This is part 2 of a very long post! If you haven’t, please read part 1 here
This week Brenda was doing the stairs at work and said she was able to do 5 flights before she had to stop for a minute, and that is up from 3 flights just a couple of weeks ago. She then did the other 9 flights. If you didn’t know, she works on the 14th floor at Intermountain Medical Center, and walking up the stairs is a good way for her to get some cardio in while she is at work. And these are not the standard flights of stairs, they are wider, a bit taller and about 3 stairs longer than a standard stair case.
We also had another nutrition class this past week, talking about planning out meals and making sure we are getting healthy ingredients to fill each meal with. The kids got to come to this class, or at least a parallel class that was taught by one of the dieticians from Primary Children’s hospital. They learned about the My Plate method of making sure you are getting the right portions of food at each meal, and then we all got together and planned out a week of meals.
And finally, Tuesday Brenda and I got to take a tour of Harmon’s Grocery store as part of the challenge. It was interesting to note that Harmon’s has 6 full time dieticians that rotate around their stores and are available to answer questions. You can even set up appointments for them to take you on your own grocery store tour and help you choose healthy options. Another great thing about Harmon’s (no they are not paying me to talk about them, but I would gladly accept donations if they did) is that on the shelves, they have green labels that say “Dietician’s Choice” under a bunch of products. These have been determined by the dieticians to be lower in sugars, sodium and high in protein or fiber, so they are good choices to grab if you are in a hurry.
For the tour, we talked about reading labels, and not only the nutrition information, but the ingredient lists as well. There is some sneaky marketing going on with food labels that you have to be careful of.
One of the most glaring examples that Brenda has found is with Whole Grain. In order for a manufacturer to be able to put Whole Grain on a package, there has to be Whole Grain in the product,*BUT* there only has to be something like .02% of a whole grain in the package. That is like .3 ounces of whole grain in a pound of product, and they can put made with Whole Grain on the package. We need to look for 100% whole grain on the labels. We also learned that we need to read the labels very carefully. We looked at Greek Yogurt, and one that said greek yogurt….style. It was basically regular yogurt that was thickened a little and didn’t have the protein and other good stuff that regular greek yogurt has. And then we were interviewed for a story on Fox 13. That should air on the 4:00 pm news on the 25th of May. **Update. this story showed up at noon on the 26th of May.**
We went home with a good understanding of what to look for in the store, as well as a good pat on the back for what we have been doing already by eliminating a lot of preservatives, trans fats, hydrogenated oils, and sugars. As well as other ingredients that are hard to pronounce, and therefore probably not something that we want to be eating. We have been working on eating cleaner and better overall for almost 7 years now, since Amelia’s kidney transplant. The docs told us we needed to do everything we can to help her kidney last, and we are getting a handle on it, but this challenge has really put the fire in the kids to eat more balanced meals and eat more vegetables. We are just lucky that they like their vegetables anyway, so that we can try some new and different things.
That’s all for this week, we will keep updating the microblogs over there to the left every few days! There will also be a link to the past contents of those coming soon.
Thanks for reading, any comments are appreciated down below!