Lindsay: Welcome to the Lifting Lindsay podcast.
Man, it's been a minute, guys.
It has been a minute between the New Year's is always really big for
everybody's health and fitness goals.
I stay pretty busy around the new year, but man, this year I got hit
really bad the past two weeks with a cold and just a tiny little cold guys.
I get sinus infections really easy.
My dad was the same way.
And so a tiny little cold, doesn't matter how small it is, Alex
is always like, oh my goodness.
Like start using, there's this thing called the teapot that helps kinda drain
sinuses and I grew up just having to use it ' cause I just get infections.
My little Link is the same way.
We thought it was a sinus infection.
I still think he did get one, but then he also got, was hit by pink
eye and then, uh, spread to my other child, and it, anyways, it's just been
a crazy beginning of the new year.
And do you know what I'm grateful for?
I'm grateful that I don't put a whole lot of stock into the new year.
Right.
There are a lot of people that do, and I'm not saying that that's right or wrong.
Personally.
I think that there is a better way, and that is deciding that there's
no perfect time to start right.
The new year will not, there's nothing magical about, about it in and of itself.
It, it actually won't ensure that you hit your desired outcome or goal.
There's nothing special about it.
Just like there's nothing special about Mondays.
I mean, how many of you have heard or said, I know, I've
said, oh, I'll start on Monday.
Why do we think that there's something magical about Monday?
Or I'll start again tomorrow.
There's, there is something.
I would say we have created something about a new day.
It feels good, a new beginning, and we have labeled that as well,
that's tomorrow a new day or Monday?
A new beginning or the first day of the month or the first day of
the year, we have created that.
There's actually in and of itself, nothing special about it, right.
In fact, I think one of my favorite moments coaching was when a client
told me that they had found themselves halfway through a box of a package of
Oreos, and they stopped and were like.
What am I doing?
You know, I, I, I think a lot of us kind of found ourselves in that moment.
It doesn't have to be directly about Oreos or food.
Have you ever had that happen just in life in general?
You kind of had that moment, you stop and you look around and you
realize where your life choices have led you, and you're like, what
am I doing?
I know better.
I am better.
Why am I doing this?
Why am I my standards.
Not having boundaries.
Allowing this and this and that from other people or myself, right?
I think that that's so common to just kind of have that aha moment.
Do you know what else is so common in those aha moments to be, oh, okay.
Okay.
I'm gonna do better.
I'll start Monday.
I'll start tomorrow.
I'll start.
Oh, well it's December, uh, and so I'll start January 1st.
I'll start the new year and we always choose this date so far in the future and,
and this beautiful moment of my client.
She said, it dawned on me as I'm going through this, well,
I'll start again tomorrow.
Today's already a wash.
I'll just let you know.
Keep going crazy today with foods and then I'll start again tomorrow.
And she said it was this incredible moment when she realized my
new beginning will start now.
This very second, I don't have to continue making these poor
choices for a minute longer.
Not days, not months, not hour.
Not a, not a minute longer.
My new beginning starts now.
So I was talking about this with actually somebody on Instagram,
how I was a little frustrated.
This isn't how I wanted my New Year's to begin.
On top of it guys, my app.
Oh, I mean you can imagine this, all of the excitement around the New Year's.
I have all of these new signups and my app gets a massive bug in
it and it is now ruining other people's massive New Year's goals.
Support is working nonstop, but we can only do so much because we have
hired out this company in using their app and it's just like these bugs and
people couldn't get to the, oh my gosh.
It was guys, it was not how I wanted to begin the new year, and I was
expressing some frustration just about kind of being sick, this person didn't
know all of this other stuff that I'm dealing with and personal struggles.
Just getting started figuring out the in vitro process too.
Heads up for you.
We are doing IVF this month and I I do ask one thing.
I I've had a lot of failed IVFs.
I've had, uh, five miscarriages, some of them extending, us not finding
out till like 13, 14 weeks out.
Right?
I share that we're doing one last, last IVFI have two frozen embryos.
I wanna share this, this, uh, time period, but I am also going to put down boundaries
that if you follow me on Instagram, or if you want to send me a message
on Instagram, or an email and be like, Hey, Linds how's your in vitro going?
Just know a few things about this process.
It is ridiculously heavy, emotional, and hard.
Um, I've also started taking hormone shots that, in and of themselves,
they cause a lot of changes within the body and, uh, just emotional changes.
