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Encouraging Healthy Eating Habits |
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Instead of “what I desire, what I feel like eating”, I’ll give him a choice of what to eat, but they’re all choices within his eating frame. What I’ll do is eat that same meal with him, along with the family so it’s something fun to do and it doesn’t limit him. Its not like, “Oh, peanut butter again” or “Oh, a sandwich.” We do have a variety of things and we include his brother by also giving him the choices of something that Thomas could actually have and we let him pick to get him involved with it. -Father She’s a picky eater and she also has high cholesterol, so we have to work with both of them at the same time. Little by little, we try to get different things into her diet. She’s not a big vegetable and fruit eater, which she needs to be. When we go to the grocery store, we give her the option to pick out one fruit she wants to try, pick out a vegetable that she wants to try. Here and there, we’ll swap it up. If she doesn’t like it the first time, we’ll go to something else. We’ll go back to that one again some other time. -Mother He gets tired of some foods, but then all of a sudden two months after that, he wants to eat that thing that he didn’t want to eat two months ago. So I would recommend changing these snacks, changing foods, try to do the best for the child. It’s hard to do sometimes. Fortunately I’m a professional so I can afford to buy a lot of stuff. Some people cannot buy different foods. Food with less calories or less fat is sometimes more expensive too. -Father A way to keep track of snacks and foods I made a book for the snacks and foods that he eats, so when you wanted to give him something to eat, I know how many carbs are in each of the foods. Sometimes he doesn’t eat a certain food for a while and when he wants to eat it again I look at the book and I know how many carbs are in it. -MotherBilly was a kid who only ate white bread, only ate mostly simple carbs when you think about it. He ate a lot of mac and cheese, grilled cheese, pasta, fruit and juice. He wouldn’t really touch vegetables except for cucumber, and I had let that happen. The rest of us ate much more healthily than he did. It was very difficult. What happened for us was that the hospital put him on a meal plan that he would like. So he would have 5 pancakes for breakfast and the same food I just mentioned. We were trying to regulate his blood sugars with him having ice cream and a huge number of carbs per meal. I didn’t know any better, so he had huge blood sugar swings. So I would say we didn’t have trouble adjusting to the hospital’s diet because it was the diet he was always eating except that he had to eat more food because they were trying to get him to gain back the eight pounds he had lost. The problem was that he went far above eight pounds. He just started to get really pudgy. So what we did with our nutritionist was we really made him change how he eats. I worked on finding ways not to drive him crazy, but to help him learn to like vegetables and learn to like some lean meats like chicken so that he could have better blood sugar control, and that was the hard part. -Mother One of the things we did was we let him pick a good salad dressing. He went through a lot of different bottles of dressing and he tasted it until he found one. If he liked the dressing and if I put out a plate of vegetables, he could dunk the vegetables in the dressing. So he started eating vegetables and iceberg lettuce. Then as he liked the iceberg, I put the dressing on the green leaf and the red leaf lettuce and we just branched out from there. The one key thing was getting something that he could dunk the vegetables in that he liked. -MotherAfter school, the kids come out of hungry so I would put things I wanted him to like in the car. I wouldn’t even say anything—the food would just be on the console in between the two seats. So I’d put out a bag of baby carrots, or I’d put out cut-up fruit, or I’d put out cold cuts and healthy meats. I’d put out cheese sticks, even though he wasn’t a really big cheese kid. All of those foods have less carbs or they’re complex carbs. I would put something out with whole wheat bread and see if he’d eat it. So sneaking it in like that when he was hungry, or when he was watching TV. I limited the TV, but when he was watching, he wouldn’t notice so much so he would end up trying new things because it wasn’t an issue. It wasn’t like we’re sitting at the dinner table staring at him. -Mother I wrote an article about called Creating a Family Culture of Healthy Eating and the reason I wrote it is because as I looked back, I used a certain number of what I would call “indoctrination techniques”. I did things with the kids like when they were doing their homework, I put on a nutrition video. And of course it’s better to watch TV than do homework, so they watched the whole thing and I remember that being a real turning point for Billy and Abby. I would read them little quotes of things I would find about nutrition when we were at dinner. I would invite people over to talk about the food they liked or we would cook healthy food with people from the neighborhood or friends of mine and the kids would be around to hear our conversations. So I found ways to sort of explain to the kids why we eat the way we eat. Along with the fact that Billy has really good blood sugar control and that feels good to him, so he wants to keep it. -Mother See, it’s different if your child’s diagnosed when they’re a teenager, but