I need help convincing my family to eat right.

Well I'm 16 years old and I'm living with a great family in a nice community, but I'm having problems with getting healthy meals into my rural family, and since in my house all the food is prepared by mom (only dinner though, breakfast is a fend for yourself thing and lunch is left for the school) and if everybody wont eat it, including my brother who only drinks nothing but soda and eats nothing but grease, then it wont be fixed. I dont know how to convince my entire family to see my way, sepecially since I'm not usually a confontive person and it's 4 against 1 on this subject.

Can anyone help me? And does anyone have any sudgestions on family healthy meals?

Well you could ask your Mom to buy Whole Wheat instead of White... Whole Wheat Pasta, Bread, Rice...

Convince your family to cook more Grilled Chicken/Salmon (Or any fish really...)

Ask for a side of veggies with meals... Green Beans, Peas, Steamed Broccoli... Or other healthy sides like Black Beans, Kidney Beans, etc... All sorts of choices...

And since your entire family has to agree to eat whatever's cooked... Why don't YOU disagree? Refuse to eat the unhealthy crapola...

At 16 you're in a pretty tough spot to have much say in family dinners. Maybe you could suggest that you're old enough to help out in the kitchen department ~ give mom a break. Then you could prepare something  you feel would be more healthy. You can find lots of healthy meals online. I'd suggest you try to use foods they're used to (if it's beef every night don't jump right to tofu) I'll bet if you prepare somethings they're used to along with some different, more healthy foods in the same meal, you could slowly introduce differnt options that they'll learn they like as well as grease and soda. Good luck! It is a big task for anyone to try to convince others they might need to make a change, but especially daunting for someone your age.

Volunteer to help with the cooking.  A lot of time people cook unhealthy meals because that's what they've learned.  I can pretty much guarantee you if you approach the subject in terms of "Mom, your cooking sucks, can't you do better," the backlash will be unpleasant.  But if you tell her you're interested in eating healthier and would like her help learning how to cook healthy meals, she might be more willing to get on board.  Most moms would be very receptive to a 16-year old daughter suggesting she wants to learn something!  ;-)

All good advice.


One more thing though...maybe you should let your family in on some cold hard facts...like the number of men and women that die every year due to heart diesese that things like grease and soda cause. Give them a wakeup call.