What I Learned About Teaching Kids Nutrition (Month 4)

1.  Convenience is king.  The foods that are sitting out within easy reach get eaten the most, for good or bad.  (when grapes or cucumbers were out, kids were eating them...)

2.  Healthy eating begins with a healthy attitude about your body (earlier blog post here).

3.  Mind your attitudes about food too (here is where I list a lot of the research behind this list)-- no eating out of of boredom or sadness, for example, only out of hunger (easy to say, not always easy to do)

4.  Keeping this in mind, let your kids decide when they are full.  (don't pressure kids to finish everything on their plates, but see number 5...)

5.  Linking dessert to healthy eating throughout the day can be a powerful motivator for kids.  But, never use dessert as a reward or a punishment.

6.  Sugar begets sugar.  Save a simple treat for the end of the day, otherwise, a small amount of sugar early in the day leads to craving more and more throughout the day and derails healthy eating.  This is a tough one for us.  Some moms prefer not having sugary foods in the house at all.  Don't guilt yourself or them over this, it's just the way our bodies are wired. (like this...cute)

7.  Give kids a little credit-- my kids actually loved some of the dishes I put in front of them that I never thought they'd eat!  (not true for everything)  No one even noticed we ate veggies straight for 2 weeks.  They will not always be happy everything you make.  Don't take it personally that your healthy, lovingly prepared meal meets a "that looks like the most disgusting thing I've ever seen!" (don't give up!)  They may like it after they've tried it (in our house, they have to try at least one bite of everything), and if they don't, they'll still thank you some day for trying.

8.   Plan ahead.  Remember rule #1?  When I haven't planned ahead, and we get hungry, that is when we make poor food choices. 

9.  Pay attention to your eating traditions, replacing unhealthy ones. 

10.  Labeling something a "treat" can make it feel like one. 

11.  Trust yourself.  I forced myself to try using things I had on hand (in my garden), and tried making up my own dishes instead of always following a recipe, and I did much better than I thought I would! 

12.   Eating simple healthy meals gave me more time with my kids but also was a fun way to involve them in meal preparation!   Even the time I asked my kids to go pick some corn and shuck it and bring it in, and later in the day I found a box in my bedroom that looked like it was full of long golden hair.  Huh?  Yes, look what they saved (why is it in my bedroom?):

13.  Model good eating behavior.  I'm still working on this one.  But our attempt to eat more vegetables resulted in the most weight I've lost since I had baby and the best I've felt since I had him.

14.  Sugary drinks count as a treat.

15.  Eating fresh foods and adding fresh herbs like parsley, basil, or thyme can replace some of the flavor lost with processed food, and can eventually change your taste buds so you actually crave healthier foods.  After some of our veggie dinners, sugary foods sounded gross to me.  If you knew me, you would know that is nothing short of a miracle.

16.  Enlist their aid.  When we talked about nutrition one night at the dinner table (I think this should be an ongoing discussion), I thought the kids would moan and groan, but they actually got fairly animated, saying "we should talk about this more often!"

17.  Point out the connection between healthy eating and healthy bodies.

18.  Make it fun.  Challenge the kids to find out the health benefits of the foods in a meal.  For some reason, they eat carrots better when they know that pilots in WWII were fed carrots so they could see better in the dark.

19.  Teach them that being active is an equally important part of the equation.  Remember the research that showed that exercise was more important than willpower?  I still love that one.  Getting active with the kids this month made for some really great memories.  I'm hoping that they'll learn a love for active pursuits and healthy foods just by being exposed to them often. :)

20.  Offer healthy snacks.  One mom cuts up fresh vegetables and the kids are allowed to eat them anytime, even right before dinner.  If the kids are too full for dinner, at least they are full of vegetables!

Good Day, Bad Day

We had so much fun the last time we went to the Planetarium, and we had a few free tickets I wanted to use before the summer was up, so we met Grandma there and enjoyed the IMAX movie "Born to be Wild" (probably my favorite IMAX of all time...the women are so inspiring, and such a great example of empathy, kindness, and a life of compassion...the animals are also very fun to watch...great cinematography and music...overall, very beautifully done).  Then we went back for a little hike, shorter than the one we did on this day, in the same place.  (It's been so nice to be more active together this month, though that wasn't one of my goals, it just sort of happened)   Then we went on to see my grandma and my dad (my dad lives with her during the week for work, then returns home on the weekends).  What a great day.

(Love those legs!  His shorts were dirty)

The next day was not a great day.  It was super busy, as we've re-started some activities, like scouts and soccer, and we're out of the habit of having these things on the schedule, so it was wild.  Also, baby was fussy and had lower-end GI issues all day.  :)  You know what I mean.  And I've discovered that eating healthily on busy days or on the fly is hard.  This is something I'm going to need to figure out, so all our hard work isn't undermined when school starts.

