Nation­al Nutri­tion Month

March is Nation­al Nutri­tion Month, and this year our well­ness chef has a chal­lenge. Every year Nutri­tion Month has a theme, and this year is eat­ing healthy bite-by-bite. This can mean eat­ing one more piece of fruit a day, look­ing more close­ly at labels, or in this case, eat­ing out less fre­quent­ly. Prepar­ing foods at home can not only help us to have bet­ter vari­ety, but also to eat foods with less sodi­um and sat­u­rat­ed fats.

Meet the Chef

Sier­ra Peters is a well­ness chef and mom of three lit­tle ones, and even she got tired of the ​“we have food at home” talk. The chal­lenge was born after hear­ing her kids say that there was NOTH­ING to eat at home and also because eat­ing out gets pret­ty pricey!
Sier­ra was more than will­ing to talk about the chal­lenge and what it means to her family.

“I want to fuel their lit­tle bod­ies and minds with good, nutri­tious foods. We need­ed a reset.”

Enter The Pantry Chal­lenge. The three biggest rea­sons for this were:

1. Take time off from spend­ing or reassess­ing your gro­cery bud­get.
2. Reduce waste, clear out old food, and rotate your inven­to­ry.
3. Reset and learn to be more mind­ful of what you are eat­ing and buy­ing, cre­at­ing health­i­er and hope­ful­ly long-last­ing habits.

The Rules

The over­all goal of a pantry chal­lenge is sim­ple — to go a set amount of time, or as long as you can make it, on just the food you already have in your pantry, refrig­er­a­tor, and freez­er. Sier­ra not­ed that, for them, this meant: ​“No trips to the gro­cery store, no deliv­ery of meals or gro­ceries, and no Thrive Mar­ket.”

She attempt­ed this for two-three weeks and took it as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to clear out all of the extra stuff that had accu­mu­lat­ed over time and replace it with more healthy and nutri­tious options.

“We tru­ly don’t have a lot of what I would con­sid­er junk food, so it shouldn’t be a dif­fi­cult tran­si­tion for us,” she said.

The Results

Day one was spent clean­ing out the panty! She cat­e­go­rized items by: what was near expi­ra­tion, what could be used, and the basics. Sier­ra did report going to the store this one day to get about $40 of sta­ples and addi­tion­al items she may need for the next few weeks; after all the goal is to make health­ful foods from pantry items.

She found that it is amaz­ing how many recipes could be made out of pantry sta­ples. Health­ful yet inex­pen­sive foods, such as whole grains, low-sodi­um canned and frozen veg­eta­bles, and eggs are easy to keep on hand and make deli­cious meals the whole fam­i­ly can enjoy. Over­all, Sier­ra reports this was a great expe­ri­ence and some­thing that helped her fam­i­ly have a fresh start and save mon­ey over the next cou­ple weeks.

Can you han­dle this challenge?