Aim for a balanced family breakfast of carbohydrates, protein and fat to help maintain blood sugar levels and delay hunger until it’s time for lunch or mid-morning snack.
Hand out paper and colored pencils or crayons and have each person draw three activities her or she enjoys doing with a parent or grown-up. Grown-ups can draw or write a list of activities they enjoy doing with family members. Compare lists and drawings to create personal activities for your family. Plan to celebrate these activities together often.
Consider a physically active family holiday, weekend, or vacation. You might spend a weekend, or vacation. You might spend a weekend on a cycle tour, a walking tour, even camping or back packing.
Develop a list of all the wildlife (animals) you may see in your community. Go for a walk as a family and see if you can find your list of wildlife near your home or on a family hike.
Check out your cabinets! Pull out some food items that have nutritional labels and sit down as a family to review the serving sizes of each item. Have each person locate the serving size on one item and then use measuring cups to get a visual idea of how much food it actually is. Once you've done this, discuss how many servings of each food you normally eat. Is it 2 or 3 servings? More? Write down the number of servings you normally eat and go back to the label to figure out your intake of fat, fiber, sugar, etc. For example, if one serving contains 4 grams of fat, and you normally have 4 servings, that means the total intake of fat is (4 x 4) 16 grams of fat. You can do this activity with all the food items in your cabinet and refrigerator.
Lie down in the grass or watch the clouds out the window. Describe to each other all the shapes you see in each cloud. Do you see a butterfly, a piece of fruit or a lamb?
Decorate special water cups or bottles for the family (everyone gets his or her own bottle). Use markers, crayons, colored pencils, stickers, glitter and glue, or whatever you like. Rinse out or wash water cups as a family in the evening and let them air dry over night. Fill up your colorful water cup and enjoy water all day long.
We are a blended family with three boys, ages 12, 13, and 16 years old. Our popular family activity is called "Comedy Night". The three boys will turn the family room into a comedy night club with a stage and microphone and then perform funny skits and comedy acts. We all end up having lots of fun and lots of laughs.
- Lawrence & Priest Family, Santee, CA
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Create “date nights” for each kid and grown-up. On a regular schedule, one or both grown-ups should take each child out for a one-to-one activity (maybe to a movie or out to dinner). This simple time together will mean a great deal too both parties.
For fun ask “where's dinner” meaning where shall we eat tonight?
It could be on the porch or the patio, on the stairs or the family room floor as if an indoor picnic.
Consideration of what types of food to be served is important. With chairs and blankets make a tent and pretend you are far far away and describe what it's like where you are and what "foods" you're having there. Ask questions like is it sandy, hot or cold, any animals lurking around?
- Rubio Family, Avon, IN
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Go for a walk together in the morning before school or work, or make it an after-dinner walk.
Designate one evening a week a family activity night. Go bowling, swimming, roller skating, or play ping pong, tennis, basketball, etc. You can even take a class involving physical activity. Find something everyone likes or will try or is interested in practicing.
Create a family council, give everyone a position, you could have president, secretary, treasurer, vice-president, etc. These “chairs” could be voted on weekly or monthly to allow for everyone to be in a different position. Keep a Family Council Record book and take minutes each week when the family council convenes. Have someone prepare a fun and interactive agenda.
Set up a badminton net in your backyard or at the park. Play badminton, or be creative and make up your own game (for example, your own version of volleyball, keep the ball off the ground, etc.).
Design a family obstacle course. Set up various stations, and be creative in the types of activities at each one. You might try hula hoops, jump rope, push ups, abdominal crunches, jumping jacks, lunges, squats, marching in place or wall sit. Set a timer and have family members move around to each station and perform the activity for 1 minute. Increase the time by 30 seconds as the family begins to master each station.
Get together as a family and create a hand signal or gesture that you can use in public to silently tell each other that you love one another. For example, your signal could be to gently squeeze one another's hand 3 times which means “I Love You”. The whole family will enjoy keeping this special secret and even teenagers will find it useful for telling their family how they feel without being “embarrassed” in front of others.
- YMCA of the USA Family
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Family’s Healthy Recipe Collection
Make your own family healthy-recipe book:
• Sit down as a family and look through magazines, cookbooks, or Web sites to find new healthy recipes.
• Take favorite family recipes and chance them to reduce fat, salt, and sugar content.
• Swap healthy recipes with relatives, friends and neighbors.
Combine all the recipes gathered into a notebook or a box. Get creative and decorate it with drawings, stickers, or glitter.