So it is a tender time.
If you are curious about what's going on with the in vitro process on
Instagram, I have saved stories on it.
If you haven't heard anything there, there might be a good reason.
So if you want updates.
Go there.
Okay.
Um, I just ask that you don't reach out personally and ask me, I would
hate for you to be the person who, if I, I've just had so many miscarriages
and IVFs and I UIs not, not workout.
I would hate it if you messaged me and were like, Hey, how's it going?
I'm so excited for you.
This is so fun.
How's it going?
I'm like, well, I just found out I had a miscarriage, so this isn't so fun, right?
Like, I would hate for you to feel that uncomfortableness, right?
Of, oops.
So just know that that's my boundary.
If you, if you're, if you have questions, you're curious
about it, I don't blame you.
But, but, um, it under saves stories on Instagram you'll
be able to see the updates.
So anyways, this has been a crazy New Year's and I ha and I was
talking about this isn't how I wanted to start my New Year's.
And a woman wrote to me and she goes, isn't it great though that
neither you nor I hold a whole lot of stock in the new year?
And I just kind of laughed when I saw that message.
'cause I'm like, she is so right.
She is so right.
I don't.
At all.
I mean, I, there's a little bit of it in the air just because I know a lot
of people are thinking about it, and I do think it's a good time to pause
and say, yeah, what, what changes do I want to see in the next 12 months?
But to be honest, at the beginning of every month, I'm always like.
What changes do I wanna see in the next 30 days?
Or at the beginning of a quarter?
What, what do I want to see?
What outcomes do I wanna see at the end of this three months?
I'm always thinking that way and, and I'm, I'm much like my client
who believes that new beginnings can start literally right now.
You don't have to wait for some magical, fictional date.
Or tomorrow or Monday, or, you know, a new year or even a beginning of a quarter.
I have trained myself over time to put really no stock into that.
But with that being said, I do want to share that.
I still do like setting outcomes.
That's what I call them.
I don't know why I don't call them goals.
When I'm talking to other people, I usually say like, oh, I have goals.
'cause that's their language that they'll understand.
But, but it's funny because right in front of me right now,
I have this big whiteboard.
I love writing stuff down.
I am a pen and paper or a marker and whiteboard kind of gal.
I love it.
There's something therapeutic about writing it all down and seeing it.
Or maybe I feel like I'm some kind of smart scientist.
I don't know.
Like I'm writing it all down, writing the paths that will lead
me where, but it is kinda funny
right now, I do have right in front of me, I have this list of outcomes on one side.
So this is how I write out my, my goals or future plans or things that I wanna see.
And I don't just have it about fitness or business.
I have it about family.
I have it about relationships, I have it about my marriage.
So I usually write this on a huge whiteboard and I, I draw a line down
this center and on the right side I write out the outcomes that I wanna see.
And on the left side, I write out the paths, and systems
that will get me there.
So I think a lot of people do this wrong.
I think a lot of people think that if they have a goal and they write down
their goal and every day they look at their goal that they're gonna hit it.
But that is not the best approach.
There's always good, better, best, right?
That, that may be good.
I mean, I mean, it keeps the idea of what you want right in front of
you, but usually the problem isn't that somebody hasn't written down
or know the outcome they want.
I know a lot of people are like, I really wanna lose weight.
And every day they fixate on it.
Every day they think about it.
In fact, it's everything they think about.
And yet, every day they are no closer to the outcome than the day before.
The day before.
Or the day before.
Or the year before.
So writing out the outcome is just the beginning.
So this month In Be Strong, which is my membership site, we have books every
month, a new book that we read together and you, you don't have to participate
if, if you don't want to, but I call it the Walking Book Club because I wanna
encourage people, just like walk around your house, just put in an audio book.
Walk around your house for a good 15 minutes, get another 1500 steps,
whether that's cleaning, washing your windows, your mirrors, deep cleaning
laundry, like, or just walking around your neighborhood or wherever.
Right now in Utah, it's freezing.
So, so I'm not going outside for my walks, but, just another 15 minutes.
What I want to encourage people to do another 15 minutes of movement, and
a lot of times it feels good just to pop in a, a good podcast or, a book.
And so I want these to be really productive times, not just getting steps
in, but choosing books that will help lead people to their highest selves.
And so this month we've chosen Atomic Habits by James Clear.
If you have not read that book again, I've read this book two times.
