First lady: Eat well now to be active later in life

Michelle Obama says she’s on a mission to stay active when she’s an octogenarian.

“My goal personally is that when I’m 80 and 90 years old, I want to be moving around. I want to be able to travel. I want to be able to walk up a temple or a ruin on my own and see the world,” the first lady tells Cooking Light magazine. “And I can only do that if I’ve been investing in my health now.”

{mosads}Obama, 51, sat down with the food-focused mag for its March issue to chat about her focus on healthy eating and tout her “Let’s Move!” anti-childhood obesity initiative. The executive mansion resident is the first person to grace the magazine’s cover in its 28-year history.

The mom to 16-year-old Malia and 13-year-old Sasha says part of her family’s eating transformation began with…a box of macaroni and cheese.

“My kids loved macaroni and cheese in a box,” explained Obama, or, they did, until former White House chef and “Let’s Move!” executive director Sam Kass told the Obamas to ditch the boxed stuff in favor of “real food.”

“My oldest daughter [Malia], who was probably 8 at the time, he took a block of cheese and said, if you can cut this cheese up into the powder that is the cheese of the boxed macaroni and cheese, then we’ll use it.”

But try as she might, cheese ashes didn’t appear.

“She sat there for 30 minutes trying to pulverize a block of cheese into dust. I mean, she was really focused on it, and it just didn’t work, so she had to give up,” Obama recalled. “And from then on, we stopped eating macaroni and cheese out of a box, because cheese dust is not food, as was the moral of that story.”

“Because our goals are generational, clearly we won’t be done by the time we leave the White House,” Obama said of her plans to promote nutrition after 2016.  “So we’re going to be thinking hard about ways that I can use my next platform as a way to keep shining a light on the things that we’re doing.”

“If there’s one word that I could say about what we do in the future,” Obama said, “it’s ‘more.’ It’s more of this.”

Cooking Light’s “Family Dinner” issue hits newsstands on Friday.