Decorate a jar using tissue paper and glue, inside the jar or container place a variety of topics that the family comes up with (movie title, book title, play title, TV show, quote or phrase), every night there is a family meal, someone can draw from the jar and engage the family while performing gestures
To indicate Categories use the following hand gestures:
Book title - Unfold hands as if they were a book
Movie Title - Pretend to crank an old-fashioned movie camera
Play Title - Pretend to pull the rope that opens a theater curtain
Song Title - Pretend to sing
TV Show - Draw a rectangle to outline the TV screen
Quote or Phrase - Make quotation marks in the air with fingers
Make up your own family gestures and “inside” lingo to have more fun each time you play charades
Decide as a family the # of vegetable servings everyone will have every day. The recommended amount varies depending on the organization. According to www.mypyramid.gov the range from children up to adult men is 1 ½ - 3 cups a day. Use this range as a guideline to determine your family's Veggie Challenge goal. This challenge will take menu planning, grocery store planning, and family time to help everyone achieve the goal of eating more veggies. This may mean having veggies at breakfast! Kids be creative and think of what veggies at breakfast might look like.
• Omelet with peppers and onions
• Tomato and cheese on whole wheat toast
• Egg and veggie burrito (tomato, salsa, peppers, onions, squash)
• ¾ cup of low-sodium vegetable juice
• Whole wheat bagel with low-fat cream cheese and cucumbers/tomatoes
Have family members make over their favorite meal recipe to add healthy ingredients or healthy preparation methods and pick a special night each week to present the “fave” meal. Maybe every Thursday night is “Favorite Meal Night” and you rotate as a family who's recipe/meal will be prepared, older kids can do the preparation and even serve the meal. Pick a meal time that works for the whole family.
Play a game of tag. The rules are that you must call out the name of a fruit or vegetable before sitting down to prevent being tagged, and you can't use any name that has already been called out. You may have to get creative (star fruit, kumquat, zucchini, jicama, pineapple, avocado, papaya) to avoid being tagged.
Have all family members identify their favorite fruit, draw pictures of them or write them down and make one list. Then, fill a bowl or basket with those fruits and make it a “family fruit bowl” and keep it on the table, counter or in the refrigerator. This way, everyone in the family will have easy access to their favorite fruit when they're looking for a snack.
Explore a little something different for a fun meal; add fresh cooked or canned pumpkin to your favorite pancake batter.
No, not that kind of pie, but pizza pie. Order your pizza with extra sauce, easy on the cheese, meat-free and with extra vegetables (broccoli, tomatoes, green peppers, onions, spinach, artichokes, etc.). Be creative. Some pizza parlors even offer a whole wheat crust.
Make your own food chart (plate guidelines). On a piece of paper, draw a large circle or trace a dinner plate, to represent a plate. Then draw lines through the plate to divide it into 4 equal pie-shaped sections. One-half (two of the sections) should be for fruit and vegetables. Draw and color some of your favorite fruit and vegetables in this section. One-quarter (one section) should be for starch and grains (rice, pasta, and bread). The last quarter should be for lean protein (nuts, fish, cheese, meat, and poultry). Once your chart/plate is complete, draw a few of your favorite foods in the places they belong.
Serve dinner using only measuring spoons and/or cups. This way everyone will be able to measure out the portions on their plates. It's a good way to become more aware of how much food you serve yourself and others. Did any amounts surprise you? Was it hard to measure any of the foods at the meal?
Start a healthy habit for the whole family: designate Saturday mornings (or any other time that works for your family) as “family walk time” and get moving together.
It's easy to add veggies! Fill your soups, stews, or chili with more vegetables by adding a bag of mixed frozen vegetables. You can even try pureeing vegetables so they'll blend in better - and you might not even know they're there. Add sprouts, cucumbers and tomatoes to sandwiches. Dip blanched (slightly cooked) or raw vegetables in hummus for a tasty snack.
Kids ask a grown up to help you. Cut a one-gallon plastic jug (like a milk jug) in half horizontally. Recycle the bottom half of the jug, but save the top half with the handle and keep the cap. Grown-ups cover the cut edge of the jug with duct tape. Cut and decorate a jug for everyone in the family.
Now two or more family members can play together using the jugs to toss a tennis ball or beanbag back and forth. See if you can toss and catch without touching the ball with your hands. In the warmer months try tossing water balloons back and forth. The jug can also be used by one family member, toss the ball in the air and catch it using the jug, see how many successful tosses and catches you can make in a row.
Sign up for a class as a family - it could be a dance, science, Italian, craft or art class. Make sure the class meets far enough away from home to allow time to talk to each other along the way to and from class.
Plan a weekly family breakfast (or other outing) in which you are the transportation. Skip the car, bus, or train and ride bikes, walk, or jog/run. Make getting there a physical activity.
