Kids: Raising Healthy Eaters is Counter-culture

It is possible to raise a child to have healthy eating habits. I have a fifteen year old daughter who is five nine and has a fat ratio of 19% (we've signed up at a fitness club so we found out). I had one friend when I was growing up who became anorexic at 15 years old, and another who was an exercise-bulimic. My best friend really struggled hard with her weight although she was not really "overweight" but had developed larger than average breasts.

The first thing I did was breastfeed my baby for two years. I did not feed her any prepared baby foods. It was strictly breast milk until 9 months and after that we gave her food that she seemed interested in that was healthy. After that, there was no nagging at the dinner table. Just healthy foods-- and I always made sure there was stuff on the table that she would like to eat (my mother would make complex, spicy food and if I didn't like it, tough, eat peanutbutter. I grew up on peanutbutter. Is that an eating disorder?). I looked at "food groups" as a full day endeavor.

One of her best friends became anorexic in sixth grade. It was so shocking. We have always talked about body dysmorphia and societal values and what is a healthy body for a woman. Now that she is developing I remind her often that any weight she is gaining is necessary for her to transform into an adult and to not interpret it as "bad" fat. When he friends go on crash diets (almost all of them "supervised by doctors!), my daughter preaches muscle + metabolism theory to them. She really gets it.

She does eat junk food. I eat junk food. But in limited amounts. Usually the afternoon snack is popcorn and sparkling flavored mineral water (sometimes diet coke, but we do discuss the chemicals often). She'll have a small bag of chips or a candy bar a couple times a week. She loves pretzels.

So far, so good. My overall plan in all of it is to teach her that there are no "bad" foods as long as the portions are reasonable and that the rate of metabolism is key to maintaining a healthy body.

How widespread is the loss of phys ed?

KatieK, I think your idea of having no "bad" food is wise. My mom had lots of food bans on us, and it took me decades to get over that.

Thanks for the link to Starling Fitness. One of my biggest fears is that I'll pass on my bingeing to a child I might have. I learned to binge from my dad. I don't want to think that the only way for me to break the cycle is to not have children.

Although we had no food "bans" in my house, I was raised in a home without candy and chips or most any processed food. all the sweets in our house were home baked, and we grew our own vegetables. My parents served healthy portions at the dinner table and we ate our meals together as a family.

I hated it. I was convinced I was the most miserable kid on the planet. Any money I could get ahold of I spent on candy and slurpees at the 7-11.

I learned many years later that my mom was a secretive compulsive overeater and I became one as well. Also I found out that my dad would buy candy bars when he was out and then hide the wrappers in the trash before he came into the house. So even though none of it was on the surface we were all a bunch of sugar addicts who binged in secret.

The upside is that I grew up knowing what healthy eating is, and I was able to rediscover it in my adult life.

Guiding kids towards healthy eating habits, exercise and taking care of themselves if something certain people have forgot. Many believe they taught their kids up right but when it comes down to it the United States become heavier and heavier every year. I had a eat disorder in my youth and now being a personal trainer I really love working with youth and help them understand the important of eating healthy and exercising.

I grew up in Israel which has a healthier overall diet. We ate small portions, very little meat and no big dinners. Those habits disappeared after I moved out on my own here in the US. Luckily, I managed to discover them again a few years ago and am now enjoying a very healthy lifestyle. Parents can and do shape their kids life. Even if the kids rebel a bit after leaving home, they're more likely to get healthy habits if they had them growing up.

Gal

I think it is possible. It is possible as long as we are willing to make some sacrifices.

These sacrifices are time, money, and convenience.

Time, because we no longer can sign the child up for football, soccer, hockey, ballet, creative pottery making, and the underwater basket weaving on the weekends. We will have to drag their cute little butt to the market and show them how fresh food looks like. How fresh food is made.

Money, because fresh spoils. Fresh spoils in a couple of days, and there is nothing we can do about it, unless we buy the heavily treated, half ripe foods. But, then it would not be really fresh, now would it?

Finally, convenience. Isn't it just oh, so easy to pick up a quick meal on the way hope, or call a delivery service, than labor over making one or two different type of dishes? After working 8 grueling hours in the office, picking fast food, or eating out is definitely much more convenient.

I am not saint, and I falter on one or more of the above. The key to success is talk to the children once they are old enough, and talk why we do the things we do...

Why McD's isn't the right thing. Why going to the market is the right thing to do. Why cooking at home is healthier.

Just my two kronos.

Quito said:
How widespread is the loss of phys ed?[...]

