Opinions: Proportion Control

I originally started this blog to help me plan meals for my family and keep track of the recipes. I'm thinking of trying something a little different now because 1. I'm quickly running out of meal ideas and 2. I'm being faced with a new challenge now.

My husband is by far the pickiest eater in the family. He says he wants to eat healthy, but when he is served a healthy meal he often turns up his nose. After some lengthy discussion (in Spanish the word discutir can mean discuss or argue, so lets just say we discussed in Spanish) he has conceded that he needs to learn about nutrition in order to appreciate the healthy meals, and I conceded that there is some room to consider individual tastes.

For now, I'll continue to post recipes, but I'll also give unsolicited advice about healthy eating habits. For the last six or seven years I have gradually (but apparently not gradually enough) made small changes to how our family eats as I have learned about nutrition from a variety of sources. My little brother has a t-shirt that says "Everything I say is fully substantiated by my own opinion," and I would say that is the best description for what I am about to embark on. I have no authority or formal training for anything I say, but if you want to save yourself six or seven years of figuring this out for yourself, you are welcome to my random nutritional thoughts.

Here is the first thing I'm teaching my husband: proportions. We went to www.mypyramid.gov and plugged in his info and it spit out his daily and weekly nutrition needs. I personally consider this website to be very dummied down, but since he was resisting other things I was doing, I thought it would be a good place to start. It is not just whether or not something is healthy, it is how much of it you eat. He loves his meat, and of course he'll dutifully eat his vegetables, but his proportions were flipped. It reminds me of restaurant proportions (let's not even mention restaurant portions...) which are usually huge amounts of meat and simple carbs, with maybe a spoonful of vegetables. Drowned in butter or salad dressing.

What your proportions should be (roughly) are half your dinner plate full of vegetables. I try to serve a salad and cooked vegetable every dinner to get us there. One quarter of your plate should be a whole grain. One quarter of your plate should be lean protein.

Of course if you have a casserole or wraps or something, you won't actually divide the food this way, but as you are making the casserole, you should adjust the amounts of the ingredients to these proportions.

And since we have many sizes of people in our family, you can adjust the size of the dinner plate, but the proportions should be roughly the same no matter the age.

If you don't believe me, check out mypyramid for yourself.