Eating A Healthy Dinner: A Simple Matter Of Planning

Dinner is probably the healthiest meal for most of us. We often overlook breakfast and eat lunch on the run, but for dinner, most of us take more time in preparing and planning how to eat a balanced, healthy dinner.

But there抯 also a lot of pressure on dinner. It抯 the last meal of the day and if you are lacking important nutrients in your diet that day, you have an opportunity to make up those nutrients in your evening meal. But you don抰 want your meal too heavy or you might not sleep well. Conversely, eating too little will not only likely leave you lacking in nutrients, but could also leave you ravenous for breakfast 12 hours later.

So how do you make sure dinner is a balanced, nutrient-packed meal? Plan, and plan some more. Although we are more likely to spent time preparing dinner versus other daily meals, it抯 also a meal that can easily get derailed. You plan to grill chicken breasts and vegetables, but then belatedly remember your son has a baseball game or it抯 open house at school. So it抯 chicken nuggets all around.

Planning keeps you in synch with your schedule. If you plan a week抯 worth of meals, you can think about the various obstacles you might find that week in actually bringing your plans to fruition. You can plan a quick pasta salad on open house night, and healthy, veggie-packed sandwiches on baseball night. This keeps you out of the fast food lane.

What are some other tips for planning healthy dinners?

*Don抰 cook separate meals for picky children. If you know that your salmon and saut閑d spinach will also result in you making mini hot dogs and fries for the kids, you might rethink it, not having the time or energy to make two completely separate meals. Then you suffer, and they do as well. It抯 important to expose your children to a variety of foods, so make the salmon and spinach. Be sure to offer applesauce, whole wheat bread and some fruit. Then everyone gets a healthy meal and your children just might surprise you by actually eating some of the 揳dult?meal.

*On weeknights, stay away from involved meals. Think of things that can be prepared in less than 45 minutes, though it抯 ideal to keep your meal prep to 30 minutes whenever possible.

*Do as much prep as you can ahead of time. If you抮e planning grilled chicken and vegetables for dinner, say, then you can clean and slice your vegetables in the morning before you head out for the day. Marinate the chicken. In the evening, all that抯 left is tossing a quick bag salad and grilling your meat and vegetables. This saves on clean-up time as well.

*If you must eat out, apply the golden rules for restaurant eating: Stay away from white or heavy sauces, order oil and vinegar to dress your salad, and eat only half the entr閑, pack the rest and enjoy it for lunch the next day.

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Cereal For Dinner: Is That "Normal"

What抯 for dinner tonight? I bet it抯 not Raisin Bran or Grape Nuts, but why not? Research shows that whole-grain cereal is an excellent source of vitamins and fiber, and is low in calories and saturated fat. But in America, cereal is supposed to be eaten for breakfast. It抯 not supposed to be eaten for dinner. We can抰 do that. Says who? The advertisers, that抯 who. What if Kelloggs launched a 揹inner cereal??and put a lot of marketing dollars behind the idea? Certainly this 揹inner cereal?wouldn抰 be different from any other cereal; it would just give us 損ermission?to steer away from the norm and do things a little differently. And I guarantee there抎 be a lot less overweight people in the world.

About 7 years ago I put my theory to the test. I ate cereal for dinner 5 nights a week for about 4 months, and I can honestly say that my stomach was flatter than ever, I never felt full or bloated and I got used to it pretty quickly. In fact, I found myself driving home from work excited about what cereal I was going to have that night, and I looked forward to it. I felt great.

Our overweight problem is largely cultural. Big, dinnertime meals are part of what we do even though research shows that consuming our largest meal at night is a big reason for our bulging waist-lines. Not long ago I read an interesting study about the timing of our eating. The researchers compared the eating habits of some community in Scotland and compared them to ours. This community was in a farming region and the people, on average, consumed the same amount of calories per day that we do, but they did not have a weight problem. The reason: Breakfast was their big meal. About two thirds of their daily calories were consumed in the morning and they ate sensible lunches and dinners. In our culture, we consume two thirds of our calories after 5:00 P.M. The body抯 metabolism slows down significantly after 6:00 P.M. and our bodies just aren抰 burning all of those calories effectively.

Timing is everything. Makes sense, doesn抰 it?

In our world, we do what seems normal, what everyone else is doing. A family sitting around the dinner table eating a bowl of Cheerios with sliced bananas sounds ludicrous. It just doesn抰 fit into our cultural schema. But obviously something has got to change in our country or we抮e just going to keep eating ourselves to death. Try the cereal plan for a few weeks and see if you lose weight. There is such a huge selection of good, healthy cereals out there so you don抰 have to worry about getting board. Dare to be different.

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