Nutrition Advice for Busy Parents

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Let’s be honest, we are all very busy, and sometimes a cereal bar has just had to qualify as breakfast!

or the kids are running around screaming and you can’t find a matching (clean) pair of socks and the last thing on your mind is ensuring you’ve all had your fruit first thing this morning – some days are just like that! Monday’s for example, am I right?

Luckily Ramona approached me with some great advice to share with you all to make some positive steps towards being healthier! especially if you don’t think you have the time!

A little bit about Ramona

Ramona Dunn is a mother and grandmother who lives in a small rural town in Southwestern Ontario, Canada where in her spare time she enjoys gardening, quilting and tending to her pet chickens and various other furred and feathered friends.

She is a nurse and had worked for a number of years as a diabetes educator. Ramona has always had an interest in natural healing and her blog “Forget the Wheat” reflects the wisdom she has gathered throughout the years in the ways a person can help themselves to maintain optimum health through nutrition.

*Guest Post*

Nutrition Advice for Busy Parents

We are in the middle of a massive worldwide epidemic of obesity and diabetes and this epidemic is not just affecting adults. We are seeing more and more obesity and type 2 diabetes in children today than at any other time in recorded history. More disturbing, it has been predicted that the children growing up today will have a shorter lifespan with more health issues than their parents. This has never happened before in the history of mankind.

Parents have a major influence in ensuring that their children do not become part of these alarming predictions. No matter how busy parents are, there are some easy positive steps that parents can take to ensure that their children are on the path to good nutrition and good health.

I will be outlining a couple of the steps that I personally took when my boys were growing up to ensure that they ate the type of food to optimize their health. Of course their nutrition were not always optimal at all times, especially when they were out with their friends, but for the most part they ate healthy food.

When my boys were growing up, I had a very busy career working full time as a nurse. I learned how to shop with a written list of healthy food. My goal was always to optimize food preparation so that I was not spending too much of my limited time in the kitchen. One of my strategies was that the food kept in the house were always nutritious. There were no cookies, no potato chips, no chocolate bars, no pop and no candies stored in the house. This strategy kept the consumption of junk food down to a minimum.

Some of the food items that I made sure were always available included:

• Bananas
• Carrots and Celery (chopped up into sticks and stored in a container of water kept in the fridge)
• Berries (when they were in season)
• Apples
• Peanuts
• Hard boiled eggs

By keeping these nutritious snack foods within easy reach, this ensured that when the boys were hungry in between meals they always had something healthy to snack on.

One of my favorite ways to ensure that the boys received their daily fruits and vegetables was that I would give my boys a smoothie every day. Often, I would sneak some spinach or some other greens into this smoothie. We called them milkshakes back then. Milkshakes were considered a treat for my boys. When they became older, they experimented in making their own smoothie recipes and sometimes proudly offered me a glass of their unique mixtures. Most of the time they were tasty. The times they weren’t…well, I just smiled and nodded.

If I had to do it over again, one of the things that I would do differently is that I would limit my children’s consumption of wheat. The reason for this is because since my children have grown, I have discovered how much wheat is affecting the overall health of people today. The genetically altered wheat that is in practically every processed food out on the market is a major contributor to the obesity and diabetes epidemic that is plaguing the world today. It is not impossible for a busy parent to limit wheat products from a child’s diet.

There are many great wheat-free bread, cookie and muffin recipes that you can get online for free. These are recipes that you can bake ahead of time and freeze in serving sized portions. I currently bake two dozen muffins at a time and freeze them in individual portions. I will take one or two of them out of the freezer the night before and place them in the fridge. They thaw by the next day and are ready to be eaten. The average amount of time that it takes for me to bake 2 dozen muffins from preparation to cleanup is approximately 1 hour.

I hope that I have given you some useful tips that you can use to ensure that your children get the best possible nutrition. Our children are our future. We have the ability to give them the best nutritional start so they can remain healthy for life.

Where can you find more of Ramona

Forget the Wheat | Facebook | Pinterest | Twitter | 

How do you make sure your children get good nutrition?