Seniors Eat Cheaper & Better
Easy Healthy Meals
The truth of the matter is that some seniors eat cheaper and better than most with their easy healthy meals. Does this surprise you? Yes, I know, with all the propaganda and media lies about how most of them are undernourished and underfed. I read it, too; and I see the news blurps, and I’m sure it’s happening somewhere.
There is another side of that coin that doesn’t make the news, and doesn’t make “profitable programming” for the media. Here‘s easy healthy meals for seniors; and it’s not through Rachel Ray 30 minute meals or lean cuisine meals. Curious? Let me tell you a story.
In The Old Days . . .
The majority of seniors are still living in the same homes you have lived in all your lives, the homes you raised your families in, full of memories, love, tragedies, laughter, and great stories abound. Healthy living and a healthy heart were directly related to a good days work.
Only then could you partake of nourishing meals for a job well done at the end of the day; after producing and preparing those foods on your table. It was team work in motion. You worked the garden, you reaped from the garden. You worked hard, and you were healthy, and you ate what you raised and harvested, and they were easy healhty meals.
It is very basic nutrition knowledge, really. The harder you worked, the healthier your body, and the better your nutrition. There was more food to go around because everyone worked the land they owned. It didn't get much simpler than that, even though it was hard work.
Oh how we wish that were true today. Now the closest thing we have to it is known as “Whole Food Stores” and/or "Farmer's Market"; and how many senior citizens can afford what they have to offer on a regular basis?
How Our Grandparents Managed
More awe inspiring is to think about how our grandparents managed their lives. Most had big families like my grandmother who had 13 kids. How did she ever make it through the day?
What's really amazing is that she was also in the cotton fields all day with several of them either taking a nap on her sack, brief sessions of breast feeding, or picking cotton in the rows in front of her and leaving little piles for her to pick up; while working alongside the men and older children from dawn to dusk and beyond before preparing a home, food, and shelter for them all. I’d say this is multi-tasking like we will never know and the meals were easy healthy meals that everyone loved.
She was the sole-breadwinner for many years after my grandfather lost his eye sight. I wonder how much stress she felt and if she was ever overwhelmed with all her duties as a mother, a child of aging parents, a care giver to all, and a devoted wife, and the caretaker of their home, easy healthy meals, and senior living properties.
I’ll just bet she never got a sick day, a vacation, or a break from her reality, and I’ll bet she never asked for them, either. Heck, I can’t even ever remember my Grandmother having a headache! I can't even imagine. She was always just there; everything to everyone, and beyond. In a word, she was amazing!
We Got Buried In 4-Letter Words
Where did we go so wrong? What did we do to get so far out of whack? What happened to our values and our dignity? Where is our sense of pride? I think it may have gotten buried in 4-letter words. Words like lazy, easy, more, and fast. Is it any wonder that when we Google search healthy eating and weight loss, guess what the most expensive words are for advertising? “Weight Loss Surgery”.
Need I say more about what kind of society we have become? We have been tagged the “Sandwich Society” when we should have been tagged the “Quick Fix Society” or “Instant Gratification Society”. If we cannot attain instant gratification from anything we do, we lose interest and go where we can. Our attention span is shorter than a burnt candle wick.
We are definitely an impatient bunch. Throw caution to the wind, inject HCG for instant weight loss, Inject Botox for instant beauty, some would like an IV drip for massive doses of Starbucks for our "energy" fixes, take tons of supplements because it’s 'good' for us, and suck up as much diet soda as you can possibly get down, flavor your water with more salt and more sugar to maintain mineral balance, and on and on. You get the picture. Have you spent the same fortunes I have on all or some of this junk? Pathetic, aren't we? None of which is condusive to easy healhty meals.
Life Is Different Now
Life is different now and some of you relate exactly with what I mean; while others have no clue what I am talking about. The senior citizens of today don’t care about your 7 day meal planner, one meal a day diet, and your healthy weight loss meals. They work on easy healthy meals without spending too much time worrying about their nutrition. They know all about the importance of family meals; they have been there and done that! They still love it, but they are not going to sit around and wait for it to come. They are busy living life. They are seniors living it up!
Remember, that’s where most of you got your silver cooking pots and serving platters? Seniors don’t want to polish silver, iron irish linen napkins and table clothes any longer, stand over a hot stove for hours on end. They have no use for a formal dining room except a couple of times a year at best (unless it has been converted to a swanky office, a bar and pool table entertainment center, etc.).
The bottom line is in exploring senior eating habits; but how can you expect someone who has lived their whole life pretty healthy and on the go, to focus on lowering tryglycerides and sticking to a restricted calorie diet; when most of them have never even heard of the word cholesterol until the last few years? They can't be bothered. Just produce for them easy healhty meals at affordable prices.
New Age For Senior Living
It’s a new age for seniors living with easy healthy meals the easy way, literally. It seems to me, after thousands of dollars senselessly spent, there is a simple solution to our nutrition problem. Stop buying crap from foreign countries instead of working our land in producing for the US.
Stay out of the aisles of the grocery stores; shop the perimeter of the stores or find a Farmer’s Market somewhere and buy fresh what you need for the day from the farmers who ARE working their land. Then, prepare it simply, enjoy it immensely, work it off diligently, and relax with life a lot.
I don't know about other cities, but where I live we have orchards you can visit and pick your own fruit and vegetables. When you hold it in your hand you can actually smell it! How long has it been since you have actually smelled a fruit or vegetable? It has ripened on the vine; not picked green and stored forever, then presented to you as "fresh". Seniors buy these and make their own easy healthy meals.
