How to Eat Healthier at Home
Does your home promote a healthy eating environment? In other words, is it easy to make healthy choices when you or your family is hungry at home? Or are there too many tempting unhealthy choices?
This section will explore what a healthy home looks like by going through each room in a typical house or apartment.
How to Create an Environment Supporting Healthy Eating for Children & Teens
Does your home promote a healthy eating environment? In other words, is it easy to eat healthfully in your home or are there unhealthy cues? Let’s explore what a healthy home looks like by going through each room in a typical house or apartment.
Living Room—Is it common to eat in your living room? Families tend to eat more healthfully if they eat at a kitchen or dining room table. That’s because it’s easy to get distracted from eating by televisions and computers and eat too much or too quickly.
Bedroom—Do you find crumbs in the bed or candy wrappers underneath? Keep snacks and meals limited to the kitchen or dining room, so there is time to concentrate on eating, rather than eating while scrolling on a phone or tablet, reading, or relaxing.
Dining Room—Is your dining room a pleasant place to eat? Clear off space so you can eat together at least once per day, like breakfast and/or dinner. Create habits for yourself and your kids to sit down at the dining room table to eat meals and snacks without distraction. Eating with family members can set good habits for kids and parents.
Kitchen—When you walk into your kitchen, what foods do you see first? Rearrange so that you see a fruit bowl, small boxes of raisins, or other healthy snacks. Look in your refrigerator and see what foods are easily available.
Make sure the healthy foods are front and center on the shelves, and that you have ingredients for healthy family meals that are easy to make. This holds true for your cupboards and pantry. Make sure you are stocked with ingredients for meals your family enjoys.
Checklist for a Healthy Home
- Create places for eating in your home, like the kitchen or dining room.
- Keep eating in the living room and bedroom off limits.
- Remove candy and snack bowls from the living room.
- Stock your refrigerator and pantry with foods from each section of MyPlate:
- fresh produce,
- lean meat and protein alternatives,
- fresh water,
- dairy or non-dairy alternatives, and
- whole grains.
- Create meals with the healthy foods you have on hand to avoid frequent fast-food outings or deliveries.
Creating a Healthy Mealtime
Research suggests that mealtime is important for learning how to:
- Eat until full and then stop.
- Try new foods.
- Learn new words and improve communication skills.
- Appreciate family members.
Many families find that dinner is a nice time to connect with one another. Others have schedules that make dinner together difficult, so they prioritize breakfast as a family meal. When eating together, there are a few ground-rules that make family meal-time enjoyable:
- Make sure there is at least one food served that your picky eater will eat.
- Consider a one-bite rule. Everyone has to try a food, and if they don’t like it, they can say “no, thank-you.”
- Avoid making children clean their plates. Forcing a child to clean their plate teaches them to eat when they are not hungry, which can lead to overeating. To avoid food waste, serve small amounts and allow children to ask for seconds.
- Make dessert an occasional offering and avoid bribing children to eat in order to get dessert. Bribing elevates dessert and makes the rest of the meal unappealing.
- Engage everyone in conversation, make jokes, and have fun while eating. Make meal-time a time for enjoying one another, not just about food.
- Set an amount of time, like 20 minutes, that you will all stay at the table together, and not rush off.
- Involve your children in making meals and choosing what is for dinner for everyone.
- Avoid short-order cooking different meals for picky-eaters, so they have an incentive to try the foods you’ve provided.
- Avoid talking about how much each person is eating or discussing children’s body sizes. Trust everyone to eat until full, and then stop.
Remember, it is not the parent’s job to make a child eat. The parent is responsible for providing healthy foods, and the child’s job is to try a bite, and eat how much their body is telling them it needs. This guideline helps avoid meal-time struggles.
Activity for Parents & Kids
Explain to kids that people “eat with their eyes” (meaning they are triggered to eat by what’s around them that looks good). Do a treasure hunt together around your home looking for ways to make healthy foods be the first thing seen, and unhealthy foods less available.
Look through each room, the refrigerator, pantry, and cupboards. Are there changes you can make as a family to make healthy foods available and appealing? What foods should be always available versus sometimes available in your home in order to promote health?
Next Steps
If you think your teen needs assistance with their diet, schedule an appointment with a pediatrician, family medicine, or internal medicine provider. View our providers in each of these areas.
Recipes
Research on healthy eating for children and teens identifies how much food from each food group is required for their growth, development, and activity. With these in mind, we created healthy recipes for you and your family to cook at home with low cost and short cook and prep times.
Contact Us
For additional questions or to request an in-person workshop please email us at uuccn@utah.edu.
