“It doesn’t matter how slowly you go, as long as you don’t stop.”
Tips for Helping Your Kids Eat Better
Hello Beautiful,
Happy Fall! With the return of school, extra curricular activities, and the holidays in sight, many moms are looking to build healthy habits into their children’s days. A common question I receive is “how do I get my children to eat healthier food?”. Mealtimes are best as a time of connection and nourishment and when they become a battleground, no one wins. Here are some of the tips that have worked best for me and my clients.
Get Sugar Smart
Most children are consuming 75 grams of sugar per day…that’s triple the recommended amount. This results in blood sugar swings, hyper activity, difficulty regulating emotions, and lots of unnecessary drama for the Mama. Start reading labels and being aware of serving sizes. Your goal is 25 grams (or less) of added sugar per day. If you make this one change, it will blow your mind how much more manageable your kids will become. The Sugar Spiral is real!
Set a Good Example
In parenting (and in life) this is ground zero. “Do as I say, not as I do” doesn’t work. Kids are always watching us and taking cues from us. Even if they aren’t currently mimicking our choices, you can bet its logging into their subconscious and will influence their future choices. Set an example of eating meals. If you are personally not consuming anything but water between meals, and you are serving your family 3 meals (and perhaps an afternoon snack) each day, it will go a long way towards improving their diets.
Meals-vs-Snacking
I recently learned the average American is eating 18 hrs of the day! That’s eating something early in the morning, grazing all day, and eating again right before bedtime. This is detrimental to your sleep and digestion as the brain needs to clean at night but the glymphatic system that cleans the brain can only operate if the blood flow isn’t diverted to the stomach. Make an effort to finish eating 4hrs before bed 3x a week. You may need to remodel your family culture and set actual meal times (7:30, noon, 3pm snack, 6 dinner for example). Grazing all day hurts our metabolism and damages our blood sugar levels keeping them higher with each new snack, rather than allowing them to naturally lower and stay lower between meals. Remember, most “snack” food. Filling their tummies with healthy food at meals will make snacks less appealing.
Crowd out the Junk with “Veggies First”
Rather than attempting to blacklist certain foods, it’s helpful to crowd them off the plate with healthy foods. You can begin by aiming to get a fruit or a vegetable at each meal. Aim for at least 2 servings of vegetables (lunch and dinner). And choose lower glycemic fruits like berries, green apples, kiwi, and if they are up for it, grapefruit! Once that is an established habit, you can work towards half of each meal (by volume) being a low glycemic fruit or (preferably green) vegetable. The next priority is to get them full with healthy carbs like sweet potato, yams, or gluten free whole grains like rice and quinoa. You may also want to add some carefully sourced (wild caught seafood or pasture raised) meat onto their plates. Have them eat the vegetables first. You can even serve a first course that’s the vegetable and let them know that the other items aren’t served until the veggies are eaten. It takes around 9 times for a new food to be well received (and eventually enjoyed), so be open to requiring just one bite of a vegetable they don’t care for but would benefit from. The next time 2 bites, and so on. I have used this to expand the vegetable repertoire of many people. Our preferences are acquired over time, and can be shared for our benefit, over time.
Upgrade their Treats
“Upgrade, don’t eliminate” is one of my mantras. Find a cleaner version of the foods they love. If they love chips, try Seite brand (which is grain free and uses avocado oil). If they love cheese puffs, try an organic brand-there are many. If they love ice cream, try an organic, lower sugar, vegan alternatives (we like Nada Moo brand with the lower sugar flavors of Vanilla Bean and Chocolate being preferred). Pick a time of day or day of the week that these are on offer. Back to my previous point about snacking…we are aiming to improve habits as well.
Closing Thoughts
Helping kids notice how they feel after eating different kinds of foods is a very important life skill to give them. After the junk food pizza party….do they feel nauseous? After the chicken and broccoli and sweet potatoes do they feel comfortable and satisfied? Even “healthy” foods don’t feel great in everyone’s body. We are all different and different foods agree and disagree in our systems. And that changes over time. We want to teach kids body literacy—the ability to read and understand their own bodies is key. We are meant to be the experts on us. We need to listen and pay attention in order to build a good relationship-with our bodies.
Lastly, you are the leader. You are the parent. You are the role model. Don’t let your kids initial resistance weaken your resolve. You are considering their short and long term best interest. Kids are rarely able to see past the moment (until they are trained how to). Don’t expect them to be cheering you on in your efforts towards better family eating habits. At the same time, by making firm decisions and sharing how much you want to support their healthy growth and development to lay a foundation for a life lived in wellness; it all can be done in love. Use a gentle resolve as your baseline and don’t engage in power struggles. Instead, be consistent in your new habits and let them adjust in their own time. A loving but firm boundary that is held, is essential.
Your kids may surprise you. Our oldest two have moved out and of their own accord avoid gluten/dairy, look for organic options, and eat veggies daily. Meanwhile, at home, our two teenager are accustomed to eating a large plate of veggies with each dinner. Even our youngest kids are choosing healthy foods and avoiding junk food. When they have a conventional treat (rather than an upgraded one) they tell me they feel sick and don’t want to eat that again. People, this can be done! We are all works in progress and can shift our habits and preference with constant actions in the right direction. Progress over perfection, always.
Remember that we are building habits. We are helping them set a trajectory for a life of well being and body literacy. It’s worth the effort. Anything worth doing is worth doing incrementally, so you don’t burn out. Persist one step at a time. My suggestion is to pick one of these points and implement it this month. In a month or two, after that is established, pick another and stay with it, and so on. If you keep you eye on where you are going, without allowing overwhelm to paralyze action, you will eventually get there.
“It doesn’t matter how slowly you go, as long as you don’t stop”.
Cheering you on,
Rachel