At the end of my bad day, I was ready to pull my hair out.  I even chucked all of my positive words work when I acted like a three year-old!  My three said something like "you're mean."  And I surprised myself when I said "you're mean!" right back. (I never talk like this to my kids, even before my work on 'positive words!')  It totally caught her off guard for a minute, then we went back and forth hurling insults at each other while my other kids' mouths dropped open in awe at their crazy mother.  While it felt great for about 20 seconds, I felt pretty awful afterward. :)

Then two things happened.  The first was I got an email from my dad.  It read:

Hi,

It was good to see you yesterday. I love and admire you and how hard you work to be a good person and mother. And you do a great job.

...Thanks again for everything and please know how deeply I love you.

Dad

  

I needed that! I'm not sure he knows it, but my dad was inspired.  Sometimes it's good to hear that, no matter how imperfect I am, I am trying my best!  I want to be a good mother!  I want my kids to be happy!

I am also copying some of my poems onto my new computer, and I found one I'd tucked away from about 6 years ago.   Made me remember all the things I love about being a mother.  About being their mother. About how life-changing and perspective changing it has been for me.  And maybe when I'm in the thick of it, in the trenches, I don't always see the big picture, but they are the highlight of my life so far!  Even on bad days.

 

Peaks and Valleys, Month 4

In a very similar fashion to other months, some things are going well and some things aren't.

As far as my dinner resolutions-- feed the kids more vegetables and make food from my garden (and don't panic if I have nothing planned), things are going great.  I have been really surprised that my kids have eaten the vegetables I've given them as well as they have.  There have been a few complaints, but overall, they have done really well!  Sometimes, to the point of asking for beets or tomatoes or whatever it is (why am I so shocked?).   And I have felt healthier, too (could be imagining it, but I think I've lost more baby weight this month than any month yet).  Making simple dishes of my own creation has been a good exercise-- I realized I can do more than I thought I could!  I guess I should have given my kids and myself more credit.

Also, I noticed that convenience is a big factor, for good foods and bad.  When my husband cut up some  cucumber and set it out, kids were walking by and grabbing a piece and snacking away (again, why was I so shocked?).  But the same has been true for unhealthy foods that are within easy reach (our freezer is on the bottom part of our fridge), as you'll see below.

There have been some tough days.  Regulating snacks, especially sweet ones, has been a challenge (and we don't have that many, mainly ice cream and popsicles).  When I am occupied with something, some of my kids will get snacks for themselves that are meant to be treats saved for after dinner.  Remembering that it is human nature to like sugar and fat has helped me to understand without judgment, but also remembering that I'm doing this out of love, to give them good habits for life, I've been trying to stave off a little frustration trying to maintain this rule.  Especially yesterday, when I found a little graveyard of OtterPop appendages littered in a cubby where kids were sneaking to eat them.  The quandary-- regulating treats without shaming kids or making the treats that much more desirable because they are off limits.  I don't think what I'm doing is extreme-- one moderate treat saved for the end of the day, but maybe I need to rethink how I am communicating these goals and how I'm reinforcing them.

I'm considering doing something more extreme to help foster appreciation for the rule, like removing all excessivevly sugary foods from the house.  What would you do?

Yesterday I hit a wall as I have with all other resolutions at one point or another.  And I realized that it was a busy day (from Month 1, I learned "don't panic on busy days"), that I was tired (undermines my resolve), and that some of my resolutions that are posing the problems are newer resolutions within this month's goals (I always tend to hit a wall early on in the month).  I hope that by sticking to my resolutions, they'll get easier.  I hope. 

Because I'm doing this for the kids, out of love for them.  To help them start life with good habits that will help them later.

How do you approach "treats" at your house?

Basque Boy Eats

One of my goals for this month (when I've been home) is don't panic at dinnertime and buy pizza or feed the kids cereal or pancakes.  Also, I had a goal to feed my family more vegetables.

(side note: I love the magazine Cooks Illustrated-- their recipes are delicious and no-fail. But time consuming. Some day I'll get back to that, but right now I'm focusing on simple meals so I have time for my little ones. Our family favorite is their grilled pizza, ha, ha-- see here)

I have a really nice garden, courtesy of my two Basque boys (explanation later)-- I'm ashamed to admit that last year a lot went to waste.  But now I'm going to do better, right?  I've realized that I have two big stumbling blocks in this regard:  I often feel too harried to go out to the garden, pick the produce, and wash it off (so sad!  I know!).  And I don't trust myself to create something without a recipe.

Hence, I've been forcing myself to go out to the garden to pick or dig up what I need for dinner, and I've been trying to create things from scratch without a recipe. 

I titled this post Basque Boy Eats in honor of my Basque father-in-law, who is an excellent cook.  He never uses a recipe and he frequently creates succulent dishes (that the rest of us cannot ever seem to quite imitate).  One day he sauteed some some fresh trout, tomatoes, and slices of lime (rind and all), then mixed it with rice and it was delicious. 