The only additives needed are a sense of humor, a few good friends, a little culinary moxie, a good bottle of wine, an exciting delectable decadent dessert, a hearty appetite, lots of laughter, a pinch of folklore storytelling, and a bucket of unconditional love. Then repeat this on a daily basis.
There is a new breed of senior citizen. While you might occasionally indulge and save McDonald Happy Meal Toys for your grandchildren, and on a rare occasion eat a Weight Watchers frozen meal; you’d really prefer easy healthy meals that you don’t have to worry about or prepare. Simply stated, you want to experience life, not prepare for it.
Seniors Want To Experience Life
For example, when you are a child, you look forward to the swing hanging from the limbs of the old oak tree out back. When you are an adult, you push your children in that swing and take such joy in their fun. When you are a senior, you say, ‘what the heck’. You build a second swing next to it and take great joy in getting back into that swing next to your grandchild or significant other to have your own fun, too.
Life is too short to sit and watch. You must take part in life to thoroughly experience the joy. No one knows that more than seniors. You want the same approach with easy healthy meals. You have your own meaning and your own ideas about your health; and it usually starts and ends with a party, even if it's only for one or two. You want to be seen, and you want to be heard. So, what's wrong with that? Absolutely nothing!
Seniors like to socialize in the grocery stores, and store owners and managers know this. They cater to the needs of the seniors in many ways, but one in particular is having a “Senior’s Day” and lure the senior citizens in with a 5 – 15% discount off their grocery bill. It is usually one specific day of the week, like “Senior Wednesday”; and repeated every week on the same day. Sometimes they enhance the offer with lots of free tasting demonstrations of different food products the stores are promoting. There are always special incentives for seniors to prepare easy healthy meals.
Happy Seniors Congregate
You can always tell where the good food is being served or where the best discounts are, (or if you are a senior, where the parties are going to be later). There will be too many grocery carts to walk through, and too many happy seniors congregated in one small space all armed to attack if you are rude to them or try to break up their party.
This is not a good place to be if you are just shopping for a carton of milk and a loaf of bread on your way home and in a hurry. Seniors just don’t need to move that fast any longer, and they don’t believe you need to move that fast, either. So there is no reason to invade their space. It’s theirs for the time being. Don’t you get it?
For many of these seniors, this IS a party, and it may or may not be their dinner, at best it is easy healthy meals. They are dressed for the evening already. This is a great way to make new friends and visit with old ones. I have witnessed this personally and it has become a weekly fashionable event.
You can hear the most amazing stories by lurking somewhere in the next aisle out of sight and just listening to the laughter and gaiety that goes on here. While some are using this as their easy healthy meals, it most definitely is the preemptive setting for the cocktails and dancing that will follow.
It’s a refreshing change from the mom or dad with three or four kids trying to shop, talk to their best friends on the cell phones, while the kids push the carts into your heels racing them down the aisles, throwing things at each other, screaming because they got hit by something, or told no for the toy they wanted. I’ll listen to seniors any day! It doesn’t matter to me if they have a one meal a day diet, have a liquid meal replacement, or whatever they want to call easy healthy meals. I love seniors!
Whatever Seniors Call Easy Healthy Meals
The world has so many interesting and diverse seniors! We have a small neighborhood market in our community, and they run specials every day. About 3:00 every afternoon they have one location in the store (the same place every day) with marked down meats, prepared salads, prepared desserts, fruit, vegetables, beverages, etc. Everything you need to prepare special but easy healhty meals.
It’s a wonderful concept, because they keep everything fresh all the time in their store. The store is as consistent on timing as the seniors are in showing up. The stores break out the electric skillets, toaster ovens, juicers, and/or steamers for samplings and feedback. Most of the feedback goes to more of a “feed a friend” and tell me what you think than feedback to the store.
The samplings are dinner to some; and from this location you hear rumblings of where to go next. Today, are we going to the casino, the pub, the Elks Lodge, out dancing, to see a show, to watch a hockey game, or to Joe’s house for Canasta and Cocktails? Rarely do you hear the sounds of “no, I am going home”, unless your's is the designated destination and you have a following with you. No one just goes home alone. Not here, this is an independent seniors living large community.
Cheaper To Eat Out For Seniors
Senior Citizens are very important here, and they know it. Politicians buy their votes with special catered meals and parties at the senior living centers. If there is a holiday, either a political figure or a casino is hosting a party for seniors; and it always involves easy healthy meals and fun.
Most of the casinos and many of the restaurants make it cheaper to eat out than stay home and cook easy healthy meals with senior discounts and “reward” meals for playing the machines. Penny and nickle slot machines abound in Las Vegas.
While having a healthy heart is important to all seniors, and healthy living means they can have more fun; getting stuck on basic nutrition data is not what they have in mind when it comes to easy healthy meals.
And I defy you to go into a casino that doesn’t have Bingo. Senior eating habits are linked directly to their social calendar; nothing more, nothing less. It's a trend that is here to stay, keeping our seniors healthy and affording them to be the fun loving sexy senior citizens we have grown to know and love while enjoying easy healthy meals and each other!
Reminds me a little of something I read recently about Jack LaLanne. He was asked if he loved to exercise and he answered that he really hated exercise because it was hard to leave a warm bed and a hot woman to go to a cold gym. We have a healthy bunch of sexy seniors here, and they want you to know it, too.
They have much more to worry about than easy healthy meals! They are worried about how seniors live it up! The wheels are always turning! So if you happen to be visiting our city and come upon a Senior Xing sign, pay attention; you might hear the best story you have ever heard over some easy healthy meals and cocktails.
There are so many senior stories that I never get tired of. Do you have one?
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Easy Healthy Meals For Seniors
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