Show notes
In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, Jennifer Anderson, registered dietitian and founder of Kids Eat in Color, shares how parents can help kids develop a healthy relationship with food and their bodies—without shame, restriction, or diet culture. Plus, practical tips for school lunches and making family meals easier and more affordable.Know someone who might appreciate this episode? Share it with them!And if you love the podcast, FREE ways to help us out:1- Rate and review the podcast in your podcast player app2- “Like” this post by tapping the heart icon ♥️3- Share this with a friend. THANK YOU!You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or check out the fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.We talk about:03:00 What does a healthy relationship with food and our bodies look like?05:00 Protecting kids from body image and weight concerns07:00 Boys, body image, and the pressure to look “ripped”09:00 Talking to kids who are worried about being in a bigger body12:00 Helping kids develop a healthy relationship with food14:00 Treats, limits, and avoiding shame or moralizing around food21:00 Can kids really regulate how much they eat?24:00 Neurodivergence, interoception, and mindful eating30:00 Emotional eating, comfort, and food as connection32:00 Simple strategies for packing school lunches37:00 Feeding a family when time, money, and energy are limited39:00 Why simple dinners are good enough42:00 Jennifer’s book and pre-order bonuses44:00 The parenting advice Jennifer wishes she’d known earlierResources mentioned in this episode:* Jennifer’s Book Feed Them Well: A Guide to Raising Healthy, Confident Eaters* Search “Kids Eat in Color” to find Jennifer on all social media platformsConnect with Sarah Rosensweet:* Instagram* Facebook Group* YouTube* Website* Join us on Substack* Newsletter* Book a short consult or coaching session callxx Sarah and CoreyYour peaceful parenting team- click here for a free short consult or a coaching sessionVisit our website for free resources, podcast, coaching, membership and more!>> Please support us!!! Please consider becoming a supporter to help support our free content, including The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, our free parenting support Facebook group, and our weekly parenting emails, “Weekend Reflections” and “Weekend Support” - plus our Flourish With Your Complex Child Summit (coming back in the fall for the 3rd year!) All of this free support for you takes a lot of time and energy from me and my team. If it has been helpful or meaningful for you, your support would help us to continue to provide support for free, for you and for others.In addition to knowing you are supporting our mission to support parents and children, you get the podcast ad free and access to a monthly ‘ask me anything’ session.Sarah: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today’s guest is Jennifer Anderson, nutritionist and founder of Kids Eat in Color. Jennifer has a new book coming out all about helping kids develop a good relationship with food and with their bodies. That’s what we’re talking about in today’s episode.Along the way, we also touched on some great tips for packing school lunches and making meals easier and more affordable. There’s so much conflicting information out there about feeding kids, and with their physical and mental health at risk, knowing what to do can be very stressful for parents. I love Jennifer’s common-sense and relaxed approach to eating and feeding, and I hope you do as well.If you like this episode, please share it with a friend so more parents can learn about peaceful parenting. If you’re a fan of the podcast, you can help us out not only by sharing it, but by leaving a review and a five-star rating in your podcast player app. While you’re there, don’t forget to follow the show so you don’t miss an episode. If you’d like to support us even more, you can become a supporter on Substack to help us offset the cost of making the show. We’ll put a link in the show notes.Okay, let’s meet Jennifer.Hey, Jennifer. Welcome back to the podcast. This is your second time with us.Jennifer: Thank you so much for having me.Sarah: Yeah, I’m so excited. You have a new book coming out, so maybe you could introduce yourself and then tell us about your new book, which is available for pre-order and coming out in September. We will link to that in the show notes, but tell us a little bit about who you are and about your new book.Jennifer: Sure. I’m a registered dietitian. I have two kids who have not been easy to feed, and I’m the founder of Kids Eat in Color and the CEO of Better Bites. I’m so excited to have this book coming out. It’s called Feed Them Well: A Guide to Raising Healthy, Confident Eaters for Life. I just cannot wait for parents to have this resource.Sarah: Amazing. You were telling me before we started that the focus of your book is having kids have a healthy relationship not only with food, but with their bodies. Maybe we could start out by talking about—obviously, this could be a very long conversation—but some of the top things you’ve found that are really helpful, sort of dos and don’ts, in terms of having kids have that healthy relationship with food.And also, what do you mean when you talk about a healthy relationship