Updating our diet: Step 1 - Breakfast

As you may know, most of the ladies from this blog know a LOT about nutrition and healthy living. I've always been inspired by their dedication to what they put in their bodies. I can remember 7 years ago, when Krista, Margaret, Christina and I were all pregnant with our first babies and teaching school together...Krista and Margaret were eating eggs like they were going out of style and telling me about the Blue Ribbon diet. I saw how beautifully they grew those babies in their bellies and how healthy those little girls have turned out to be.

I feel like my family keeps a diet similar to a lot of my peers...I suppose I consider it "fairly healthy". I cook the majority of our meals, we only eat at restaurants about once or twice a month, and we eat a lot of fruits and vegetables. But I'd say we are "fairly American" in our diet as well. We eat cereal for breakfast 6 out of 7 days, processed cheese, crackers, snack foods, and bread. My kids probably eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich 5 lunches a week and we have more added sugar in our diet than I'm probably even aware of.

Anyhow, I've been inspired to take baby, BABY steps to overhaul our diet. I've heard/read of different ways to go about this, but I finally landed on changing it meal by meal. My first step: change what we eat for breakfast.

Breakfast for my family would be a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios with whole milk. We can go through a lot of cereal and milk this way, especially if I pour the boys a glass of milk to drink along with it. I think this breakfast has a few problems: cost, milk consumption, added sugar, and not enough energy to get us through to lunch. So I sat down with the kids and came up with a list of breakfast alternatives we could try. Here's our list:

Yogurt with Fresh Fruit added
Quick Cook Oats with Brown Sugar
Scrambled Egg Sandwich (on a biscuit with cheese)
Pancakes
Waffles
Bagel with Cream Cheese

In order not to overwhelm myself and burn out, I started with store bought versions of most of this. The yogurt is Aldi brand nonfat vanilla yogurt, the biscuits are Grands biscuits from a tube, and the bagels and cream cheese are from Aldi. I already made pancakes and waffles from scratch, so that wasn't a change. But I use white flour for them.

Now that we are into week 2 of our new breakfasts, I'm ready to start making a few more changes to them. My first step will be to make my own yogurt. My plan is to follow Money Saving Mom's Homemade Crockpot Yogurt Recipe. I'm going to buy a half gallon of organic whole milk (not ultra-pastuerized) and a container of plain yogurt with live active cultures. My goal is to change the nonfat vanilla yogurt we're eating now to one that has good fat, no sugar, and is organic.

I can already see some results from our changes. We have cut way back on our milk consumption, and everyone has more energy to make it through the morning. Plus I love looking over the table and seeing the boys eat something besides yet another bowl of cereal!