This is my third time reading it, and I still have just as many aha moments as
I did the first time I read this book.
It is so good and I, I listened to it and I have the book.
Because I like marking stuff in books, and when I'm driving to the
grocery store, I'll listen to books.
People often will be like, how many?
How?
How do you read three to four books a month?
I listen to so many of them as I just like, I'll drop my kids off at school.
I like talking to them.
Soon as they get out of the car, pop in a good book as I'm grocery,
shopping, walking, whatever.
So this month is James Clear.
This book is amazing guys.
It is so good.
And I love how he says
we don't rise to the level of our goals.
We fall.
To the level of our systems.
He has this entire section about how just having a goal doesn't get you there.
You have to, and focusing all your time and energy on having that
goal, not what gets you there.
So I have said this a lot.
I feel like people oftentimes are in a
diet mind or just have a diet mindset where they fixate on fat loss so much
and fixate on all the things that they need to do, but they don't do any of it.
They kind of may be a little bit, but they're exhausted mentally and
physically because they spend so much time thinking about the goal.
And they spend so little times actually creating systems that
carry them through to finally obtain the goal or the desired outcome.
So systems are key.
They really are.
Just having the goal is not key.
It's knowing the path that gets you there, and then actually following it.
So in another podcast I shared
that because I had somebody ask me the question, how do you keep
life balance and not get too pulled into your fitness goals?
And I'll let you guys listen to that whole episode.
The main thing is that I have a lot of goals, not just health body goals.
So that helps keep me balanced.
So right now.
On this whiteboard, I have family goals, what I want to really see in my family.
So on the right hand side, I am, I've just spent a lot of time
thinking about this and I wrote all the outcomes that I want to see.
So I'm just gonna share a few of them with you.
Um, just gonna kind of go down this list.
I want my kids to be hard workers.
I want them to learn how to do hard things with a little
less complaining, to be honest.
Uh, I want them to learn how to manage money and wants.
There's nothing wrong with wants, but you need to learn how to manage them so
that you don't get swept away by them.
I want them to learn how to
read the scriptures and actually learn the language of the scriptures.
I want them to feel safe and loved in expressing their emotions.
No thought, no emotion is off limits.
They can express those things to me and they find safety with me.
Oh man, guys, that one, we could have a whole episode in
and of itself about that one.
Um, I want them to eat healthier with less sugar.
I'm not an anti-sugar person, but do you know how fricking hard it is?
Our kids are just inundated with sugar?
Even those who don't, like my sister went through a three month sugar fast
with her kids, no processed sugar.
They could have fruit.
That was the extent she really wanted to just kind of clear out their palate.
And I get that because if you're used to high sugar everything, then
that's what your palette is used to.
And other sweets won't taste as sweet.
My brother went to Japan for two years on a service mission, and
when he came back he brought some Japanese candy and I tried it and I
was like, that is not sweet at all.
It, it's not bad.
It tastes good, but it's not sweet.
Like this isn't, to me, it wasn't candy.
And then my brother, after two years of eating only, you know, food from Japan.
He had a candy bar and he was like, oh my gosh, this is, he
was like, this is way too sweet.
It was the funniest thing ever, just because he wasn't used to it anymore.
Children and sugar, it's hard.
I'm actually really glad that our kids go to the schools that they do right now.
Two of them go to a school called Challenger.
And Challenger is very much like we don't reward kids with candy.
We don't do that for a lot of reasons.
One of the main reasons is they need to learn to start doing hard things,
feeling accomplished.
We want them to feel accomplished.
We want them to do things on their own and get that feeling of independence
like that leads to a lot of self-confidence and, um, we don't want
them doing things right to get sugar.
To get candy.
I was so grateful for that because two years ago my kids went to another school
close by and this teacher, she was just doing her best.
Okay.
She was just doing her best.
I didn't agree with it, but she, but I, I, I really do.
Uh, my heart reaches out to teachers.
They're just trying their best.
I get it.
but her thing was, I'm gonna have this huge bag of candy and I'm gonna ask a
question and whoever raises their hand and says it right, I'll give you candy.
Well, my daughter is the one who's like front and center raising her
hand for every single question.
She's literally eating sugar all day long.
And I, it drove me nuts.
It drove me nuts because then they go to church on the weekends and the church
teachers feel like they need to provide a treat at the end of every lesson.
I'm like, you don't, you don't need to just like, why can't we just teach
our children to good do good, to listen because it has its own rewards.
