Question
Debarah Lewis
How do you work with children on nutrition, that do not live in your home and in fact live miles away. ?
Answer
It's a great question Debra. So one of the you know, I worked in school food and really helping, you know, childhood nutrition for wow, I guess that was 10 years. I did that and that's a wonderful thing that's close to my heart. One of the best things that I can tell you is to be a good influence, you know, if if they're not in your home, it's a little bit harder and if you do live miles away, but when you do see them you can also be the person to you know, be having the good foods, you know, so you can be known as the person that says, you know, if it's your granddaughter you can be the grandma that comes like oh, yeah. I'm you know eating these kinds of things all the time and try to keep them more Whole Food plant-based, you know, it doesn't always have to be solids which a lot of kids are like salad like that's like gonna happen but show them, you know kind of what you're doing with it too try to make different activities where they can get involved and see what is actually in the food and that they can do it themselves. Um, you know, so one of the biggest things that I saw is that a lot of kids would not eat Foods until they actually did it themselves. So salad is kind of an odd, you know thing for this I did a competition for kids where it was a build-year-old's out build your own salad contest. And you know before this these kids just probably wouldn't have eaten the salad at all. But since it became like a competition and it was try to see who's solid was better than the other persons, you know, it became really fun. And these kids were eating huge amounts of salad. Like what I sit down to a salad I make a really big salad and it's mostly greens and just vegetables. I don't usually use dressings and stuff like that. I use herbs and stuff for other, you know flavors to be able to add to it. But these kids are eating huge huge salads just because it was something that they got they had fun with and they had an adult kind of coaching them through to say like, oh you could add this or that or you could go completely crazy and add this to it, you know, so being a good example in that way is probably the best way to be able to help a kid with their weight when I was first, you know, when I was growing up I had issues with my weight as well too and it just took me a little time to be able to kind of catch up to you know to link them out I guess and Lose some of the weight on that as well. One of the things I can always recommend too is to introduce exercise, you know, so along with the nutrition. Showing wonderful great things. So instead of having like potato chips do something like a kale chip or something like that, but you can also have those fun moments where you're outside and just doing activities so going for walks and you know introducing, you know things where you're just things that are okay for you as well, but things that can introduce them to the activities that are outside or inside to be able to help them with their weight and a little bit of inspiration on nutrition is probably the best thing you can do and since it's your granddaughter having, you know those conversations with your kids as well to be able to make sure that that's okay. So I hope that helps that's you know, there's only so much I can say about it, but that's probably where I would start is to be the inspiration.
