Diet Ideas: Easy Family Friendly Diet Plan to Lose Weight

Easy Family Friendly Diet Plan to Lose Weight

8:07 PM

By Walt Miller
We all know how hard it is to get kids to eat well. They are suspicious of new foods which mom or dad may suddenly be serving them. They can sense the dislike that we, as adults, may be having with the new family diet plan. It can make a change to healthy eating come to a screeching halt. There has to be an easy family friendly diet plan to lose weight available somewhere.

Good News! An easy family friendly diet plan to lose weight is not as difficult as it may seem if you follow these four tips:

1. Eat as similar as possible to the old foods using healthy substitutions and omissions. If you eat pizza every Friday night via delivery, change to "Family makes pizza night." Avoid partially hydrogenated oils in the pizza dough. Avoid high fructose corn syrup or sugary pizza sauces. Use fresh meats and chopped veggies for toppings instead of nitrate laden lunch meats and sausage. Find low fat shredded mozzarella cheese for the topping. What you end up with is still pizza. The family enjoys the process and the taste. Do this with other meals as well. Try brown rice noodles or spaghetti instead of the regular kind. Try yucca instead of French fries.

2. Make and freeze meals you would normally buy in the ready made processed versions. Let's face it. There are very few ready made meals available in normal grocery stores which don't have preservatives, hydrogenated oils, food dyes or large amounts of sugar added. It is much healthier to make several dishes of lasagna ahead of time and freeze them to eat later than to rely on the store purchased varieties. This can be done with many dishes from meatballs to barbecue chicken.

3. Add fruit for a sweet substitute for sugar. The amount of sugar consumed daily these days is amazing. If fruit can be added instead of sugar, the fat losing benefits of soluble fiber will be added as well. Try using applesauce for oil in baking recipes and then half the sugar. Instead of jelly try slices of banana, strawberries or apple.

4. Habits may be the problem. If everyone is use to going to the pantry for a snack, put the snacks in the pantry. The key is to make the healthy snacks easier to get. Have ready-made bags of popcorn in small sandwich bags available and easy. Have dried fruit and nut bags ready to go also. Put them at eye level in a big bowl in the pantry. You can even try to place fruit in a bowl in the pantry. Go with the habit patterns.