Welcome to my first blog post! I hope that you will find some ideas that will help you and your family live healthier lives. We're all at different points in our journey to wellness. Some haven't started, some are perhaps already there, and the rest of us are somewhere in between. My own wellness journey began more than a year ago, and I became a certified wellness coach earlier this year. One of my goals is to help create healthy habits for my three kids, ages 4, 6 and 11. It has required getting out of old habits when it comes to food, and I have revamped what I pack them for lunch. I became intrigued by the idea of bento lunches. A bento lunch is basically a homemade lunch packed in a box and often jazzed up with artfully arranged food. I don't usually have time to be fancy, but my kids do eat a fairly healthy lunch these days. You can purchase a variety of systems (more on that another time). I have started out with a simple system--the Ziploc container in the photo. It has three compartments, and it does a great job of keeping the food separated. I've put yogurt in one of the small compartments, and it stayed put. Just be sure to press the lid down in the middle around all three compartments. The photo is of my 11-year-old's lunch: a hard-boiled egg, veggies, cantaloupe and banana sushi. What we call banana sushi is a 100% whole wheat tortilla spread with 100% natural peanut butter. Roll up a banana in it and slice. (100% natural peanut butter is just ground peanuts.) Did he eat it? Most of it. He doesn't always eat all of his veggies, but he usually eats at least some of them. This kind of system can reduce your use of plastic baggies, control portions and I hope encourage you to include fruits and veggies if you don't already do so.
