With the start of 2018, I set out to make healthier decisions for my family, to transform our wellness together. Less Goldfish crackers and more apples is a simplified version of my plan. I wanted to start incorporating more “real” food into our diet. Growing up, we were the family who didn’t have any good snacks. You know, the Pepsi, Oreos, Cheetos, etc that all our friends had. Same holds true for Matt’s family. He comes from a family of four boys and his parents cooked every meal for them, a lot of times from scratch! So we are going to try and spend more time in the kitchen together, cooking our meals and making great homemade snacks.

Here are three things that we’ve done to change our eating habit for the better.

Meal Planning

In the beginning, the one thing that I noticed was kind of a problem was the cost of eating healthier. Fresh fruits and vegetables are not always cheap, especially when we don’t use them soon enough and they go to waste. That’s the easy thing about pre-packaged or frozen, they have a long shelf life. Not the best but good enough I guess. However, I didn’t want to fall back into our old habits, so I decided to find a meal planning app that would cater to our needs. Just help us plan our meals and create our grocery list with the exact ingredients we need for the week.

We stumbled upon Plan to Eat. I gave it a try for 30 days and fell in love! After the 30 day period, it’s $5 monthly or you can sign up for a yearly subscription for $39 a year. As I found recipes, I’d import them into the app (this process is extremely easy, this is the main reason I love the planner). You plan your week with the recipes you’ve saved and it would create a grocery list for us to shop for only the items we needed. This saved us tons of time and money. We were only buying what we needed. We also were not wasting any food. It’s brilliant.

Eating more whole foods

Planning our meals has also contributed to us eating better. For example, on Mondays, we have fish and salad. Last year, we’d always be missing one or two ingredients to make a salad, so it turned into us just making quesadillas. Now, we both love quesadillas but having them 3-4x a week was not a good meal plan.

There were a lot of changes that we needed to make. Everything from cooking my own black beans to making Sebastian’s Applesauce. I wanted to know what we were putting into our bodies. The main goal was to start eating less packaged and processed foods and more fruits, veggies and whole grains. We started with small changes. Things I knew I could easily manage.

I’ve been following a lot of vegan bloggers on Pinterest and Instagram. They eat plant-based diets and I get a lot of inspiration from their posts. A few of my favorites are Loni Jane Instagram, Forks Over Knives app, Minimalist Baker Blog and Goop.com. Goop’s Instagram Stories are my current favorite to watch and read on Instagram. They always have quality articles with insightful information. Brings me to my next source of inspiration, The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living like the World’s Healthiest People. I discovered this book on Goop.com and it’s changed the way I look at wellness.

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Cooking Together

This has been the neatest part of this whole wellness transition. We are in the kitchen so much more, cooking together and preparing one of our new recipes. We love cooking with Sebastian. It get’s messy…really messy. But I love getting him involved and seeing his face as we go. He loves pouring in all the ingredients and using the kitchen appliances. As we cook (or bake) we talk about the week, upcoming trips and other things we want to try for the following week. It’s a great way to spend time together and communicate with no distraction of the phone or computer. Oh, one other really cool things about cooking regularly is that it forces you to get creative so you start to try new things, which is fun.

We made Aimee Song’s famous Raw Bar and they were delicious. Here’s the recipe we used to create the bars.

Our dining set in the kitchen is by Rove Concepts! If you have been following us for a while, you are probably aware of how great of a brand they are. How cute are the wishbone chairs! They fit perfectly with the kitchen and big open windows. Love how it pairs with the marble top dining table. Couldn’t be happier with how the dining set turned out! Makes it so nice cooking together in the kitchen! The sectional you see in all our inside photos is from Rove as well. We love it! Oh, and Rove is having a site-wide 15% off sales happening right now! Check it out here.

Hope everyone had a beautiful Easter! We spent the weekend in St. Louis to celebrate Matt’s birthday and enjoy time with his family on Easter. Sebastian loves his cousins!

Thanks for reading!

xo, Olivia

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