March marks the start of spring and new growth, making it the perfect time to celebrate National Nutrition Month (NNM), an annual education campaign designed to help people make more informed food choices.
This year’s NNM theme is “Personalize Your Plate.” Each week focuses on a way to achieve this, such as eating a variety of nutritious foods and learning new skills to create tasty meals. Moveable Feast incorporates the theme into resources that are provided to clients with the intent of improving health knowledge and enhancing engagement.
With Moveable Feast serving such a diverse community of clients, it is important for our dietitians to meet clients where they are to help set personalized dietary goals. A client with high blood pressure may be encouraged to try and cook with dried herb blends instead of salt, while a client with food insecurity could receive advice on budget friendly grocery shopping. This counseling aligns heavily with the themes of NNM as we work to encourage clients to try new foods and increase diet diversity while meeting their personal health needs. Learning how to incorporate new choices into their diet can help clients of all backgrounds and encourages them
to get more creative in the kitchen.
In addition to day to day nutritional counseling, the Moveable Feast dietitians have been working to enhance client engagement by holding monthly virtual events called “Feast with Friends”. These events engage clients in a group setting regarding nutrition education topics ranging from heart healthy recipes to reading nutrition labels. For March, in order to incorporate NNM messaging, our Feast with Friends event is focused on making a personalized MyPlate. Clients will learn how to incorporate new foods into their favorite meals in a heart healthy way, with the goal of increasing overall diet diversity.
Moveable Feast has not only been working to engage clients in NNM activities, but our dietitians are also striving to include our staff throughout the month. Activities include; emails each week that review and educate on NNM topics, and, a step challenge to encourage daily movement and activity.
This National Nutrition Month, we hope that you will join us in making more balanced diet choices that support a healthy lifestyle! If you are not sure where to begin, try starting with small changes, like completing 15 minutes of physical activity per day and eating at least one fruit or vegetable at each meal.
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