technique or to cook with new flavours and textures in a dish. However we should not get bogged down by them. Instead, we should get to the stage where we can view them as a helpful guide to creating a dish. Recipes can help you create a dish step by step, but as you slowly become a more confident home cook, you’ll learn to add your own spin.
If you always stick to what you know and rarely test the boundaries of new recipes you have tried, or new cooking techniques you have learned, chances are you will get bored and lose your drive on this journey of creating home-cooked meals on a daily basis.
Encourage each other to read, create and cook new recipes and add your own recipe creations to the family cookbook that you now have created. When working in the kitchen together during the ‘big cook up’, reassure and inspire each other to try new spices, herbs, fruits and vegetables and discuss what you have seen or learnt from recipes you have studied recently.
The Journey Towards Great Health
This is a lifestyle, it has to be maintained for life. The only diet that will keep you and your family healthy for life is one where you team up to ensure healthy home cooking and meal preparation is part of your everyday routine.
This program has all the help and information you need to make this happen. Even just by taking a few steps or ideas from what you have learned – you will make lasting changes to your overall health and wellbeing and that of your family.
As I mentioned earlier, we can’t determine certain aspects of our health as we age, some things are beyond our control in life, but take charge of what IS within your control. Namely your family’s diet. By doing so, you’ll ensure you are in the best possible position to tackle whatever life throws at you.
Above all else, enjoy the ride and enjoy your cooking journey.