I don't have kids yet, but I hope that I can raise healthy, well-adjusted kids that have a healthy relationship with food. Growing up, we had no food bans in the house, but my mom would often buy lots of junk food and eat it herself. She has compulsive overeating disorder and I think a lot of the time, she ate in secret so we wouldn't see her. My dad was always the healthy eater...he always encouraged us to eat our veggies and now there's not a single veggie I don't like. He also taught us how to cook things from scratch and I think we only ate fast food a couple times a month. We also had no video games to play, so we were always playing outside and riding our bikes everywhere.

Quito, loss of PE is pretty widespread. In my school district (third largest in the country!) PE is taught twice a week in elementary school, every day in middle school, and then only required for two years in high school. One of those two years can be waived if you participate in one season of any sport (or two seasons of bowling).

I'm a substitute teacher, so I'm all over the city at different schools. Every day I'm completely amazed to realize that there is NOTHING in the school cafeteria that I would eat. My diet is, I think, super healthy. Veggies, fruit, water, whole wheat products, and not very many animal products. I can't remember the last time I saw a real vegetable (iceberg lettuce is not a vegetable!) or a whole wheat product in a cafeteria.

I feel super lucky to be raised in a family that believed in good home cooked meals. My family is by no means health nuts, but still - I remember my school friends being amazed. I had not been to many of the fast food chains they frequented and we often had food at my house that they had never seen (plums, artichokes, lima beans). I have a college friend right now who only eats six vegetables.

I hope that I can raise my kids to like and enjoy good food without giving them the complex that many children who are raised in super-healthy homes have (ie: stashing candy like it was a drug! I once had a friend who could smoke marijuana at home, but her parents would freak out if she had a chocolate bar).

My teenage son has two friends who have refused a third visit to our dinner table because of the "megadoses of vegetables" they were faced with on their first two visits. Mother of one boy casually mentioned that her Marshall said I was "some kind of health freak".

Menu 1--grilled chicken breasts, grilled sweet potatoes, corn on the cob, and romaine/cherry tomato salad. (full disclosure:butter on the table, peach cobbler for dessert)

Menu 2--whole grain pasta with tomato sauce--eggplant and peppers in sauce topped with lf cheese,sauteed garlic/broccoli rabe on the side.

Now the kids come over with backpacks full of junk food as if they were parachuting into enemy territory. What surprised me was not that kids can be picky, but how their parents all casually supplied them with bags of utter garbage and said their kids "just didn't" eat "that kind of stuff".

Jim said:

...

Claire, outside of the fact that I'd like to live next door to you in hopes of getting a dinner invitation, that's a depressing story. And Brittany, your story is discouraging too. It did remind me of the time my parner took kumquats from my Dad's tree to work (meiwas, yum!) and tried to pass them out to her coworkers. No one was willing to try one...

I never did understand the concept of giving kids their own food. What's the difference between "kid food" and regular food? My parents NEVER made us special foods and always encouraged us to try new foods. Every week, my dad always let us pick a new fruit from the produce section. I don't think I would've tried pomegranates, starfruit, or mango otherwise. My sister's husband grew up in a house where they were served a lot of "kid food" and now to this day he only eats mac and cheese, pizza, and stuff like that.

Spectra said:
I never did understand the concept of giving kids their own food. What's the difference between "kid food" and regular food?[...]

I'm sure much of this is in the marketing. Ads for foods marketed towards children often depict children making their own choices and having their "own" foods (the nutritionally absent foods). These ads are meant to undermine parental authority when it comes to eating. There are subtle messages that it isn't "cool" to eat the same "boring" things as mom and dad. The ads tend to drop below the radar of consciousness so that most won't notice.

One study showed that 2/3 of American children decide what to eat for breakfast.

Marion Nestle covers this topic nicely in her book "What to Eat". There is also a great book I skimmed through called "Consuming Kids" by Susan Linn which covers the art of marketing towards children.

Mike has the right of it. As a parent it seems that everywhere I look - someone is trying to shove junk down my kids throats. It's like a war of attrition and sometimes I buckle under the power of convenience.

Another thing: Supermarkets - you stand in the queue with your kids and all around you (at kids height of course) is a pile of lollies and candies. How many parents out there face a battle of wills when our kids pick up the candies and we have to tell them to put it back.

I don't need that as a parent. I have enough issues to contend with.

Supermarkets: Get rid of the damn sweets and give parents a break. Stop leveraging "pester power" to increase your bottom line...

Where I grow up, proper meals are hard to come by at times. With limited pocket money we have, we go for the usual sweetie stuff like ice creams and other empty calorie food. These days kids are different - they have more pocket money and more choices yet there is a problem of obesity. The only way is to teach our kids when they are young about nutritious foods and what to look for, what food to avoid and make wise choices. The temptations will always be there but we can control our own decisions.

