Treat your food like its your job

Several years ago I read the statement that if we treated our daily food intake like it was our job we would all eat healthier.  That really struck a chord in me and I realized that I had slacked off in the food department for myself and my family.   Working outside all day teaching PE in the hot Florida sun makes a person tired and the last thing on my mind was going home and preparing dinner.  The man of the house was starting up a new business so he was working all the hours he could to build the business, our children were 5 and 7,too young to be able to prepare much, and I lacked the patience to engage them in the kitchen after working all day.  For someone who had made her own baby food and obsessed about her children's  food in their first 3 to 4 years, I had fallen off the wagon, hard.
Reality gets in way of healthy eating sometimes and prepared food are an easy option to turn to for busy parents, but it is not the healthiest of choices for our families.  After read John Robbins "Food Revolution" in 2006 I made decisions to get back to planning meals each week, taking on the task of shopping with a more critical and careful eye and getting my whole family involved in the food process. That means when I ask for meal ideas, everyone has to contribute, my husband and both kids.  We now have a list of meals that everyone enjoys and we  posted it in the kitchen so we can pull from that list.
Now I make a concerted effort to prep food over the weekend so that when I come home during the week, what I need to finish a meal is done and can be quickly put together.  Crock pot meals have been a wonderful way to ensure that tasty meals await us when we walk in the door.  The book "Make it fast, cook it slow" is an awesome book with great crock pot meals, plus the author gives the verdict of how her family felt about the meal....talk about the perfect book for me!
Treating the food my family and I eat like a job made me focus on the bad food habits we were developing and  helped me clean up what food came in the house and how it was prepared.  Putting your own self under the microscope is hard, but in that one line,"Treat the food you eat like it is your job" I understood that I had relied on other people to do that job, and that was not what I wanted. 5 years later, we eat cleaner, we all contribute to the meal process and we all understand that it is our job to choose good healthy food.  Wow, talk about getting a lot of bang for your buck on one line!