Dinner Meal Planning

Your dinner meal plan should be the easiest meal plan of the day to develop, because you have total control of your food environment. If you have purchased healthy foods, you are set for fun!

Some Healthy Diet Habits for Dinner are:

• Use the half plate rule and serve your family. Once you have plated their food, evaluate the meal to make sure half of the plate is salad and veggies. If not, add in a handful of baby carrots, or other chopped fresh veggies! It does no good to prepare great healthy food, and allow your family to serve themselves. They may eliminate the vegetable choices and plate only meat and potatoes. This is a habit that will not serve them well.

• Eliminate processed foods because they contain chemicals, preservatives and way too much salt. Honestly, they taste like salted cardboard. Sensitize your taste buds to fresh foods!

• Cook only real foods, especially if you have kids! They need to eat healthy meals at home, because they often grab junk away from home. Do you really know what happens to that healthy lunch you prepared?

• Half of your plate should be veggies, so a nice big salad and low carbohydrate veggie are simple choices. One fourth of your meal should be a higher carbohydrate choice, either a grain, pasta, beans, or peas, corn, potatoes, squash or pumpkin. One fourth of your meal should be your lean protein choice. Simple! Beans of course are a flexible protein or high carbohydrate choice! If you prepare a stir-fry, soup, or stew, use the same proportions. It is hard to over-eat meals that are full of veggies, because they are so full of fiber and quickly fill you up!

• Keep your refrigerator full of healthy fresh fruits and vegetables. If you see a new vegetable that you have not tried before, grab it, and try a new recipe, or combine it with other veggies you love, to develop a new creation! Life in the eating department should never be boring!

• If you need some ideas to whip up your own creative healthy dishes from fresh vegetables you have on hand, check out Poor Girl Eats Well on Facebook. She shops for fresh veggies and fruits at local farmers markets, brings them home, and whips up fun dishes using veggies, that you probably have never tried before! This is my favorite Lifestyle Solution for health, buying new fresh veggies and developing new creations!

• Develop a love for all fresh herbs, or grow your own herb garden. Herbs take your recipe from great, to out of this world amazing! Cilantro can be added to almost any recipe for zing! Once you get hooked on herbs, you can’t live without them!

• Double, Triple or Quadruple your spices in recipes. American recipes are so boring and bland. Spice things up a bit and you will find it takes less food to fill you up!

• Shop at farmers markets in your area to find the freshest ingredients, and most likely you will save money too! Make it a family outing as most farmers markets are becoming very family friendly! 

• Check out the healthy recipe section of this site. I will keep posting my new creations!

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Cooking great fresh healthy dinner meals is not rocket science, just good old fashioned common sense! It’s also fast. My goal is always to whip up dinner meals at home that take less time than fast food! Fast home cooked healthy meals are a healthy diet habit!