This is of course really scary. As a parent of a 4 and a 7 year old, my wife and I are always concious of what our kids put in their mouths. We do eat some fast food but my son from the age of two liked to say "McDonalds is crap" both of them have been raised to understand that fast food is a filler for our body and is not really food that helps you grow and get stronger.

Around the house we have lots of fruit for snacks but also I have food that I take to work like chocolate bars and pop. again the kids know that this is bad and that we treat it like an indulgence and again not a food.

The one thing that my wife may go overboard with is the lack of fat in our diet, No dark meat in poultry, cutting off all fat from our steak...that kind of thing.

The next thing? Educating our kids against refined grains. I don't think it ever ends.

Quito said:
How widespread is the loss of phys ed?[...]

I never had PE in grade school but this was before video games existed. We went outside and played. There was no need for structured exercise.

Sadly I don't think even the return of a regular PE class will help a lot of children. I had phys. ed. for a few years as a child and I still became overweight. When I got home there was nothing but junk food and I was depressed so I ate for comfort. Playing basketball for 45 minutes just couldn't counteract the amount of calories I consumed. It wasn't until I was a teen that I discovered healthy foods on my own and became vegan.

It really is important for parents to set good examples for kids. I never had help but I watched my mother struggle with diets all my 23 years. What I learned was to restrict and it went from being healthy to severe anorexia. My parents didn't even know what eating disorders were until my aunt was hospitalized for one a few years ago. As much as I want to have a child, I am still deathly afraid of him/her having to see me stuggle with my tendencies everyday. I don't want my daughter to think being 80 lbs is acceptable.

My sister's approach to food with her son seems to be working well. She never told him no to any foods and always encouraged him to try fruits and veggies. She also never forced him to finish anything. And now he's 13 and loves being vegetarian but still enjoys his sweets too. He knows how to feel hungry and full and is active. I know my father forced us kids to eat everything because we were very poor, but it was not the best food and it set us up for problems.

What good is gym class when it's up against the bane of my existance...STUPID AFTER SPORT SNACKS! Those of you without kids probably don't realize that after every soccer, football, baseball, etc. game, snacks are passed out: usually Capri Sun and Oreos, snack cakes, or cheese crackers. I can understand oranges for the halftime snack during soccer games (where the kids are actually running for a long period of time)...but this other stuff is just unecessary, unhealthy calories. So what are my options? Refuse to allow my kids to participate in snacks...so they can grow up and complain on a site like this that their mom was mean? Or just go with the flow? Every year I think about starting a petition to get rid of this stupid practice...maybe this spring (baseball season!) I will. Anybody else have any experience with this?

Marie said:
Anybody else have any experience with this?[...]

MeMe Roth has tried to stop things like this but people like to kill the messenger
:-(

This is just another reason to homeschool!

There are a lot of homeschoolers in this area, and I would say most of us have relatively healthy families -- many are healthy to an extreme. Those I know who do bring chips and fast food into their life on a fairly regular basis still cook meals most nights. We make "Stone Soup" (a big vegetable soup where everyone brings something to add to the pot) at our homeschool co-op once a week, and everyone, children and adults, looks forward to it.

I'm not sure why this is, but here are a few guesses: Maybe it's because we are all already counter-culture, by the virtue of homeschooling. Maybe it's because we all put a high value on family togetherness and thus a high value on sit-down home-cooked family meals. Maybe it's because in most homeschooling families at least one parent is home a lot more than the average parent and is able to shop for and cook whole meals.

The children we know get a lot more exercise than the average child too. This past week my girls and I went on three hikes and went biking twice, most of those times with other homeschooling families. On their own, the girls spent many, many hours this week playing outside. They have time to play, and this is a big reason I chose to homeschool in the first place.

I only realize how counter-culture we are when I read articles like this (or when it's thrust upon me at sports events or other activities we share with public school children), because in the world I move in, vegetables are perfectly acceptable.

I'm really glad my children are not being influenced by the public school culture.

My mom always tried to stress eating well to me, but for a teenager who was playing tennis and on the track team, doing physical activity 6 out of 7 days of the week, nothing I ate ever stuck to me. I think the best thing they did for us was join the neighborhood pool and get us enrolled in sports throughout the year. Summers were spent getting up at dawn and biking down to the pool to try and talk the lifeguards into letting us in early. Nothing was more fun than swimming before anyone else got there.

When my husband and I start a family, living in a neighborhood that is more active will be on our wish list.

Mmm, homeschooling. I'm going to school to be a teacher and the more time I spend learning about how to teach in public schools the more I want to home school my own children. So much of the attitudes found in schools are toxic to intelligence and individuality. Ugh.