We don't need to use candy as this reward system.
It drives me nuts, guys.
Okay?
As I'm sure you can feel that over this podcast.
The two other things that I have on that outcome list for my children
is wanna teach them to serve others.
I want their worldview to expand.
So I have this whole list.
Now these are relatively vague outcomes, right?
How do you measure my children's worldview expanding?
How do you measure that they, you know, have served enough or know to
serve or all of these things, right?
But these are general outcomes.
That I want, and I know that these things take time.
So what I'm going to focus on are the paths and the systems
that will get them there.
So on the left hand side, I have these paths that they're going to
daily, weekly, monthly, be working towards that will in and of themselves
naturally lead to the desired outcome.
You know, one of the things when I do like one-on-one calls, or when
I do my weekly live calls with Be Strong membership, um, users.
Uh, one of the things that I repeat the most often is like, what are your systems?
What systems do you have in place?
And all last month we had about four lessons go out on systems.
And this month we're now doing that even more because this month's goal
is becoming the master of protein, but we've got to get systems in place.
They might be hard at first, but true systems turn into autopilot.
So it, it takes a lot of effort at first, but once you get that
habit and system in a few months, it's just on autopilot and it just
naturally leads you to the outcome.
And I've been thinking a lot about this, these systems and also like
what is the low hanging fruit?
What can I just change by 1% today?
I.
And then in a few weeks change by another 1%.
Then in a few weeks change by another 1%.
It's like once you get a new system in place, then you kind of add a little bit
more on top, and this becomes a natural path that turns things on autopilot
to now I just have this healthy life.
And a lot of times people will be like, well, how do you get from where you were?
Lindsay?
Eating chocolate and cheese, no concept of health and nutrition beyond
what other people think are healthy.
Right?
The the green juice drinks and all of that like.
People sometimes have a weird sense of what, what's healthy.
Um, but what's healthy is creating these systems that just turn
on autopilot that lead you over time to your desired outcome.
And so that's what I've been focusing a lot on and as I've been looking at
my family, what are these systems?
What can we change by 1% today that will have that incredible
outcome in five years?
So on that left hand side is, is where I am I'm doing all of that.
Let's actually talk about the eating healthy with minimal sugar.
Recently I had a woman write in on Be Strong where they can ask
me questions and she's like, I'm, I'm just really frustrated.
I've come to this really good place with food, having a
better relationship with it.
Um, better systems, but, but my family is struggling and my kids don't eat
healthy and, and I, we don't want our kids to sit there and track macros,
like, let's, that'd be like weird.
Like we're not gonna have them do that.
But we still want them to be fueling their body, right, getting nutrients
and not eating all the sugar.
And, and we, we also know the negative impacts that it can have
with food relationship issues and even body issues by over emphasizing
like, sugar bad, that's bad for you.
That's a toxin.
Like that type of talk is actually showing some pretty negative outcomes.
People who talk that way tend to have bad relationships with food, body dysmorphia,
bad relationship with, um, working out, um, over utilizing those things.
So, we want to make sure that we're teaching our children while
keeping a healthy mindset, right?
I have had those same frustrations with my children.
They're, why would they come home and eat a relatively healthy meal when literally
all day long my daughter is getting sugar from her teacher for answering questions?
Right?
So, so why would she then eat her lunch?
The healthy lunch that I pack her, she, she's not even that hungry
because she, she's just been eating sugar all the way up to lunchtime.
So then she barely nibbles on lunch.
The rose, it all away goes to waste, goes back to her classroom, where
once again, she's getting candy.
Um, and then comes home, wants a treat because food is now just treats.
And I, it's, it was really hard.
I was so grateful when we sent her to Challenger and they're
even like, if it's your child's birthday, don't send candy and sugar.
So believe me when I say I have dealt with these frustrations now earlier, mid, uh,
last year, I we had made a lot of really positive changes and it was so awesome.
We were seeing our kids finally sit down and eat healthy meals and
dinners and not have to have, uh, treats and sweetss all day long.
We had made these changes and I'll share a lot of those changes with you today.
But then, the holidays came and we started traveling a lot too.
So we had Halloween, and we were on a cruise, and then
we came back for Halloween.
And then there were a few Halloween parties before that.
Thanksgiving we ended up traveling for around, uh, Thanksgiving time too.
