We all know it’s important to maintain healthy nutrition and we honor this knowledge by telling our loved ones why we should eat more vegetables. Unfortunately, much of this information doesn’t stick. Often, it only aggravates the children who see it as some sort of cosmic injustice taking place:
“Why do we have to eat VEGETABLES, of all things, to be healthy?”
In all honestly, our own opinion about the matter is usually no different. This makes the injunction for more vegetables even less convincing.
Bullet # 1:
- We must learn to love eating vegetables.
This will enhance our talent for cooking vegetables. More importantly, loving vegetables dissolves our desire to lecture our children about them. As we begin to practice what we preach with an authentic love of doing it, we will impress our children in lasting ways.
This brings us to bullet # 2.
- He or she who loves vegetables eats them for breakfast!
This is remarkably simple and it brings vegetables to a whole new level of prominence in your life.
There’s something magical about breakfast. It’s wrapped with awesome sensations like the rising sun, birds signing, and the smell of coffee. With this comes a natural rise in serotonin levels and many other endocrine hormones that give us positive feelings. Children are most attuned to this natural, morning high.
Coupling the morning time with vegetables (which could benefit from these positive associations) just makes perfect sense! Furthermore, having just woken from a night-long fast, breakfast time offers us a unique opportunity to fall in love with any food that we choose to eat, not just bacon or French toast.
Lastly,
- Relax and enjoy your child’s defiance – it’s a sign of good health!
One thing is for certain. Children are born into this world with a vitality level that few adults can remember. Adults want children to be healthy and strong, but they already are these things!
If adults were endowed with a childlike vitality, two things would probably happen.
1) They would be unceremoniously plunged into the present moment and begin to live a more vibrant life.
2) They would quickly take on that characteristic of children which abandons all fear for future health concerns.
Just imagine the freedom!
The bottom line is that we can regain the freedom and vitality of our childhood. This vitality IS achievable through the consumption of copious amounts of cooked vegetables. And our children, surrounded by the love of nutrition, will learn to enjoy it as a part of life, which will ensure that they maintain their vitality into adolescence and adulthood.
From Pathways to Family Wellness Newsletter, March 27 2017