Dierdre, if you're interested in a fun book for your kids you might want to check out Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli. It's about a girl (Stargirl) who has been homeschooled her whole life and decides to try out public school for high school. Things go good and bad. It's a really sweet book for young adults.

My mother always prepared healthy meals for my brother and i as children, now that were grown up and can cook and fend for ourselves we tend to naturally gravitate toward healthy foods. Even our favourite comfort foods are healthy and we both know how to cook from scratch and we try to emulate our mothers food ourselves.

We couldnt afford to eat out all the time and we always had our lunches packed for us at school (becuase we couldnt afford the canteen) and thankgod for it. I was only allowed to order at the canteen once a week or once a fortnight and my mum wrote the order. It was a meat pie or beef lasagne (our canteen at school had some healthy thing going, the meals were small and similar to weight watchers frozen dinners) with a fozen yogurt. every other day i had fruit, a small chocolate, a sandwich, and a fruit juice (popper as we call them in Oz)

A close girlfriend growing up ordered her lunch every day, and while i was jealous at the time, i'm so thankful now. She is so used to eating garbage anything else just seems gross to her now, salads, vegetables, grilled fish etc. Her idea of a healthy meal is fish and chips (battered and fried) and the crappy little side salad which is technically the garnish they throw in the box.

We still eat kfc and junk on occasion, but we both tend to enjoy the flavour you get from beatiful fresh foods.

Claire, I can totally identify with your situation. I faced similar - a friend brought her family to our little farm for a visit last July 4. I had plenty of food available at breakfast - cheerios, multi-grain something or other, oatmeal, and my fave, Grape-nuts, as well as plenty of fruit, juice and milk in all three varieties (whole, 2% and skim, for the various ages of kids).

Her husband looked at the buffet, and snorted, "what, is she some sort of health freak?" and packed up the kids, went to the store, and returned an hour later with Frosted Flakes, that little chocolate-ball cereal (cocoa puffs?), and some sort of frosted, bright-colored cheerio thing.

Lunch, same thing - fruits, veggies, whole grain bread, meat for sandwiches offered, and he packs them off to Mickey D's.

I didn't bother with dinner. I gave in and we went for pizza. The rest of the time was spent at the town's festival, where I grabbed my meals (for my son and me) from the Farmer's Market, and they went from tent to tent, buying deep-fried and sugar coated crap.

And then my friend wonders why her kids are hyper and uncontrollable!!

Oh, yeah, and I'M the one with the compulsive-eating problem.

Maybe home schooling is an answer, but I think what we need, collectively, are more people like Ann Cooper (http://www.lunchlessons.org/)...

This concept worries me as well. I grew up with a binge-eating mother, but she was always on one diet or another. There was always slim fast in our refrigerator, diet pills, and the discussions on how small certain celebrities are (spoken in a context that praised them). I was always active, never overweight (throughout high school I weighed no more than 115 pounds), yet all of this talk around me got to me more than I expected, and by the time I wa sixteen I had become anorexic.
I'm glad to hear that people are learning from these experience of others. I hope one day, if I ever have a daughter, that I can teach her that there are no "bad" foods as well.

Growing up, my family always had a huge garden and mom made EVERYTHING from scratch. We always ate lots of veggies, rarely ate out, TV watching was limited, and we got lots of exercise. I still developed an eating disorder (binge/compulsive eating).

Lack of gym class and eating too much fast food may have an effect on obesity, butI have difficulty believing that they play a very big part in developing eating disorders. A family's emotional health plays a FAR larger part.

KatieK said:
It is possible to raise a child to have healthy eating habits. I have a fifteen year old daughter who is five nine and has a fat ratio of 19% (we've signed up at a fitness club so we found out). I had one friend when I was growing up who became anorexic at 15 years old, and another who was an exercise-bulimic. My best friend really struggled hard w[...]

I like your idea of no 'bad' foods. Any food (even 'healthy') can be bad in the wrong proportions. For example, overdosing on vitamin supplements can lead to toxic symptoms - hypervitaminosis A (overdosing on vitamin A) can lead to birth defects and liver problems.
...Which is why we're supposed to eat veggies and fruits and dairy and meat (non-vegetarians...) - to keep our bodies in balance.

Kids will always eat the fast food and things like that, but it is what is served as meals in the home will dictate their approach towards nutrition and eating. I don't blame fast food as much as I blame parents showing poor eating habits to children.

I am a personal trainer and when I tell people about what is healhty, they look at me like I'm crazy.

If I show people how many servings of vegetables they should be eating a day, they say stuff like all those vegetables can't be healthy or something like I think I'll get sick if I eat all that.

Also, since so many people are overweight, when most people see someone who is thin and at an ideal weight they think the person is sick and anorexic.

Healthy is so weird for a lot of people. It's ashame.