Schedule a monthly downtown lunch date. Go to a special place for a meal, or just go for a walk to the bagel store or walk to the park and share a picnic together.
Keep a log of family time spent together each day. Record who was there, what you did, and what you talked about. At the end of the week, go over the log as a family. You might be surprised at how easy (or how difficult) it was to find time to be together. If you continue to keep a log, it might help you to schedule more time together as a family.
Create a nonverbal communication system for your home. You can make and decorate a special mailbox and use it to leave personal notes for each other on a daily basis. The notes can express encouragement and support, or they can be about something that is causing anxiety or concern, but you are not comfortable talking about. They can be about anything at all. Keep the mailbox in a safe and common area. The mailbox can be decorate with magnets, family members' names, pictures of animals that represent each family member, or whatever you like. Use your imagination!
Set aside at least 10 minutes of “special time” for each kid every night at bedtime. Use this time to read, talk about the day or sing a song together.
Sit down as a family for breakfast and measure out the cereal poured into each person's bowl. Before measuring, guess how many servings are in your bowl. Remember the recommended amount of cereal flakes (1 serving) is 1 cup - about the size of an average fist.
Each Sunday evening, we buy homemade ingredients and make a pizza from scratch. We also have a salad and a healthy dessert like Kraft Jello Fat Free Chocolate pudding. We take turns picking out a family movie that we will watch when we eat pizza.
- Moorhead Family, Atlanta, GA
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Pick a fresh or frozen fruit to add to cereal, pancakes or oatmeal and sneak some color in today.
Pick a new or different fresh or frozen vegetable and add to spaghetti sauce, casseroles, or slower-cooker/crock pot dishes.
See how much color you can sneak into your next meal.
After family dinners (other meals), turn on music and dance, play musical chairs, or make up a family dance routine/skit that you practice a couple of evenings a week.
Sundays in our house are deemed No-Electronic Sundays. No screen time-for anyone! A lot more book reading and family or sibling games happen, and it's peaceful!
- Zalokar-Jones Family, Columbus, OH
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Have kids and grown-ups who like to sing and dance, practice and prepare a skit, and family members not interested in performing can act as judges, have kids make the awards, and little ranking or grading cards to be used after each performance
Judge new, rarely- or never-before-tasted foods (fruits, vegetables, healthy recipes, other healthy foods) by choosing 3 similar types of food and have family members rank them 1 for the best, 2 for good, and 3 for not as good. Count up all of the points for each food. The food with the most points is now the new “Food Idol” in your home for the week.
- Martin Family, Easley, SC
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Our Healthy Family Home Scrap Book
• start a scrap book to capture the family improving the home
• draw pictures of every one, include recent photographs if available
• begin capturing photos of the family cooking and eating together
• collect photos of family members participating in physical activity
• take a group/family photo every month and add to scrap book
Have a community garden host a Family Garden Club.
Park Play Day could include Kite-Flying, Kick-ball and Arts n Crafts.
Park Arts n Crafts portion could include families making row markers for the vegetable garden.
- Thomas Family, Detroit, MI
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Planning a Physical Activity Based Birthday Party (not just for kids, grown-up birthday's can be celebrated with physical activity too)
• goodie bags contain jump ropes, rubber balls, Frisbees
• using kids's or grown-ups favorite character as a means of playing a game of tag, run through a sprinkler, play in a pool or at a play ground, play in the snow or sledding, bike rides, relay races
• serve a healthy meal (offer salads, fruit and vegetables, veggie pizza w/easy cheese, whole wheat pasta w/sauce, decorate your own lean hamburgers (or turkey) use whole wheat buns and have lots of toppings lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, avocado, cucumbers, spinach leaves), or have healthy snacks available and then enjoy the cake. Low fat cake/dessert options, low fat cupcakes (made w/apple sauce instead of oil), angel food cake, low fat yellow cake with fresh fruit, fresh fruit parfaits
Create a portion-size reminder card. Use some card stock or heavier paper and draw the following portions. Pictures and numbers will help to remind you of serving sizes. For example:
3 oz. serving of meat, fish or poultry is about the size of a deck of cards
1 ½ oz. of cheese is the size of 4 stacked dice
1 cup of cereal or a baked potato is about the size of an average fist (adult)
Draw these items on your card and keep it handy at meal time.
Plan a small and personal field trip with your child somewhere you've both never been - for example, an aviation museum at the airport, the race track, a working dairy farm, or take a tour of your city's municipal water system. Pack a healthy sack lunch and enjoy the day together.
Parents, be spontaneous. One day, if you sense it would be fun and helpful for your child, take the day off from work and have a fun day together, at home. Stay in your pajamas, enjoy hot chocolate or a cup of soup together, and watch a movie. Make it a special day full of rest and relaxation.
