Your goal is to fix your and your family's weight issues by becoming healthier overall.  Your cooking strategy to accomplish this is by preparing healthier foods.  For this, we've covered what you need to do to have healthier foods available.  Now let's get into tactical concerns: how to make sure what needs to get done gets done.

 

It seems like it will take a lot of work, but actually it doesn't.  What it takes is planning.  However, there's a hitch.  You have to, again, forget what you've been told by conventional nutrition experts.  Conventional, in this case, is just another word for generic.  We don't do generic in this course.

 

Nobody needs hydrogenated fats or refined sugar or refined salt.  The real food pyramid is sound for just about everybody on earth.  After that though, different people have different needs, and you've got to look at yourself as an individual, and your family members as individual people, and feed them according to their needs instead of general needs.

 

 

This doesn't mean there should be a free-for-all, but don't force people to eat.  Let them be, because their body may be telling them that they are about to have a gastric disturbance, that they've had enough calories that day, or that what they really need is more water, or whatever.  A person who isn't obsessive-compulsive isn't going to become anorexic from skipping a day.  Periodic fasting, maybe once a week, won't even hurt a teenager.

 

The boundaries however, should be no eating more than a piece of fruit or a vegetable less than 2 hours before bedtime.  If they're not hungry at dinner time then that's okay.  If they get hungry right before bedtime, offer them a cucumber, and that's it until morning.

 

 

Before you go to bed, you should be thinking about what you're going to feed your family tomorrow.  This way you can set things up or plan what you need to set up, and things will go smoothly at game time.  You'll have options.  You also have less chance of getting lazy and backing out if doing so means you'd waste food.

 

Set your beans and rice to soaking, get your break mixed and rising, and your gravy or pudding flour-water to blooming, so you can rest easy knowing that you're prepared and sure to make a fabulous nutritious meal.

 

 

Just don't buy it, and then you don't have to worry about people eating it or eating too much of it.  Anything you eat should have had to involve some actual cooking.  So buy ingredients to make chocolate cake, not snack cakes.  The kind you buy outside usually have some fake food in them anyway.  If you're going to have a snack or dessert, it should at least be made from natural ingredients or as natural as feasable anyway.

 

 

This may mean that you have to make a couple of trips to the vegetable stand or produce section per week, but this is okay.  Make sure they are always available, and buy as you need instead of large amounts of things that will go bad in the refrigerator.  Press yourself and your family members to finish them so you can get fresh things.

 

 

This gets your family used to having occasional indulgences, but made well.  Your kids may become the kind of food snobs who can taste when a cookie is sweet but tasteless compared to the good stuff they get from home.

 

 

After your family is used to good old fashioned real food, they'll usually prefer to eat at home anyway.  Still, every once in awhile, it's nice to go out and let someone else do the sweating in the kitchen.  When you do though, don't waste the trip someplace mediocre.  Go to where they have things that are real pleasures.

 

If for your kids, that's McDonald's or Burger King, fine.  They won't die or be driven far off track by a little junk fat once a month.  However, talk to them about whether or not they are really enjoying that.  If I was a gambler, I'd bet that after a few months of having good food at home, they'll be telling you about a sushi bar, seafood restaurant, or steak house they'd rather go to.

 

 

Some folks have work traditions like going to the pub or having a beer at home after work, and that's cool to a degree.  However, one should remember that alcohol is not the greatest thing for one's liver, and that alcoholic drinks are full of sugar and very high in calories to boot.  So afternoon and early evening drinking should be done in strict moderation (as in nurse one beer the whole time), and should have some cheese, meat, and/or nuts to balance things out.  The last thing you need while you're drinking is starchy food.  You also don't want to have things that have been fried in junk fat.  So if there's meat, opt for something grilled.