I’ve been reading blogs and websites about working moms recently, like Workingmom.com and SimpleBites.net, trying to get inspiration about how to balance life that includes kids, husband, parents, finances, friends, environment, profession etc.
Today’s woman has so much access to knowledge, it can be overwhelming. In the old days women consulted their mothers or grandmothers for advice, now the web can be a great substitute for the experience those elders offered. However, the catch is not to expect perfection in everything you undertake.
As a registered dietitian, one would expect that I strived to teach my children to eat healthily. Well, I recognized immediately that actions speak louder than words and rather than verbal teaching I made sure our meals had balance and variety and organization. All our meals had variety of color, texture and nutrients long before the MyPlate program showed us all how to eat. Ellen Sater RD in her book, Feed Me I’m Yours, taught me that the size of one’s portions should be determined by the person eating with the requirement that one needs to sample new foods. I ate most meals with our children and snacking was rare.
To quote Aimee Wimbush-Bourque on SimpleBites.net: “If they see you reaching for a crisp apple instead of a Doritos bag at snack time, they’ll do the same.” Peer pressure does take hold when kids go to school and those packaged foods look so much better than the home made lunches I sent but, after sending kids with packaged lunches once or twice, they soon realized that simple homemade food was tastier.
In my professional life I find it easy to support the egg industry because I have always felt eggs are full of nutrients, inexpensive, serving sized and delicious. If this was a scientific experiment I would be able to write in the results section that I proved my hypothesis, my kids now all adults, are healthy, eat well and love to cook.
