How to Incorporate Real Food Into Your Busy Life

Eating healthy sounds great, and it should be a really simple thing to do, right? Well, yes… and no.

So why does something that sounds so simple, also sound so daunting at the same time?

Because we’re busy! And prepping real, whole food takes time; time that a lot of us are already short on between taking care of a family and work and the always growing baskets of laundry and shuttling kids to school and practices, and as soon as you get caught up with laundry there is more, and the list goes on, and on, and on.

As soon as you say, “Ok, our family is going to start eating healthy,” questions that start with “how” and “what” and “but what if” start racing through our mind. What if I don’t have enough money in my grocery budget for farm-raised chicken or vegetables at the farmer’s market? How do I even cook a whole chicken? But what if I buy and prepare all this healthy food and my family refuses to eat it?

What if I told you that you don’t have to know all the answers to these questions to start eating healthy? You can start feeding your family healthier food, real food by incorporating just one of these suggestions today. Then add one or two more suggestions from the list little-by-little as these tips become regular practice.

Eating real food doesn’t have to be an all or nothing endeavor. You don’t have to completely scrap everything you know and love and totally start over.

Fun fact - I don’t do everything on this list all the time.

We try to keep with the 80/20 rule at our house. Eat whole healthy food 80% of the time and the other 20% of the time I don’t stress about it. That’s a much more realistic goal for us with two working parents, sports practices & games, kids working, trying to build/maintain a farm, or whatever else might be going on at any given time. And it keeps me from feeling like a bad mom when my kids burn through a whole box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch tomorrow morning or when someone asks my honest-to-a-fault child at his baseball game what he had for lunch today and he says, “a couple popsicles.” Because I know there are healthy meals and snacks in our day, and we eat really good food most of the time.  

Here are 20 tips to help you up the amount of real food you incorporate into your family's meals and snacks:

Read ingredient labels when you are shopping. This is an easy one to start with. Look at the packaging label of items that you normally buy and scan through the list of ingredients. If the item has just a few ingredients, and you see ingredients you recognize, it's probably minimally processed. If you have trouble recognizing or worse-yet pronouncing the ingredients…pass.

Start with whole, plain ingredients and switch it up with different spices, seasoning, or additives. For example - overnight oats can be customized about 100 different ways.

Look for foods in their whole/natural form (rather than processed) form. Whole foods include fresh fruits and vegetables, eggs, old-fashioned oats, real milk, various beans, nuts & seeds, unprocessed meats, herbs & spices, and olive/avocado oil. For decades we have been told that some of these real foods are bad for your heart and will make you fat. Sorry...not true. Minimally processed foods like block cheese, yogurt, frozen/canned vegetables, whole wheat flour or other whole grains that have not changed much from their natural form are good, too.

Don’t just assume that expensiveness automatically equals health.

Be sure all major food groups (protein, fruit, vegetable, whole-grain) are represented in appropriate proportion at your meals.

Packages labeled with healthy buzz words like “low fat” or “heart healthy” are not always as good as they seem. Look at the ingredients to verify.  

• For example, the product Just Eggs is advertised as “so good you will accidentally eat healthy” and has the following 14 ingredients: Water, Mung Bean Protein, Expeller-Pressed Canola Oil, Contains less than 2% of Dehydrated Onion, Gellan Gum, Natural Carrot Extractives (color), Turmeric Extractives (color), Potassium Citrate, Salt, Sugar, Tapioca Syrup Solids, Tetrasodium Pyrophosphate, Transglutaminase, Nisin (preservative).

• Do you know how many ingredients are in an egg? 1 ingredient: egg.

Cook once and eat twice (or more). Cook a farm-raised chicken and portion it out for multiple meals such as chicken salad, chicken and rice, or chicken noodle soup.

Find just one thing to swap for a whole food or eliminate all together. I started with Pop-Tarts. That is something I refuse to buy at the grocery store. And it’s not because I don’t like them. I love them. Especially the strawberry frosted ones. And so does everyone else in our house. If a box of Pop-Tarts shows up, they are gone in less than an hour. Why? Because they’re delicious and so easy to grab and eat for breakfast or for a snack or just because you are bored. But they’re so unhealthy! So, I don’t buy them.

Plan meals around healthy protein such as whole chicken, pot roast, or pork chops, and add healthy, low-cost sides.

Invest in appliances (or use those you already have) that will help you make meals without all the hands-on work. We use our crock pot, Instant Pot, and air fryer all the time, especially during the summer.

Search the Internet or watch videos on YouTube. Don’t know how to cut up a whole chicken? Can’t think of anything to do with the 15-pound turkey you got on sale? Looking for farm-raised meat or locally grown vegetables? Need some inspiration for meal ideas? There isn’t anything you can’t find or figure out with your smartphone or a computer.

High quality meat and eggs can be more economical if you cut out the middleman and buy directly from local farmers. Buy half a hog or a quarter beef to save even more per pound on meat.

If gardening isn’t your thing, find someone who has a garden. Chances are there are people you know who would love to give extra produce away when their garden is in full production and they have tomatoes and zucchini covering every surface in their kitchen.

Shop the meat and produce isles/areas first when grocery shopping and you won’t have as much room in your cart for junk!

Cut out or reduce sugary drinks like soda, sweet tea, and sports drinks. Sports drinks and fruit juices can also be diluted with water. Think Trop 50, which is really just (over-priced) watered-down orange juice.

Eat at home more. Nine times out of ten, what you cook at home will probably be healthier than what you could get from a drive thru.

To cut costs on whole food, supplement with ingredients that are traditionally less expensive such as rice, beans, or homemade bread. We always add black beans to our taco meat to stretch 2 pounds to 3. I also put old-fashioned oats in meatloaf and mix in ground venison or venison roasts into nearly all of our beef recipes.

Prep food right when you get home from the store or market. If we wash and cut up fruits and vegetables right when they get home from the store and make them easily accessible in the fridge, my kids are more likely to snack on that rather than going looking for chips or candy or anything else that is ready to unwrap and eat.

Grow a garden or just a few plants in pots on your porch. You can get foods closer to their natural form than picking them right before you cook or eat them! Planting just a few seeds will yield a lot of produce.

When buying ground beef, look for higher lean/lower fat varieties. 80/20 beef is 20% fat, but 90/10 beef is only 10% fat, so it’s leaner.

• Pro-trick: if you only can find ground beef with a higher fat content, pour boiling water over your cooked and drained ground beef. The hot water will remove even more of the fat than just straining it.

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