My kids and I have habits and routines, just like everyone else. Since this blog is about health, food, etc. I will give our previous habits because they were really brought to life yesterday. It also brought to light how they need to change. Yesterday, I didn't know if I should cold turkey change or do a gradual change. When do you know which way to go?
Habit/Routine #1 - On Monday's, my son has Cub Scouts. We usually would eat out because I had to pick the kids up, do homework, talk to them, listen to them whine about doing homework before we had to leave for the meeting. There was just no time to cook and I just didn't want to rush anymore than I already was. Now, I am married, but my husband worked until 6:00pm so he was not involved in these after school activities. Can we all say, overwhelmed mom? *lol*
Habit/Routine #2 - One or two days a week, we would go to the grocery store, on the way home from school to pick something up for dinner. Before we would even get out the car, my son would ask for a doughnut and my daughter a muffin. Now this grocery store has great doughnuts called Colossal doughnuts and big muffins. So pre-program, I would usually say yes unless the days where, in my head, I knew they just had one earlier in the week. We get those and get whatever else we wanted in the store. If it was a day I really didn't feel like cooking, we got Ho.t Pockets. They would eat doughnut and muffin on the way home, in the car.
Habit/ Routine #3 - REPEAT #1 or #2 at least two more times
Habit/Routine #4 - No extra exercise.
Yesterday was the first Monday, after starting the program. Now, this shows how programmed my mind is. After work, I immediately thought about going to P.anda Express. Darn, I can't go there, we are on the program. As usual, I forgot to take some meat out the freezer. I need to get better with that. My husband has since been laid off but I even forget to tell him to take it out. *lol*
I even thing about this being our one day of eating out. Again, I had to talk myself out of it. I felt horrible. I go get the kids and know that we won't eat out but I still have to go to the store because I have not been grocery shopping. We get to the parking lot and #2 starts. At first I say "NO" which should have been the end of it. But then I try to rationalize and say it has to be gradual because, I will be honest, the kids looked sad and my daughter said "not even a raisin bran muffin?". I know, I know...bad mother. I told them yes but I told my daughter she could only eat half of the Raisin Bran muffin.
In the store, I got some more "bag o' greens" and frozen dinners. There was no time to cook. I did not get our normal frozen dinners though. I got them both L.ean Cusine dinners and I fixed a salad for them and one for myself. So that was actual another habit, I broke. We would usually get one of the high calorie meals. So I thought I did pretty good.
I also got my daughter the F.uze drinks. They have a juice that is low in calories. My daughter likes them and the nutritionist said they were fine to give to the kids on the program as long as they still drink water. There is, pretty much, no other good juice for them to have. All of them have so many calories. Don't be fooled by the 100% juice idea because the calories are still high.
I didn't let the kids eat in the car either. We got home and ate dinner, the kids were satisfied.
We even went for a walk and the kids played tag with a little boy, on the playground. My daughter got 45 minutes of active exercise yesterday.
All in all, I think we did OK today. It wasn't perfect but it is a gradual change.
My daughter has exercise class today.
