Healthy Living on a Budget: The Move to Whole Grains

In the coming months, my goal is to slowly share with you our journey to Living Healthy on Our Budget! One of the key things I have learned about changing your lifestyle is that it needs to take place with small steps in order for it to stick around. If I came in and cleared our cabinets of processed food, artificial colors and flavors, and then replaced it with all natural and organic products, our cubbards would be bare!  I have learned that in order to change our lifestyle, I need to have patience and take it a little each day. I can’t afford to just all the sudden replace everything with organic. But, more importantly, I want to know why I am replacing every item for my family.

Educate Yourself
One of my reasons for breaking this down into smaller bites is to let you see that every time you make a change you need to know why.  There is no way I could educate myself properly, if we changed everything all at once.  By moving slowly and picking the things that are easy first, I am able to be more educated and determine the changes that will work best for my family.  I don’t think it will make sense for my family to ever go fully organic or all natural, however I hope someday if it fits our lifestyle, we can do it. By taking it slowly, there is a higher chance of that happening.

Our Move to Whole Grains
With all that to say, the first place I began to focus on a few years ago was to slowly move us to whole grains. I grew up eating whole grain breads, so that was easy, we were already doing it. So next I started replacing our enriched white pasta, with more whole grain options. At first my husband really didn’t like the whole grain pasta, and we were eating more pasta on a regular basis at that time. To make the transition easier, I starting doing half white and half wheat and that seemed to work better.  I still serve some white enriched pastas, but my goal is to stick with the whole grain options.

The next place I started introducing whole grains was in my baking recipes; like pancakes, waffles, muffins and homemade pizza crust.  Later in the series we will even talk about using fresh milled grain, buying grains in bulk and using a grain mill! I will be learning more about that this week , and I am so excited to get educated on it and share with you what I find out.

So, have you made the move to whole grains?  Why or why not? Or, what was your first healthy living move? Leave us a comment and tell us about your experiences.

Up next in the Healthy Living on a Budget Series…Must Reads on Healthy Living.