Many people find that it’s hard enough to manage their own diet plans, let alone having to deal with multiple types of diets in the same household. Due to the dramatic differences in many variations on diets, it’s sometimes impossible to come up with good meals and food ideas that will work for everyone in a single place.
In order to best accommodate different diet plans without totally breaking the bank, you’ll need to do some careful research. When it comes down to it, virtually every diet shares a few basic items that can be intermingled. These items can form the basis of your cooking and will provide a stable set of ingredients from which you can choose. Otherwise, you may have to get creative with your cooking or assign different family members to do different tasks in the kitchen.
Matching up Diets
Take the time to consider different requirements for the diets that are effective in your household. Better yet, have each of the family members share his or her particular diet with the other members of the family. This can help you to monitor each other and to watch out for temptation in the form of non-diet foods. It will also make sure that everyone knows the same basic foods that overlap between diets. If it’s helpful, create a small diagram or a chart to represent the different ingredients that are necessary for each diet. Look for places that overlap; these will be the foods that you should focus primarily upon.
Setting Meal Times
Different diets have a unique set of meal requirements. Some recommend three meals throughout the day, some incorporate snacks and others use different meal spacing entirely. Take stock of the different times that each diet calls for meals as well as the relative size of the meal. If, for instance, one member of the family is supposed to eat five smaller meals per day, while everyone else should eat three standard sized meals, consider preparing one of the smaller meals in the form of a side dish or single item in the larger meal. That way, all of the other family members can enjoy their full meal while the last member has his or her partial meal at this time.
Flexibility
Above all, it’s important that everyone in the family be willing to be somewhat flexible. It is unreasonable to expect any single person to cook a set of meals that varies for each person. Make your best effort to come up with a dining strategy that will work to accommodate everyone and his or her different diet plan. However, if other people are unwilling to be flexible about this, be clear that they will have to do their own cooking and food preparation in order to meet their needs completely. Remember to be encouraging and helpful to each of the other people in your household while they work on their diets.
