When my son was born almost 3 years ago, like all mothers, I wanted the best of everything for him. I was bent upon making my kid a better eater than both my husband and I are. Now we both are not terribly bad eaters, we eat at home most of the time and try to choose healthy stuff when we eat out. The problem really is that the lure of artificial, unhealthy, deep fried, slathered in fat junk is just too much for us to resist. Add to it the fact that I have a terrible sweet mouth (as apposed to most people having a sweet tooth!!) and fruit unfortunately doesn’t qualify as sweet according to my highly evolved (read: damaged) taste buds. For me dessert means something fatty, syrupy, greasy and preferably deep fried. This has lead to both of us being 5-10 pounds over our ideal weights for as long as I remember.
When I weaned off my first born at 5 months old, I started him with boiled, puréed peas. Everybody and their mom was dismayed at this blatant violation of the set rules, you know, feeding the babies pre-packaged cereals or mashed bananas, if the mother is being too bold. Now I don’t believe there is anything wrong with feeding a baby fresh fruit (that’s not the opinion I have about pre-packaged cereals btw), but my point here was that I wanted to make sure he developed a taste for vegetables; fresh, unaltered, additives free, not done-to-death variety of vegetables. Ever since he could sit up straight, he has been “helping” me out in the kitchen. Since I have a strong penchant for cooking, we both do manage to cook up some interesting stuff in the kitchen. Bonus: he will eat what he cooks so that means I can introduce him to a new ingredient every day, without any fear of rejection.
My son is such a vegetable and home-made food freak that most of the times we prefer to feed him at home before going out. This tactic works most of the times because we don’t have to worry about running after him at dinners to force-feed him and we both get to enjoy a decent, peaceful meal.
Excuse the cliché please, but I do believe that we learn from our children almost as much as they learn from us. Having a good healthy eater as a family member has actually improved our own eating habits tremendously. We both now try to snack smart, have stopped keeping store-bought junk in our pantry and prefer veggies over meat any day.
We still do splurge on fast food and guilty pleasures once a while, but those occasions are now few and far between. Eating healthy has helped all of us in a number of ways, most important of which is improved immunity. Oh, and contrary to popular belief, healthy food is actually cheaper, so more money for shopping!!
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