The Family Table Is More Important Than You Realise
Simple tips to save time, help fussy eaters and enjoy dinners together by creating easy, healthy habits and connection around the dinner table. If you are struggling to find the time to make meals for your family, or perhaps you (and honestly this is me), just don’t know where you even start when it comes to dinner time and kinda dread it, This interview is going to so super helpful. Join me as I chat with Andrea Heyman from Adventures In Feeding My Fam as we discuss all kinds of challenges with food and meal time that mothers are facing. Andrea is a registered dietician and is passionate about keeping meals simple, nutritious and enjoyable. She shares her 2,2,2 method to make meal planning super simple and how you can create a weekly schedule to suit you, including ideas for using up the vegetables and reducing food waste. We also discuss the one rule you should have at the dinner table to help you all be present and maximise the time together, how to help younger children eat more and try new foods (beyond bribery and pushing them), why family meals are more important than you think and how we can cultivate moments of connection with our family during mealtime. If you have a picky eater at home this will help you too!
WANT TO HEAR MORE FROM ANDREA
Instagram @adventuresinfeedingmyfam
Website www.adventuresinfeedingmyfam.com
Elyse:
Thank you Andrea so much for coming on The Wholesome Mummma Show.
Andrea:
Thanks for having me. This is such an honour. I really appreciate it.
Elyse:
So would you mind just to start us off telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Andrea:
Well, I've been a registered dietician for 25 years. I've worked in a few different settings. I started out working with adults in a pretty big hospital, I've worked in research and now I'm in my favourite setting, which is a specialty hospital and we work with kids and adults with disabilities. I have a specialty of weight management but my favourite piece of it is really making healthy, eating habits, practical and super simple, making it fit into each individual's life. And that's how I've created the podcast "Adventures in Feeding my Fam", which is a new venture for me. I take that same strategy and I really want to promote that eating healthy doesn't have to be hard and getting food on the table for your family can be simple and easy.
Elyse:
Yes. I love that. It's a realistic focus on keeping it simple, and actually how to practically make that happen because there's a lot of talk about how you can do this and do that. So as a registered dietician and a mother yourself, can you share with us some of the biggest struggles that you were saying when it comes to families and males?
Andrea:
Yeah, I think probably the number one thing is time and that people are pulled in so many directions and just don't feel like they have the time to meal plan or meal prep. That's probably the biggest thing. And I really encourage people when you're making meals, you know you have to get meals on the table, right? So there is going to be a little time invested in that but it doesn't have to be super labour intensive. If you're someone who does not really enjoy cooking or making meals, you don't have to force yourself into that role and force yourself to love doing it. But you can still do it in a simple, easy way that you're still feeding your family in a healthy fashion in a way that you want to promote and teach them to eat for their entire life. I would say another common challenge I see is that families feel that their kids are 'picky' or won't eat the foods that they want them to eat. Especially those who have younger kids. That's definitely a challenge as well. And some folks plain old don't even know where to start.
Elyse:
Yeah. So you mentioned briefly meal prep and meal plan. Can you just quickly explain the difference between them and what each of those are?
Andrea:
Sure. So meal planning is making a roadmap of what you're going to eat for the week, or it could be any interval of time really, but having a plan. Typically I recommend folks plan a week at a time. If you know what you're going to be making for various meals throughout the week, you can then make an appropriate grocery shopping list, which can facilitate grocery shopping so that you have all the ingredients that you need. So that during the week you're not running out to the store at the last minute saying, Oh, I need pasta or I need chicken or whatever the ingredient is because you had planned all your meals, you know what you're going to make every night of the week. And you can successfully do that because you had an efficient grocery shop. Now prep, is the actual making of the food. And so I think there are a lot of strategies. Some people prep once for the upcoming week. Some people prep a little bit every single day and some people prep every other day or if they know that they work Mondays and Tuesdays, but don't work on Wednesdays, they might prep a couple times a week depending on their schedule. And that's really key is that you want to make it work for you in your schedule.
Elyse:
And I think too, with time being a big factor for everyone, because we all have full lives. What are some of the simple strategies that you would suggest that women and mothers, who often the ones cooking and the dads for the dads who do, but what are some of the strategies that you would say to them when they're thinking I just don't have time. What are some things that they can do?
