Tips for Your Boomer Years

1.  Healthy eating doesn’t mean you have to give up butter. Here’s on great tip: Buy one of those little butter spray bottles and just spritz your vegetables before serving. You still get the buttery flavor without all the fat and calories.

2.  Speaking of spritz bottles, those salad dressing spritz bottles only have about 10 calories per spray, as opposed to say, Kraft’s Balsalmic Vinegrette dressing which comes in at a whopping 90 calories per 2 tablespoons, of which 65 calories are fat. Even if you switch to a lite version of this salad dressing, you’ll find it has 45 calories per 2 tablespoons, of which 36 are from fat.

Here is a healthy recipe for homemade Balsalmic Vinegrette that beats the bottled dressing in taste and calories.

Balsamic Dressing Recipe

Recipe Ingredients

1/4 c balsamic vinegar
1/4 c minced green onion
2 tbsp German-Style Mustard
1-1/2 tbsp Olive Oil
1 tbsp water
1 tsp Tarragon

Recipe Directions

Simply whisk ingredients together blended, then chill in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes.

Yield 3/4 cup dressing.

Nutrition per serving - 2 tbsp each

Calories 40
Carbohydrates 4 g
Sodium 1 mg
Fat 3 g

3.  Choose lean cuts of meat for healthier eating. Although lean cuts of meat are good for you, they can sometimes be tough. Marinade lean cuts of meat with lemon juice, orange juice or 7-Up to tenderize. Just put meat into tenderizer for about 30 minutes before cooking.

4.  For healthy eating, one easy tip is to choose whole wheat products instead of refined white flour. Use whole wheat noodles for spaghetti or whole wheat bread for sandwiches. Even kids don’t usually notice the difference. Brown always trumphs white if you wan to eat healthy. You can even find packaged rice dishes in brown rice versions now.

5.  Try serving veggies with healthy dips. Kids love dips and even adults appreciate the change of pace from steamed vegetables. Make your dips with low fat plain yogurt instead of sour cream or use fat free sour cream. The dips are still tasty but contain less fat and calories.

6.  Serve fruit for dessert for a healthy finish to each meal. Skip the sugary desserts for healthier eating. The daily recommended allowance of fruits and veggies is NINE servings. Having fruit for dessert is one way to meet that fruit requirement.

7.  Try fruity herbal tea for a healthier drink. Skip the soda and sugar filled drinks and switch to herbal tea or green tea with fruity flavors added. Herbal tea can be delicious and contains no calories. Try fruity rooibos iced tea. Even kids will love it. Green tea also is low in caffeine and contains lots of healthy antioxidants. If you need sweetener, try stevia, a natural plant sweetener which contains nothing artificial and zero calories.

8.  If vegeatbles sometimes seem too much trouble for healthy munching because you have to peel and cut them up, purchase the already peeled varieties, like peeled baby carrots. These have the same great nutrition. Organic baby carrots are even very easy to find these days. Another veggie healthy eating tip: If you make a salad or veggies for dinner, cut up some extra and stick into a zip loc sandwich bag for snacking the next day.

9. Speaking of snacks, nuts are an extremely nutritious snack. Nuts contain protein and heart healthy fats and studies show, eating nuts actually helps you lose weight. Add nuts to your salads or put some into a zip loc baggie and take them with you to work or for a pick-me-up while shopping. My 2 year old granddaughter would rather have sunflower seeds than just about any snack.

10.  Keep dried fruit bits around for snacking or for adding to salads or muffins. Dried fruits also count toward your daily fruit requirement. Cranberries make a welcome addition to any salad.

11.  Switch from white potatoes to sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes contain more nutrients and they are also lower on the glycemic index than white potatoes, meaning they don’t cause spikes in your blood sugar. You can roast sweet potatoes and serve just like white potatoes or steam, peel and mash, serving with a little cinnamon and a spritz of butter.

12. Try using more herbs and spices in healthy recipes and leave out the salt. There is lots of excess sodium in the foods we eat and it’s healthier to cut salt where you can. Cooking with herbs and spices makes foods tastier and they don’t add calories. Add most herbs about the last 5 minues of cooking to enhance taste.

13. Get creative! There are hundreds of healthy recipe sites on the internet, including healthy recipes. Whatever you’d like to cook, look for a healthy version of it or make your own healthy substitutions for high calorie, high fat ingredients. Healthy cooking can be fun.

Better yet, if you want the kids to eat healthy, have them help you shop for the ingredients and prepare the meal. They’ll be much more interested in eating foods they helped prepare. Remember, kids and grandkids are learning healthy eating habits from you while they are young so hopefully they will carry this way of eating over into adulthood.

These are just a few healthy eating tips for you and your family. Healthy eating doesn’t have to be difficult and once you get in the habit of thinking and being healthy, it becomes second nature.