with their bodies? Maybe that’s a two-part question.Jennifer: Yeah. I love that you framed it as a two-part question, because it is kind of a two-part question, but I feel like that’s only because in English we don’t have a way to describe the fact that these things are deeply connected in us.When I think about a healthy relationship with food, I want to make sure kids know how to take care of their bodies. They know what a balanced diet looks like. They’re able to enjoy food, whatever kind of food it is. And also, we want kids to be able to really appreciate and live in their bodies, experience life through their bodies, and not have this deep what’s called internalized weight bias, where thin is the ideal. Thin is what everybody is shooting for. You should either be worried about how thin you are or trying to get thinner. That is a soul-sucking way of living when we’re so focused on weight and diet culture.So we want to give kids another option. We want to give kids the ability to really appreciate their bodies, and yet we also want to do so in a way that they’re still able to care about the health of their bodies in a way that’s healthy, as opposed to just diet culture.What I call this is embodied independence, where kids are independent. They know all the things they need to do, and they’re also embodied. They’re living in and experiencing their bodies.When we think about what we want to do and what we want to not do, we want to model what we want kids to do, ideally, and this is in every single area of parenting, including eating. That’s where the independence comes from. We’re modeling, and we’re also providing the boundaries and opportunities for them.I always tell parents, “You are in charge of your restaurant at home. You’re the head chef. You’re going to set when your restaurant hours are, you’re going to set what’s on the menu, you’re going to set all these things.” As you’re doing that, you are teaching your child what is part of a healthy lifestyle.On the other side, we’re thinking about their relationship with their body. We want to minimize internalized weight bias, and that means we’re not discussing body sizes or body shapes. We’re not weighing ourselves in front of our kids. One of the most powerful things you can do as a parent is to not discuss your body size or shape and not discuss any weight-loss attempts at any point, if that’s something you ever engage in. Those two things are huge risk factors for disordered eating and eating disorders. If we could just not do that, that would actually be huge.Sarah: I feel like that’s actually a real gift my mother gave me. She never talked about her weight or diets or her body, really, at all. And I feel like I’m one of the few people I know who—I’ll say at least until perimenopause recently—had no body-image issues for my whole adult life. I think that really did stem from being raised without that being a thing that people were talking about.Jennifer: Yeah, absolutely. It was discussed in the groups that I grew up in. At the same time, my parents were like, “No, you are not allowed to look at beauty magazines or teen magazines.” I don’t remember really pushing back on that as a teenager, but now I am so grateful because, whether it’s social media now or teen magazines or so many other things, so many of them are focused on body image: how thin you are, how to get thin, how to stay thin, all this stuff. And that stuff is just toxic.Sarah: Yeah, and it used to just be for girls, right? And now boys are—I have so many clients who’ve said their son wants a six-pack, and they’re eight or nine years old and won’t take off their shirt to go swimming.Jennifer: My kids are right now into parkour, and it’s interesting to watch because we’ve been very careful about what we’ve said about them. They’ve recently started talking about six-packs and strong cores and all that because, in reality, my son is like, “I need a stronger core because that will help me flip better.” And he’s 100% right that his core strength is going to determine his success in this sport in a lot of ways.At the same time, getting ripped is not the phrasing that I would really prefer because so much of that is focused on image, right? And yet this is what they’re hearing. My kids are 11 and 13, but it really started last year, when they were 10 and 12, where they’re just kind of being exposed to these ideas of fitness.So when we think about kids understanding this, yeah, we have to have them understand their physical fitness, and then we also have to help them understand that it’s not about looks. It is about how we feel. It’s about what we can do. It’s about how we can serve people. It’s about so much more than just how we look.So as I think about my kids getting ready to do these things and doing these things, I’m going to continue to focus on, “This will help you flip,” not, “This will help you look ripped.”Sarah: Talk a little bit more about some of the dos and don’ts about the healthy relationship. We’ve sort of focused on our bodies. Actually, you know what? Before you do, I want to ask you about something else first, so we’ll stay on that for another second.If you have a child who is in a bigger body and they’re concerned to obsessed about being in a bigger body and feeling like that’s, quote, “bad,” how do you talk to them