And then we had Christmas where, you know, tons of daily treats were
being brought over by neighbors.
And I usually love all of that and that's fine.
I love showing my children like, you can just take a few, you don't
have to eat all of them, right?
But all of a sudden my house is just full of all of this candy and I feel like
I'm pretty good at navigating myself.
Around that, but my children have let yet to learn that.
And so a lot of times what parents will do is they'll use fear like,
oh, that's evil, that's bad.
Sugar's bad, don't do that.
Or they're, they're on the other side of the spectrum where they're so scared of
their child developing some type of eating disorder or feeling bad about themselves,
and so they won't even talk about it.
Right?
We have to fall somewhere in the middle.
But what I noticed is even having a little bit of these treats, my children they
didn't have a healthy approach to it.
And so I knew what we had to do.
We had to go back to what we had established earlier on that year.
So let me go through that.
Now, I did go through and I got rid of all of the treats the day after Christmas.
All of them, and I talked about this on Instagram and some people
were saying, wait, wait, wait, wait.
But you teach that um, these were genuine questions.
I don't think anybody was coming at me and, and rightfully so good
questions saying, wait, wait, wait.
But how do you teach navigating around treats if you're just getting
rid of all of them and, I'm like, look, I'm really good at navigating
around it, but my kids aren't.
And right now their palate has actually changed over the past three
months to all they want is sugar.
If it's not really high sugar, then it doesn't quote unquote taste good.
Literally, my 4-year-old was telling me that, like those were his words, saying,
if it's not sugar, it doesn't taste good.
I don't want it for dinner.
There were some, within just a few months, we had fallen
right back into this rutt, so.
I went back to the system that was working really, really, really well.
So the first thing is I changed our environment.
I had to get rid of everything, not because I think it's evil or bad, but
the environment was not setting my children up for success because they
don't know how to work that environment.
I think this is kind of a common sense principle, right?
You're not gonna give your eight-year-old child a cell
phone with access to everything.
All the social media they want all the YouTube, they
want all the TikTok they want.
I mean, we're really not gonna do that, right?
We're not gonna do that because there is an environment on there that
they don't know how to navigate yet.
So my children personally don't have phones and, and won't have phones.
Intel.
Both they and I are in a place where, uh.
We can put in a lot of time and energy into the educational process and slowly
introduce different environments and how to be healthy in those environments.
So that was my thing.
I need to get rid of this current environment.
I need to change it, and so that there's really no treats.
And I need to help them kind of clear out that desire of
wanting just sugar all day long.
We, we need to kind of step away from sugar as much as we can right now.
And so that was step number one.
Step number two was to get rid of all treats, like all bars, all
just like little really sweet.
Treats, um, and get them, if they came to me saying they wanted a snack,
I said, you can have some fruit.
That was it.
Because another problem is they were trying and they would sneak into the
cupboard too and get all of these snacks and everything, and then
they wouldn't want to eat dinner.
Or I'd be like, yeah, you can have that snack.
So then they just kind of freely ate and then they would barely
touch dinner, and then half an hour later be like, well, I'm hungry.
Well, yeah, of course they're not going to eat their meals.
They were snacking all day long.
So I decided I'm gonna show them what I do right now with my own clients.
Eat large meals, large nutrient-dense meals, minimize all snacking.
So I'm going to introduce to my children what I do for myself
and my clients right now.
So I got rid of all of those, all chips.
Now I did keep my popcorners.
They're not sweet and they don't have that same satisfaction as
regular chips where you can just keep eating, eating, eating, eating.
A lot of them are not like that.
The ones that we have in our home aren't.
And so I kept those and my children could take those to school.
Those were not a snack to be had at home.
So then I put them on a schedule of meals.
We have breakfast.
You go to school, you eat the lunch, you come back.
We can have a meal when you get back from school 'cause they're usually hungry.
So this is kind of like a smaller meal.
You could call it a snack, but it's something that's gonna be large
enough to hold them till dinner.
And if in between that they still want something, we always
tell them you can have fruit.
And then after dinner, if they're like, oh, I, I, I'm still hungry.
You should have had more dinner.
You can have fruit.
Since we've done this before, the children just kind of knew.
We talked to 'em about this.
Explained why we were doing it, and which really, really helped.
We are getting on board.
I am loving it.
We are back to our children eating meals.
I do wanna talk about one other thing.
What do I do as far as vegetables, because I have kids that don't like vegetables.
