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First, an acknowledgment that feel good foods may not even be part of your current lexicon. After all, we’ve been taught to think of things as healthy, delicious, nourishing, and indulgent. But what about the spot where food you love intersects with food that makes you feel good? That’s where you’ll find feel good foods!

In today’s post, I’m going to be sharing all about what feel good family food means and why you should care about this if you’re a busy parent who aspires to feed your family better.

Ready? Let’s dive in.

What are feel good foods?

Feel good family food = Feel Good Process + Feel Good Choices + Feel Good Eating

Want to know exactly what each of these means? Here we go:

Feel Good Process

Let’s start off with feel good process because that’s where feeding your family well really begins. After all, if there isn’t healthy food in the house, then there isn’t going to be healthy food on your plate.

The reality of feeding a family is that there’s planning, shopping, and, yes, even cooking oven involved. But the good news is that you don’t have to love cooking or be an avid Food Network viewer to get a nutritious meal on the table.

For me and my clients, one of the most important pieces of the process of feeling good about feeding your family is in being realistic about where you’re at. This applies to so much of healthy living – until you get real with yourself about where you’re at, you may be focused on what other people tell you is important rather than what’s ACTUALLY important to you.

Being realistic might mean that you don’t always cook from scratch and that getting dinner on the table looks different every night based on your time, energy, and schedule.

Key to having a realistic process are:

• Creating a clear and realistic menu plan
• Making sure you have a thorough shopping list so that you’re not scrambling for ingredients
• Having solid back up meals for nights when cooking really isn’t going to happen

Here are some examples of back-up meals my family loves:

• Veggie-packed meatballs that are made ahead and frozen + Rao’s tomato sauce + brown rice or chickpea pasta
• Trader Joe’s orange chicken with half the packaged sauce + frozen brown rice mixed with cauliflower rice + frozen broccoli

Strategies like this are so awesome because once you have them they are always in your back pocket. The ingredients are really easy to keep on hand and having them stocked means that you can very easily ebb and flow with your energy and capacity on a nightly basis without sacrificing a balanced meal.

Feel Good Choices

Feel good choices are the next element of feel good foods.

Perhaps you’ve had this thought: I want to feed my family healthy food but the information on what’s actually healthy is changing all the time. Or maybe I want to feed my kids veggies but they don’t eat them so I just stopped serving them.

These are the kinds of things that I hear all the time that lead parents down the path of relying on processed, kid-friendly favorites like goldfish, chicken nuggets, and Mac n cheese. It’s not that these foods don’t ever show up at my house or that they don’t have a place in yours. However, I can tell you from experience that finding a balance that works for you and your family goes a LONG way to stopping the worry and guilt that many parents feel around feeding their family.

I make feel good choices for my family with two things in my mind:

•  Those choices are mostly in alignment with general good nutrition (whole grains, low in processed sugars, overall balance) aka I feel good about feeding them to my family
• Those choices feel good to my family members when they eat them – this is where food allergies or sensitivities come in.

Both my boys struggle with constipation when they have too much dairy. This means that a feel good choice to us means 1-2 servings of dairy per day max. An easy way to control this has been to monitor their overall intake and do not drink cow’s milk.

For you, it might be something completely different.I want to help you navigate those choices with where you’re at.

If food allergies are something you struggle with you may want to go back and listen to my convo with Kathlena, the Allergy Chef, in Season 1 of the podcast. You can find it here.

Feel Good Eating

Feel good eating is pretty simple: you eat food you enjoy and you enjoy doing it.

The reality is that as a parent this isn’t as much of a given as it might sound like. Who of us hasn’t sat at the table and asked our kids to taste one bite of something…over and over and over.

Letting go of food battles can be so hard for parents because we see nourishing as part of our job. But if we want to help our kids (and partners) build long-term healthy relationships with food, letting them explore food without pressure is one of the best gifts that we can give them.

At this point in my life, I refuse to eat anything I don’t love. That may sound dramatic but that doesn’t mean it’s all Doritos and Sour Patch kids (though I do love those foods). It does mean that I work really hard to find and share recipes that will nourish my family and that we will really enjoy eating.

For me, eating well is the intersection of food you love and food that makes you feel good:

When it comes to dinner-table dynamics, there are so many considerations like:

• How do you end food battles?
• Do you enjoy your time together?
• Can you reclaim dinner-time?

If this feels like a longshot, I totally understand. But don’t despair!

We’ll be talking about feeding dynamics in future episodes. But in the meantime, here are some awesome conversations that we had in season 1:

• Turning Picky Eating Around with Natalia Stasenko
• So you wanna raise an adventurous eater? with Melanie Potock

Next Step: Defining Feel Good Foods for Your Family

Ready to take the first step in embracing feel good foods for your family? Cool. I have a little exercise for you.

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to pick 3-5 words to describe your family’s realistic and ideal way of eating.

For my family it’s: whole, real, and unprocessed (most of the time).

Need some help in defining yours? I’ve created a short worksheet with some suggested words that you can use. Download it here:

 

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When you’re done, hop on over to Instagram and let me know what words you picked! You can message me here.

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