I've tested my normally fearful culinary mettle several times this month, mostly with good results!  I was lucky to have a friend here one day when I tried to make a vegetable soup-- she gave her input as to whether I ought to use chicken stock or water and helped snap the ends off the beans.  Her encouragement helped me over that first hurdle, and the soup was really good!  (it was simply chicken stock with fresh potatoes, string beans, cabbage, Swiss chard, garlic, and salt)

One night I sliced potatoes really thin, sauteed them in some olive oil with yellow crook-neck squash, then added some garlic and fresh thyme (on this day I did them in separate batches).  The kids loved it!  I was really surprised.  They asked for thirds.  Who knew?

 What is your favorite quick and healthy meal?  Here is another of our favorites from long ago. :)

(FYI, more New York pics tomorrow)

Teaching Kids Healthy Attitudes About Their Bodies

I'm learning a lot about how a person's attitude toward food affects how he/she eats.  But I've also realized that there is a step before that.  It is how one views one's body. (see here) 

This is quite funny, because just the other day I had a little conversation with myself in the mirror.  I happened to catch myself on a bad day, and looking at myself in the mirror, lets just say my feeling was bordering somewhere between horror, dismay, and disgust.  Saggy, wrinkly, pasty white, wiry thinning hair, and an unflattering paunch around my middle.  I tried to fight the negative thoughts with positive ones-- remembering all the good things my body has done, like nourish five healthy little miracles inside it.  I tried to write a lighthearted poem about my showdown with the mirror-- it's not finished, when it is, maybe I'll share.

Here is what I've been thinking about bodily attitudes :), as I prepare to help my kiddos have healthy attitudes about their bodies:

1)  My value does not lie in the way I look.  I'm valuable insofar as I try to be a good person, kind, loving.  That makes real beauty-- pretty is is pretty does.

2)  My body is a gift. 

This has become even more apparent to me after having aforesaid healthy babies.  I'm always amazed that my body can perform such an amazing feat!  Starting with cells smaller than I can see, I grow a little life inside me, with a tiny beating heart and little fingers and toes and functioning organs and even a little personality.

3)  There is no universal optimum size.  Healthy bodies come in all different shapes and sizes.  Thin doesn't necessarily mean healthy.

I remember from a very young age learning from peers that some people believed there were a set of perfect measurements and they roughly mirrored the dimensions of a Barbie (ouch!).  A few years ago, I read this talk (start 7 paragraphs from bottom), about how there is no universal optimum size (written by a man, no less), and it revolutionized the way I look at my body.

4)  God looks on the heart.  So should I. (sam 16:7--  ...Lord said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the Lord ^aseeth not as ^bman seeth; for man looketh on the outward ^cappearance, but the ^dLord looketh on the ^eheart.)

When I see my stretchmarks or varicose veins, I need to make a conscious effort to remember they are signs of one of my greatest blessings and triumphs!  The fact that I'm willing to sacrifice for someone else should make me more beautiful, not less so.  I need to look on my own heart, too.

5)  Society is increasingly objectifying women, through music, magazines, and TV, and it starts young (think princess!).

I am not an object.  Give myself positive messages: I am a smart, giving, worthwhile individual, not a collection of body parts to be gawked at (or not!).  Men and women suffer when women are portrayed as objects-- it hurts men's self esteem too, to be told they are nothing more than a collection of uncontrolled hormones (of course the reverse is also true, think werewolf).

I've noticed a correlation between how many movies I watch and how I feel about myself-- when I'm watching less I have more realistic expectations about my body and feel much better about myself. 

6)  I can show respect for my body by how I treat it-- what I take into it, put on it, subject it to. 

I used to be an unapologetic tanning machine, but seeing my kid's gorgeous creamy skin and realizing I don't want to look like a handbag when I'm 40 nor deal with skin cancer has made me a sunscreen user (I'm a Nazi with my kids and sunscreen!  I want to keep their beautiful skin nice.  And I cover their ears to protect their hearing in loud places, too.)



7)  My body is the other half of my soul.  If I degrade my body (um....half of a cake yesterday?) it dulls my ability to feel and think clearly.  Also, if I get too extreme in this sense, it inhibits my ability to give to others.

8)  Remember who I am!  I am this.  Not a set of arms and legs and abs (flabby ones).  When was the last time I thought of Mother Theresa's measurements?  Or how she looked in a swimsuit? 

I need to have proper attitudes about my body in order to be a healthy eater.  I have to model this for my kids and teach them, so they will believe in their true potential and value themselves for the right things. 

I'm beautiful because of my stretchmarks and falling out hair and vein-y legs.  Because they show I loved someone else more than myself.  And that is beautiful.