To be completely honest, I'm, I'm not a huge vegetable eater.
I don't really enjoy them.
Um, I do it more because like, I know I need to eat it, but that's really
hard to have your kids do that.
So, as far as greens and vegetables and, and try like, think what is the
purpose of having greens and vegetables?
The purpose is, in my opinion, to give your, your children variety in their diet.
Uh, so I will have it on the table.
If they eat it great.
I try to at least encourage them to try it.
But the other main reason is because we want them to have the, the
nutrients and the vitamins, right?
Well, fruit also has nutrients and vitamins.
They may not have as much as vegetables, but they still have
'em and they have antioxidants.
And so I will now put fruit on the table for every dinner.
I love watching my children just eat, uh, a serving of
the, the meal that I have and.
Gobble up their grapes or the, the cantaloupe or the bananas or the
strawberries or the blueberries or the raspberries, like I feel like, do you
know what, at least they are getting nutrients and vitamins from there.
I have other children who will have three servings of greens.
Two days ago, green beans, my daughter Elsie, three servings
of them, she loved them.
My other daughter won't touch them, and so I'm like, do you know?
I'm just grateful she is eating these blueberries and
raspberries with her dinner.
I.
So that's something that I've started doing is if the goal really is to
help them get more nutrients to help them get more variety in their diet,
we can do that through fruits too.
We'll be encouraging healthy whole foods still, right?
Um, so that's one thing that I've started doing.
Another thing that I've started doing is asking them like,
what kind of meals do you like?
What do you prefer?
And getting their input.
So as I get their input, then I take that and I make healthier versions.
Sometimes it's a hit and a success, and sometimes it's not.
But I have stopped making more than one meal.
I, I don't know if, if you've ever done this before, but your
children won't eat the meal.
And so I told them, fine, then go and make your own chicken nuggets,
then just get something to eat.
I'm not gonna make another meal.
And I thought that that was a good step in the right direction, which I think
it was making them like make their own, like if you want something else, then
you can, but I'm not making another meal.
Well.
I finally stopped doing that.
I, I finally realized I am training them or they are training me,
actually, and we are wasting food.
So I stopped doing that and I started telling 'em like, there are
meals that I make that I'm like, Ooh, I'm not a big fan of this.
I don't like it.
I'm not gonna make it again.
But it's the food that we have and so I will.
Eat it and I'll, I have sides that I can enjoy too, but I have stopped
saying it's okay to get another meal and everything's a battle at first.
Everything.
If you think that your kids are gonna be like, okay, mom, sounds great,
then you are in for disappointment and high levels of frustration.
It's just not gonna happen.
They're, they're gonna fight you.
And, and it's not that that's a bad thing.
They're pushing boundaries.
That's actually part of maturing and growing.
That's how the brain works.
I'm gonna push to see what I can get, kind of thing.
You do it.
Maybe the tactics are a little different than your children's, but you still do it.
So we can't be upset with our children doing something that's actually natural
for human development, but we can decide to be the parent and we can
decide to be the adult and not let them and, and hold your ground and say, no.
Now what I've just shared may not work for a lot of people.
And some people may be like, oh, that's gonna, that'll, that'll be great.
Remember what I said?
Everything is about trying something out, seeing what works, what
doesn't, and learning how to pivot.
Okay?
The same is true with your children, but you cannot try something once and then be
like, oh, it didn't work for my family.
Seriously?
That's like eating one salad and being like, what?
Well, I didn't lose weight, so doesn't work.
You have to be consistent.
That is the most important thing.
So let me just kind of go over a quick list of just kind of what
I've already talked about, just main takeaways on this subject.
The quick list of what has stuck before, and then we kind of got out of it because
of holidays and everything and travel.
And now going back to it, it's feeling really good.
I mean, it feels so good yesterday.
I made dinner and, and we're talking about healthy, it was lasagna,
35 grams of protein per serving.
And because we had been putting our foot down and not allowing them to
snack all day, and if they wanted to snack, then I would cut up
some, they could have some carrots.
They could have some apples.
And I just put my foot down on that.
And um, and so when they sat down.
They were actually hungry for the meal.
My daughter, Elsie, ate three servings.
Hazel and Link had two.
And then afterwards, probably about an hour and a half right before
bed, they were like, no, I'm hungry.
It was probably two hours right before bed.
Oh, I'm hungry.
And he said, okay, then we'll cut up an apple or let me cut up some fruit.