Host a salad potluck in your own home. Put out bowls of healthy salad ingredients:
• chopped vegetables - onions, green or red peppers
• romaine
• cabbage
• sliced vegetables - cucumbers, beets
• garbanzo beans
• kidney beans
• sunflower seeds or other nuts
• shredded low fat cheese
Have family members build a salad from their favorite ingredients and experiment with one or two new toppings. Invite friends and neighbors to bring their own healthy salad versions and share your combinations.
Work and school during the week, so as a way to connect as a family early in the weekend try a fun Saturday in the park routine...pack a picnic breakfast (healthy food only!) and together as a family walk or ride bikes to the local park...at the park play, eat breakfast and enjoy this special time together...the park is usually not very busy early in the morning which adds to the fun! It is a great way to spend time together before busy weekend schedules and chores begin.
- Diamond Family, Raleigh, NC
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Scavenger Hunt in the Grocery Aisles
Have a grocery-store scavenger hunt. As you shop, find some of your favorite foods and check to see which items have 3 or more grams of fiber and less than 5 grams of sugar per serving. Those are the foods to gather in your cart. Challenge each other to find the most family favorites that meet this fiber and sugar amount.
Every evening while we are enjoying dinner together, which we do every night, we take turns in sharing "the best thing that happened to me today" and "the worst thing that happened". It is wonderful to hear what happened in everybody's day. And also to see that there are good and not as good things happening all the time. We stay very connected to each other through this family time activity.
- Jabs-Devins Family, Rochester, NY
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Take a family trip to the mall, but make it a rule that before you can go into a store, you must first walk a lap around the entire mall. Window-shop as you go.
Create a list of everyone in the family's favorite snacks, and modify the “not-so-good” choices as a family to make them a healthy snack
• plan for 1-2 healthy snacks per day
• have options (a variety) of foods available to make snacks
• prepare snacks ahead of time and divide into appropriate portion bags or containers
• create a grocery list that includes healthy snack ingredients for the entire week
Grown-ups, plan a surprise lunch at school. Visit the child's school, if possible, and have a fun healthy lunch with him or her.
Have everyone in the family grab their favorite sugar sweetened drinks or snack food and read the label to find out how much sugar is in a serving of each. Then, using a measuring spoon put the amount of sugar into a zip lock bag. (Hint: 4 grams of sugar = 1 teaspoon.) Mark each bag with the name of the drink/food and leave it out on the counter to remind everyone of just how much sugar they're getting each time they pour a glass of that beverage or grab a handful of that snack.
Play tennis ping pong with a volleyball, soccer ball, basketball, bouncy ball, etc. at a local tennis court. You could even draw a line (to replace a net) on the driveway if a tennis court is not available. Use your hands as paddles (carry it over or catch and throw, especially with the heavier ball) and follow ping pong rules. With the tennis court as the ping pong table the only exception to ping pong rules will be that you are able to stand on the ‘table'!
- Martin Family, Easley, SC
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Conduct your own family taste test. Make a meal you'd normally eat, but skip the salt, added sugar, or fat (substitute skim milk for whole or 2% milk; put 1/3 less sugar than what is called for; use low-fat cheese; use reduced-salt broth, etc.). Taste each dish to see if you can tell the difference. Use your taste buds to rate each dish.
Another option would be to serve a few things that have been altered (reduced fat or reduced sodium) and see if family members can determine which foods are “healthier” choices.
Search for a park or trail near your home and plan for a family hike. Pack a healthy sack lunch and make a day out of it.
Choose a theme for hiking/walking. Collect pictures of leaves, identify birds, or create a treasure map. Capture pictures of the family on a hike/walk; write down thoughts and stories from the hike/walk.
Wear a pedometer (a gadget that counts your steps) and track your movement. Everyone in the family can wear them and compare steps at the end of the day. Set goals or have contests. You may decided to give out prizes for the most steps in one day or one week.
Kids plan a treasure hunt for the family. Decide what the treasure will be, it could be a piece of fruit or a veggie, and then bury it somewhere in the house or the yard. Draw a treasure map. Then the family, working together from your map, will find the treasure.
Turn off the TV during family meal time. Give your time and attention to each other instead. Talk about the Healthy Family Home activities you did earlier that day.
Volunteering is Healthy for Everyone
Volunteer together somewhere that interest the whole family - maybe a local soup kitchen, a walk/race event, animal shelter, or an assisted living home.
Go for a family walk and every few minutes or at the end of each block perform an activity for one minute to increase everyone's heart rate. Try lunges, jumping jacks, mountain climbers or running in place.
Turn up the music and do chores together (clean the house, wash windows, laundry, etc.)