Billy was seven. By the time he was a teenager he knows why he eats the way he does and so if he goes out with his friends, he might have a diet soda, which I don’t like the ingredients in but certainly he can have it. We don’t have that in the house, so that might be something he would have with his friends. Or he might go out for pizza, but he would tend to get salad and a slice of pizza. He might go out for ice cream with them, but then again, he’s not going to go out and have a soda, a pizza, and ice cream. What he tends to do is he’ll have something, but not so much that it’s going to rattle his health or his blood sugar control. -Mother It’s got to be said that food matters. Looking back, I’m so glad I figured out what foods are not good for my child, and to get those nutrient rich foods into him so he’s not having what I call, “wasted calories”. He eats so well now and whole family is healthier, but also you just notice that you just don’t get the spikes that make him end up low. He does not have to be on the rollercoaster because his parents are trying to do their very best and they don’t know from the diet they’re giving him what’s the wrong part. I find often times that the difficult part is that you’re doing your best, but you’re feeding your kid things that are kind of uncontrollable through insulin. -Mother I had to find a way to change his diet without him getting stressed out. It’s one thing to say, “Your child should be eating kale.” But it’s another thing to try to find a way so that you have this child is already under a lot of stress, whose life is already completely different—to keep fighting with him at the dinner table, “You have to eat this kale.” That’s crazy. So I had to figure out by trial and error how to get him to like iceberg lettuce. And then, how am I going get him to consider other lettuces? Then how to get spinach in, and then kale? Do you see? We did it in steps. -Mother You’ve got to educate your kids on why we’re making these changes. And we had kind of a sneaky way of doing this. We got a great DVD done by a chemist who talks about the way foods are and the glycemic index and how it affects blood sugars. It was really a great DVD, but my kids would never sit down to watch that DVD with myself and my wife. So what we did was when the kids were engaged in doing their homework my wife and I just put the DVD on and started watching it ourselves. And of course the next thing you know is they’re watching it with us because they’d rather do that than do their homework. So that all of a sudden that got us involved in educating out kids without force feeding them—no pun intended—about nutrition and about how food works. It wasn’t that we were telling them this; they were learning it for themselves. -Father Every time I come across some sort of little article or commentary about nutrition and food, I’ll cut it out of the paper or the magazine that I read it in and I’ll just leave it on the counter at home. Eventually the kids come across it and they say, “Hey, gee--did you know that there’s a half cup of white sugar in every Dunkin’ Donuts cookie and that that has 500 calories? And can you imagine what that must do to your body?” So, it’s sharing things that we know as adults with your kids, but in way where you’re not making them learn it, but you’re encouraging them to learn it. -FatherA gradual transition to healthy eating What we did is when we went to whole wheat, we went to only Wonder whole wheat—just a difference in dye, but there’s no difference in taste. Then we went to oat bread. And with the oat bread and then I would turn it into either a grilled cheese or french toast so that he couldn’t even tell. Finally, now he eats Ezekiel bread that is sprouted grain. When a child eats a white bread it spikes your blood sugar far faster then the insulin can get on board, but with a whole grain or a sprouted bread, it absorbs so slowly that the insulin can catch up. -Mother Karen, Billy’s mother, has been very, very good because I think inside she’s been a little angry that she couldn’t rely on us more. But she has decided that her role has to be as a coach. So without being angry, she’ll go over what we did all weekend, what we should have fed him, why that wasn’t such a good choice, what we could have fed him instead. I would say more than reading, it’s been through Karen’s patience that we’ve figured out how to take care of Billy. Also, I’ve learned a couple of recipes. I learned how to make a birthday cake out of Jello with whipped cream, and fruit. And when Billy comes over, I ask Karen to tell me what to make. I have snack plates in my house the way she does with carrots, celery, and peanut butter. Of course as Billy got older, it gets easier in some ways. In other ways he’s more rebellious and he’ll take things he shouldn’t, but that’s not my responsibility any more. As he gets older, it’s up to him and it gets much easier. -Grandmother Get rid of all the junk food in your house so that if your child is over visiting you, they can’t open a closet and be tempted. So don’t have chips. We don’t have white bread. Reduce the temptation and make sure you have things that the child can eat when they come over so that’s no stress about it--it’s just there. -Grandmother
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Hospital Boston Department of Psychiatry. All Rights Reserved. The information on this website should not be taken as medical advice, which can only be given to you by your personal health care professional. Updated: June 8, 2009 |
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