The past few weeks, I have been examining my approach to healthy eating. I do really well in some areas like staying relatively low-fat and eating mostly whole grains, but really need improvement in other areas like eating too much processed food, sodium, and sugar. I decided that this year, I want my food theme to be, “back to the basics”. I am trying to find inexpensive ways to eat more whole foods. For today’s “Trying to be Healthy” Tuesday post, I thought I would share a few steps I am taking to move towards this goal:

1) Try homemade recipes
In order to reduce our sodium and sugar intake, I am attempting to make more things homemade. So far I have tried, homemade bread, ice cream, and chicken broth. I found these things to be less labor intensive than I expected, and they were very tasty (follow the links for the recipes I used). There are still things I will buy that are processed because I get them so inexpensively with coupons. However, I am trying to find quick and easy recipes for some of the higher cost items. You have to decide for your family what is practical as far as homemade items go. So far I have found my homemade products to be much faster and easier to prepare than I expected. My next goal is homemade noodles (I will let you know how they turn out :)

2) Buy produce in its whole form, even if it takes longer to prepare.
I am going to try to find one whole produce bargain and try it each week. This week I tried buying whole carrots. They were only $1 a bag, and I found that peeling them took much less time than I expected.

3) Begin learning about city gardening now.
This is the scariest of my three goals because I have absolutely no talent in this area. I have the opposite of a green thumb and basically kill anything green when it is in my care. But, I really hope if I start researching now, I can learn enough by spring to at least keep a few plants alive. Fresh produce is one of the more expensive parts of my grocery budget, thus growing my own would not only be healthier but cheaper (if I can keep them alive). The good news is, there are a lot of free resources on the internet. I will update you as I research and let you know what I find.

I would love to hear the way you have found to incorporate whole foods into your lifestyle.