about that?Jennifer: So I think the first thing is—and I have a framework in the book that, even though it’s kind of cheesy, I call the LOVE framework—we want to listen. We really want to listen, and then we want to validate. Because if a kid is coming to us and saying, “I’m fat. I want to lose weight,” one, we don’t really know what they mean by that. We don’t know where that came from. Are they being teased? Did they hear something? Are their friends all trying to lose weight? We have to listen and understand.And then we have to say, “Yeah, you feel like you want to lose weight. You’re feeling bad right now. You’re telling me that your body is rounder than your friends’.” As we validate, we want to use neutral, factual language. If they’re describing their body in negative terms, we don’t want to say, “Oh no, you’re wrong,” because that’s not right, and it’s also not bad to be in a bigger body. And so if we’re like, “Oh, no, no, no, you’re not fat,” that’s not helpful because we’re just invalidating their whole experience, and we’re also reinforcing the idea that fat is bad.Instead, we want to be like, “Oh yeah, you’re right. I’ve noticed that in our family, we all have softer tummies. We all have rounder tummies.” When we’re using basic descriptive language that’s not negative, we help them reinterpret their body in a way that is more neutral, where we can then eventually move away from this judgment of body size and shape to an acceptance of body size and shape, where that’s just not part of what we’re talking about. It’s just like, “Oh, it’s neutral. This is just a body,” and let’s move on to something more interesting.And then, after we’ve listened and validated, we really want to see if there’s something that we need to take action on. We’re saying, “Okay, do I need to help my child learn coping skills for being bullied? Do I need to talk to the school? Do I need to talk to their friend’s parents? What is my role now in figuring out what needs to happen? Is my child showing signs of having disordered eating? Have they put themselves on a diet?”Those are the sorts of things where you want to take it seriously. If they’re restricting themselves from different foods or they’re doing things to try to change the size of their body, then is the time to involve a professional. Whether it’s a counselor, an eating disorder therapist, their doctor, whoever it is, that is the time. I know it’s hard when we think, “Oh my gosh, my kid potentially has disordered eating or an eating disorder.” That can fill parents with a lot of guilt and fear and shame and all that sort of thing. Don’t let that stop you from getting your child help as soon as possible.Sarah: Yeah, this is not a DIY project.Jennifer: Yeah, it’s not. Now, of course, you can be DIY-ing it all the way up to that point, but at the point where you see a big red flag, go bring somebody else in.Sarah: So what are some tips for helping kids have a healthy relationship with food?Jennifer: I love to talk about food factually, the same way we would talk about bodies. It’s like, “Oh, these are the names of foods. They’re hard, they’re crunchy, they’re savory, they’re sweet, they’re delicious,” as opposed to this sort of, “These are healthy foods, and these are not healthy foods.”It adds a level of complication that is too simple and also contributes to a very rigid perspective of food and eating. Potentially, that can even leak over into how people think of their bodies.Sarah: Yeah, because it just occurred to me—I was reflecting before, when I was thinking of questions to ask you—that I do know someone who talks to their child about, “We have to eat healthy food before we eat the unhealthy food.” And why would you ever want to tell your child that you’re giving them something unhealthy anyway? “Have this dangerous toy.” You know?Jennifer: Yeah. “Don’t play with the dangerous toy until you’ve played with the safe toy.” I completely agree with that, and I think it comes from a very well-meaning place where, again, we’re wanting to pass on this information that empowers kids to nurture their bodies for the rest of their life.So it’s all coming from a good place. We just have to think that kids will internalize this sort of, “Wait a second. You’re giving me all this healthy food, but then we have this unhealthy food. Why are you giving me unhealthy food? And also, am I bad if I eat this unhealthy food? Should I feel guilty? Should I feel afraid of it?” There are a lot of things that kids can take from these conversations.Now, it doesn’t mean that if you’re using this language, you have ruined your child or you have given your child an eating disorder. I am telling you, kids are not that easy to ruin. And you can give them new skills, though, which is just to understand every food does something different in your body, and we can listen to our body to find out what’s right for us. Because let’s say you have an allergy. Yeah, there are some foods that are truly unhealthy. You’re going to have a really bad reaction. And there are also foods where, if you eat too much of them—and this is truly just about every food, including water—if you eat too much of it, you can also become unhealthy.You can’t just live on broccoli. I promise you. That’s not healthy. And w…
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