That's what we had.
So let me go through this, this quick list.
Fruit at every dinner.
Like that has really worked for my kids to get them more nutrients, more variety.
Two, they help me choose the recipe.
I even show them pictures.
Um, and then I also get feedback on whether it's a keeper or not.
And it's interesting because the longer they stay away from the highly processed
foods and treats and snacks, the more they say yes to the healthier food options.
But also I really do try to hear what they have to say.
Like, they really like hamburgers.
So once a week we have hamburgers and I make them out of 96% lean ground beef.
It's nothing fancy.
Just season them up, grill them up.
We have that once a week and they're so excited.
They, they all love their hamburgers.
Okay.
So, so I really do take their feedback and I love even getting on Pinterest,
and they really like chicken nuggets.
Well bare chicken nuggets are actually really good, and we air fry them
so they can have their, you know, chicken nuggets once a week and I'll
take that and, and throw it in a salad or or get creative with that.
But I do like to show them that I care what they think and I'm
dinner's not just for me, but I do also explain to 'em, look, I need.
I need you to eat healthy too.
I need you to fuel your body, right.
Another thing is my kids are at the age nine 10 where I have started telling them,
um, to help out with the cooking process.
When they help make the food, they usually are a lot different
in their reaction to it.
Like I said, not letting them snack throughout the day, getting
them used to eating larger meals.
And then, like I said, getting rid of all of the treats.
It is, it is so hard, but it is really cool after a few weeks to
watch them love eating fruit and that's like a treat for them.
Or I will make my, uh, protein ice cream and I make it for them
too, because they just love it.
That's a big treat that they get once a week.
You know, growing up we didn't have treats every single day like that.
That's mind blowing that we do that now because growing up.
I didn't know about you guys, but we didn't do that.
Maybe once a week
my mom made a dessert.
Um, school didn't provide treats for us every week.
Church didn't provide treats for us every week.
This is like a thing that I'm seeing in these younger generations that
is just kinda mind blowing to me.
I don't like it.
And so I'm gonna try to really push back and even when I'm in church
callings, I try to push back on it.
And I try to encourage.
Don't use treats, or even ask the parents if it's okay, because maybe
the parents are like, no, I don't want you bringing 12 cookies to my
child every week just to sit through church or school or something, right?
So, anyways, these are things that have really, really, really helped me.
But the first few weeks are, I always get big pushback and then it's like their
palate gets used to the, the lower treats.
Do you know we have cereal every once a week?
And do you know what I do?
I buy this cereal from Trader Joe's because it's not as sweet.
So they get this kick, but they don't wanna keep having bowl after bowl after
bowl after bowl, and then they don't wanna be snacking on it all day long.
It's like one bowl with some fruit and an egg, and they're like, yep, I'm set.
I'm done.
So choosing the lower sweetened options and getting them used to it, their
palate used to it, and ours need to get used to those things as well.
So I have really enjoyed the past few weeks watching my kids go
back to eating full meals again.
Back to eating more healthy with minimal sugar.
They usually don't fight as much.
Their energy levels are so much better throughout the day.
Um, so it really, really helps not just physically, but even mentally.
Even emotionally, how they show up.
So I, it's something that I really wanna strongly encourage each one of you
to look at the food culture in your family, and maybe what I do isn't right
for you, but just looking and seeing what can I change by just 1% today, by
just 1% today and then in a few weeks.
What can I change 1% today?
Right?
Just have that mentality of just little changes and include your family in on it.
You really can.
You can include them in and say, this is what we've been doing and it's
not working, so like what can we do?
This is what I think is going to be best and we're gonna try it out, kind
of having those, those family councils.
I hope you guys have a wonderful, I know this wasn't like entirely fitness
related or training related or, or whatever, but last, uh, I've actually
had a lot of people asking me if I could speak more on my lifestyle and
my family and how I've been able to incorporate health and fitness into
my family more and just life balance.
Life balance.
Because life is so much more than a six pack, right?
It's so much more.
I mean, prs feel great in the gym, but life is so much more than that.
And there are other prs that we can hit outside of the gym
and, and my encouragement to you would be, what are the PRS that
you wanna see outside the gym?
What are some personal best that you wanna see with your family?
Or even how you show up with your family, so that you can enjoy your
family more, and life so much more.
Anyways, I hope you guys have a wonderful week.
I will talk to you later.