Eating Plan

Learning from the past, Anthony, Davan and I have developed a plan for mostly healthy eating that we're going to try to stick to in a forever sort of way. We're going to eat healthy stuff at home, which means aiming for predominantly a veggie and fruit based diet with some whole grains, nuts and seeds thrown in. More nuts and seeds for those of us who are growing and/or very active. We will limit, but not totally eliminate added oils and sweeteners. We are allowing up to two food items with dark chocolate chips in them a week, i.e. pancakes on Sunday and bars that are otherwise healthy.

In addition, we will eat out once a month. When we eat out, we can eat whatever we feel like, including dessert, if we so choose. We will also walk over to our local TCBY one Wednesday a month for a waffle cone. They have 99 cent waffle cones on Wednesdays. We all enjoy the experience of walking over for "ice cream" and miss it greatly when we don't allow it at all.

We've also came up with several eating holidays throughout the year. The holidays include birthdays of immediate family members, Christmas, Halloween, Groundhog Day (yes, really - some friends of ours do a big Groundhog Day party every year), free cone day at Ben and Jerry's, Easter and Thanksgiving. On the holidays, we can eat whatever we like.

If we choose to eat out for a birthday or other holiday, then that's our one meal a month of eating out.

And there is still one more caveat. That is that whenever we are traveling or at another person's house for a meal or are invited out to eat (my parents take us out semi-regularly), we will also just eat as we like, which may be healthy choices or may not, but no judgment either way.

There are a lot of ifs, ands and buts in this eating plan, but we feel like it will work for us. Each of us wants to eat in a healthy manner, but we all have a harder time if there is no foreseeable splurge. Of course, sometimes we'll have a lot of splurges in a short period of time, but we may choose to not splurge as much because of it on those occasions. Or if we do, we do. We're still eating in a mostly healthy way overall.

Today we had yet another gymnastics picnic - this time for Devos rather than team and we had our first eating whatever we liked time. Boy we had to wait a long time for that - day 2! LOL Anyway, we took a large veggie tray to share and we all ate a lot off of it. I also ate some watermelon and then went wild with the chocolate chip cookies, one of my personal weaknesses, in addition to a few tortilla chips and a few bakery potato wedges. Anthony went wild with fried chicken, pizza and chips as well as chocolate chip cookies. Davan, meanwhile, only splurged on a slice of pizza with the cheese pealed off. She was contemplating a cookie when a friend dragged her off to swing and then it was out of her mind. That's what you get for being busy, I guess - a lot less recreational eating, which is what I was doing for sure, especially by the 4th chocolate chip cookie...

Davan received one of the awards the Devos coach handed out today. She was the hardest worker in her level. She was proud of that, but also shared with us after that she felt like she was one of the ones who'd improved the most, also, even though she wasn't chosen for that. I think she's right about that, but I also think the coach wanted to spread out who got what and Davan is a remarkably hard worker, making her a stand out in that category. No one got more than one award.