Here is a list of all the things I do that make me mean:<\/p>\n
1. I don’t buy white bread and if a sandwich is purchased in my presence, it’s gonna be on something whole grain.<\/p>\n
2. We only have dessert once a week, on Friday nights. Birthdays, holidays, and times when there are guests may be exceptions to this rule.<\/p>\n
3. I don’t keep snacky things like chips in the house. There are exceptions: twice a week my son gets PopChips<\/a> in his lunch — they have a gram of fiber and aren’t high fat. We keep Lundberg<\/a> Organic Sesame Tamari rice cakes and Newman’s Organics<\/a> high-protein pretzels. The former are kind of rationed because Son and Husband will eat a whole package in a sitting. Nothing, though, that’s bright orange or contains non-food items is in my pantry for snacking.<\/p>\n 4. I only let Son buy lunch once a week and insist he has salad at that meal. He’s pretty good about that.<\/p>\n 5. We don’t eat fast food. We typically try to stick to no more than one meal out (or taken out) per week, and if we are going for a burger, it’s usually a trip across the lake for the best burgers in the Seattle area: Red Mill<\/a>, or in a pinch, Kidd Valley<\/a>. The usual fast food joints don’t offer me anything I want to eat for my money. I’d rather pay more and get Food. That probably not only makes me mean, but a snob.<\/p>\n 6. Even the good stuff I get is tainted by being organic. Apparently, neighbor kids don’t like to come here for snacks because my granola bars say organic, which apparently means lentil-flavored.<\/p>\n 7. I insist on whole wheat pasta.<\/p>\n 8. I hide my stash of dark chocolate chips. That’s because I can eat a handful and put the rest away. I don’t eat spoonfuls of (organic) sugar or entire packages of other sweet food. Unlike some people in my house, nor do open packages say to my brain that they must be finished. Now.<\/p>\n 9. When someone is hungry a half hour before dinner, I tell them to eat a piece of fruit.<\/p>\n 10. I talk about appropriate portions and serve them on plates in the kitchen. Salad is the only food that’s on the table family style.<\/p>\n 11. No soda in the house. I used to buy this stuff called NutriSoda by a company called AirForce Soda, but they’re no longer in business. One local store has a few dozen cans left that are of the decaffeinated variety and I’ll probably buy them out. We have about 40 cans in the garage. We each get one a day. They’re 8 ounces — a reasonable serving size — and don’t have scary artificial sweeteners. They also have some vitamins and minerals, but that doesn’t matter. Soda is soda — it’s a daily treat type thing for us.<\/p>\n 12. Juice isn’t a substitute for soda. Son drinks two glasses of calcium-fortified orange juice a day (he’s not a milk lover). Otherwise, drink water. I’d let him have iced tea if he liked it, but he’s not interested in tea, black or green (tastes like straw, says he about the latter — and I agree).<\/p>\n 13. If he doesn’t eat what’s on his plate, he doesn’t get a snack later — no redos for dinner. Nor does he get the weekly dessert if he doesn’t eat protein and vegetable. Bread isn’t a substitute for a meal.<\/p>\n 14. I don’t buy regular jam except to mix with my lower-sugar home made jam. Mostly because the aforementioned discussions of portion size apparently don’t apply to jam. A peanut butter sandwich (of which my son can eat four or five on a big eating day) apparently needs about a quarter cup of jam.<\/p>\n 15. Other reasons which have yet to be imparted to me.<\/p>\n I have to say that these things seem kind of familiar: I’m raising my son largely the way my mom raised my brother and me: that treats and desserts and restaurants are for special occasions, not a daily norm. I remember hating unrefined sugar (you needed a hammer to break it up in those days) and whole wheat bread. Now I prefer bread with substance to it. We always had salad. There was a rule that only two boxes of cereal could be opened at a time and none of those were sugary. Same rule applies here, but no one seems to mind that one.<\/p>\n So hats off to my mom for teaching me how to be a Mean Mommy. I do it with all the love in my heart and hopes that when Son is older, he’ll love healthy eating because that’s the way (Mean) Mom cooked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here is a list of all the things I do that make me mean: 1. I don’t buy white bread and if a sandwich is purchased in my presence, it’s gonna be on something whole grain. 2. We only have dessert once a week, on Friday nights. Birthdays, holidays, and times when there are guests…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,17],"tags":[775,98,154,161],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-heatlh","tag-food","tag-health","tag-parenthood","tag-pop-chips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}