Articles tagged with: eating behavior
Ending the old year with some reflection and starting the next day fresh has fueled many a resolution for improvement. There is a reason both of these steps are considered key aspects of successful behavior change. We are much more successful in making desired changes—whether they be increasing our level of activity or improving our diets for better nutrition and balance—when we first acknowledge what we are doing right.
Here…
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“There is something about a shared meal — not some holiday blowout, not once in a while but regularly, reliably – that anchors a family even on nights when the food is fast and the talk cheap and everyone has someplace else they’d rather be. And on those evenings when the mood is right and the family lingers, caught up in an idea or an argument explored in a shared safe place
This is a follow-up to “Are Your Kids Telling The Truth About What They Eat?“
When my daughter was about 4 years old I discovered the Eating-Honesty Bind.
I had sweetened the pot of a boring morning spent running errands by promising my daughter that I would take her for an ice cream when we were done…
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Most parents teach their kids to lie about food and eating. Not intentionally, of course.
No one wakes up one morning and says, “Right, it’s time to turn Lucy into a liar.” But our cultural obsession with nutrition puts enormous pressure on parents to get the right nutrients into their kids, and that pressure makes most parents resort to a host of tactics that don’t…
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- Don’t feed your kids breakfast. It’s hard enough to get them out the door in the morning anyway. Geez, moms need a break too. Just make sure you put a candy bar in their pocket, in case their blood sugar drops a little later on.
- Pay no attention to portion sizes. In fact, adult portions are completely appropriate. Don’t worry about a child’s stomach only being the size
When a child eats to “feed” a feeling (sadness, happiness, worry, frustration, boredom, etc.) instead of to relieve hunger, they are in the midst of “emotional eating.” It is natural for eating and emotions to become connected to a certain degree, but if emotions prompt a child to make poor food choices, or eat too much or too little, long-lasting problems can ensue.
Teach kids how to talk about feeling…
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As we are all trying to be healthier, let’s take a moment to breathe and be aware of all that is around us. In today’s world with all of our societal pressures and fast paced living, much of our eating happens automatically. We often don’t notice how much food is on our plate or how much we have just eaten. Instead much of what we eat is driven by external…
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Change is hard. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make it simple.
This is the third article in our “Healthier Family 2011” series on how to create a new, more wholesome and active lifestyle for yourself, your spouse and your children. In January, when many of you made a resolution that this year, the family is going to start eat healthier and exercise more, we talked about “How…
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…or how NOT to create a monster.
At a friend’s house the other day, my 5 year old pointed over to the family’s breakfast table, her eyebrows raised high up into her forehead. “Mama, look!” she gasped, pointing at a half-eaten bowl of kids’ cereals. It was the kind Michael Pollan ruled against. You know, the cereal that changes the color of the milk. Hoping no one had heard…
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Most people outgrow picky eating behavior. But some don’t. If you are one of those adults who still harbor aversions to many foods and feel most comfortable with eating only a limited variety of foods, you might be interested in strategies for not passing on your own issues to your children. To be clear, we are not talking about eating disorders here, but merely about parents’ food-related quirks that might…
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