Healthy Habits: 3 Healthy Habits for Kids (and their parents too!)

Last year I realized that we had some terrible health habits. The truth is, I was just in survival mode and not really paying attention to the eating and exercise habits of our family. As I was working on our family goals for the year, it struck me that we need to be purposeful about our health. We had a long way to go so we broke it down into manageable steps.

Step One: Teach our kids about healthy eating.

I decided to keep this really simple and go with the "food is fuel" idea. I told my girls that and then asked them, "Do you think all food is good fuel for our body?" We chatted for a bit about their thoughts and then we did this experiment to prove the point that not all food is good fuel.

Food is Fuel Experiement:

I held up the straw and said, "This is like our body, good fuel should move through it and help it work better." I held the straw over a glass bowl and said, "Let's see how these fuels travel through our body."

Then, I held up the first cup (the one with the dark liquid). I let the girls take turns pouring the fuel into the body (the liquid into the straw). We watched as it traveled easily through the straw and into the bowl.

Next we tried the chunky mix. Right away the girls noticed it was hard to pour. Some spilled out and what did go in the straw got stuck or moved very slowly.

We talked about how the food we put in our body is just like that. Some goes right to where it should and helps our body work well and grow strong and healthy and some causes problems and does no good at all in our body. I helped the girls come to the conclusion that we needed to think about what would be good fuel and what wouldn't. We looked at this site and learned about what our body needs and why.

A Pyramid of Change

Now that we knew about food as fuel and learned a bit about what was good fuel, we decided to make our own food pyramid to help us remember. We went really basic. The large bottom of the pyramid is foods to eat often, foods that are really good fuel. The middle section is foods that aren't great, but aren't terrible, foods that are ok to eat a little of. The top section is foods that aren't good for our body at all, things we may eat only every once in a while or not at all.

I drew a pyramid on a large piece of construction paper and made the three sections by drawing a line to divide each. Then the girls got to work cutting out pictures of food from magazines, newspapers, and grocery ads I had saved. We talked about each picture and decided where to put it in our triangle. When we were done, we hung our family food pyramid on the wall in the kitchen near the fridge so we can all see and remember to be careful what kind of fuel we are putting into our bodies.

Step Two: Changing Our Habits

This step of our plan was a lot harder because it required moving from learning and thinking to choosing to do. Changing habits is hard. There was a lot of complaining and plenty of really bad attitudes, but a year later we are a healthier family. It was so worth weathering the drama to see our whole family making better health choices and knowing that we are taking much better care of our bodies. What was hard then is now habit and I am grateful. Here are the 3 habits we changed:

Habit One: Drink Water

This is really straight forward. Your body needs water. Either you drink enough or you don't. We didn't so we had to make the choice to start drinking more. Here are a few ways that helped us through the transition.

I quit buying other drinks and kept only water and milk in the house. (We are at the point now where we buy "fun" drinks for special occasions or treats, but in the beginning we had to just cut them completely).

We got the girls fun cups. Each girl got to choose a fun cup to drink their water out of. They were fancier than we usually get and they loved drinking out of them, even if the only thing that could go in them was water.

On the days that were really hard, we looked for ways to make it a bit more fun. We did things like use a fun straw to drink with, or put a tiny drop of food coloring in the water to make it a pretty color, or add fun shaped ice cubes to the water.

Hang in there, it is really worth it to get on track with drinking water, if you need more encouragement check out these sites:

Habit Two: Eat Healthy Food

I know this sounds huge, but I really tried to break it down to how I cooked and how I shopped. This is what that looked like for us.

Buy fruit and whole grain snacks instead of sugary treats and snacks

Replace white flour with whole wheat

Replace butter and cooking oil with virgin coconut oil (I hate coconut, so believe me when I tell you that you can't even taste the difference!)

Don't fry, plan meals that require oven or crock pot heat

Serve and eat vegetables at every meal, we like ours steamed

Use whole grain pastas

This year I am working on cooking healthier by replacing condensed "cream of" soups with a natural base I make. I got my recipe here and love it. There are tons of other great ideas here as well. I'm thrilled to tell you that my family didn't complain a bit when I made this announcement, it seems we are all on board with healthy eating this year. Here are some other links full of helpful tips to help you eat healthier.

Habit Three: Move More (Exercise!)

This is so simple but so hard for us to do. When I quit teaching we gave up our gym membership so going somewhere to work out is out of the question for us. For a long time we used that as an excuse. When we decided to be purposeful about our family's health, we decided we all needed to move more. Here are some things that worked for us.

Jump Rope: This seems a bit child like, but we invested in a family pack of ropes and got hopping. It is fun, we can all do it and we can do it in the house. The girls have loved learning chants to sing as we jump and have enjoyed researching and practicing different tricks. We often take our ropes outside and attract lots of kids to jump along. Fun and great exercise.

Use the stairs: I don't let the girls do this much for safety reasons, but I have come to enjoy running our steps. I start really small and just go up and down a few at a time until I can work my way up to doing the whole flight. It is free, a great work out and can be done while listening to whatever I want while the kids are sleeping.

Move More: I began to notice that when the girls were doing a "brain break" from school or playing on a weekend, I was often sitting. I also noticed that when I am with the baby I am also sitting a lot of the time. We decided to try to make better use of this time. Now, before I sit I may do a few lunge walks across the room or walk a few laps around the room and down the hall. It seems so easy, but the choice to simply move really does make a difference. Much of the time, as soon as I start moving the girls join in.

Dance: We use our Just Dance Wii game to have Family Dance Nights, we play favorite music really loud and "silly dance", we learn a new dance such as the electric slide and practice it together. It doesn't really matter how you dance, just dance often and you'll be surprised what a difference it makes.

These non-traditional forms of exercise have really helped our kids think about moving and being active. They have helped us, as parents, be sure we take time to take care of ourselves and they have made the point that time and money aren't really valid reasons not to exercise. Here are a few more exercise ideas.

Healthy kids are certainly worth the time and effort it took to teach them about "food as fuel" and then inspire, encourage and sometimes require them to change habits so they can feel good and enjoy this business of growing up!