Andrea:
So I was going through this with my friend and neighbour who lives down the street. She has three teenage boys and a daughter, so they go through food very quickly. She had gotten herself into this pattern of just thinking that she had to make full elaborate meals every night of the week. And I was like, no, no, no, no, Wendy, and I told her what I do. So I plan two more fun meals, maybe a new recipe or something that takes a little bit more time. Two of those a week. I plan to kind of average time meals. So maybe 20, 25 minutes is all it takes to prepare. And then I plan two meals that really are like a 10 minute quick, easy prep and done kind of thing. And then I plugged those into the nights of the week depending on my schedule. So for me, I work later on Thursdays. So Thursday nights are always one of the super, super fast, easy meals, Fridays and Sundays. I typically have more time. So I spend more time on those days. And, and then I kind of fill in the rest of the nights, depending on what the schedule is. So my friend down the street, once I explained that to her, she was like, Oh, it's two, two and two. So now I call it the two, two and two method.
Elyse:
That's so good. So many of us do get caught up in thinking we have to have a new elaborate meal on the table every single night when really you don't have to at all. So I really liked that two, two, two method.
Andrea:
Yeah. You can make a lot of things that are quick, easy and healthy. I would say one of my favourites is the sheet pan meal. I will take any variety of vegetables that are in the house. So this is also a really nice way to use up some of the scraps that you have in your house. So whatever it is, if I have a little bit of leftover broccoli, maybe some frozen brussel sprouts, a sweet potato, carrots, whatever it is, and I will prep them, put them on a sheet pan drizzle with olive oil, maybe salt, pepper, and roast it. For those who are vegetarian. I might add some chickpeas and season them with a little chilli powder and then roast them as well. But others who do eat meat, just basic, however, you're going to roast or bake chicken or whatever meat you have. You can put that all on a second roasting sheet pan, everything goes in the oven all at once. So now you just did five minutes of meal prep there. And then the second piece is that you cook up a grain of your choice. So whether it's quinoa or rice, any of those will do, and that can be cooking while the rest is roasting in the oven. Really the hands-on prep time was about five minutes. Obviously it takes a little longer for everything to cook up, but once you pull it out, you've got a really reliable meal and you can make any number of combinations with. So like I said, it doesn't have to be hard.
Elyse:
We can really over-complicate it, I know that I in the past have definitely have. And one thing that we have is a fridge clean out night. So we do something like that, where we'll either do a pizza, if we've got toppings that can go on a pizza, otherwise we'll do a stir fry or a curry or something where just everything that's left over gets cooked. So we do it because I was also sick of wasting so many vegetables and things that went off. I just had to throw them out. It's so smart having something like that. And then you just know that on Saturday night we're having pizza and we'll just put the leftover veggies on the pizza.
The other really big struggle that you mentioned, which I am all too familiar with, is trying to get young children, so for me, toddlers, to eat better and not snack all day. My children would just snack and they would snack on fruit, but also I'd really like to eat filling, nourishing meals. So particularly this is your specialty. What are some of the practical ways that we can help to get our younger children or maybe people are thinking their child is 'fussy' or 'picky', what are some of the practical steps that we can take to get them to eat better, try new things and enjoy mealtime more?
Andrea:
The first step is to really set the stage and set the meal time table. You want it to be a positive setting. So first of all, always good to sit with your kids, right? And then I really recommend role modelling the behaviour that you want them to adapt. I have lots of parents that come to me and sit, tell me that their child won't eat this or won't eat that. But then I come to find that the culture around their table could be set up for a little bit more success. So if you know, mom goes and eats separately and just sits the kids down, it's harder to get the kids to try new foods. Then also, if let's say my husband, wasn't a really adventurous eater, they see that too. And it's important to, for your kids to see you eating the foods that you want them to eat.
So those are some good pieces. I also suggest keeping conversation positive at the table. I know that sometimes as parents and I trust me am, so have been so guilty of this in the past. I want so badly my child to eat all of these really healthy, nutritious things. And so I have pushed for them to do that. And I really suggest trying to limit that as much as possible. Typically if the mealtime is a positive environment, then eventually they will try new foods and be more confident eaters. Another really interesting fact is that it can take up to 20 tries of a food before a child decides if they actually like it or not. So not even just that you're serving the food to them 20 times, but they actually eat it and taste it 20 times. So not giving up if they, for the first five times didn't eat broccoli, still offer it, still serve it over and over and over. And I would also suggest just like I said, just trying to keep things nice and positive at the table.
Elyse:
Well, firstly, I can agree that I have been definitely guilty of trying to reward my children for eating their dinner with some kind of dessert - "if you eat this and you can have some yogurt", something like that, which is probably not the best. But I loved what you said about keeping it a positive environment because I think so much in particularly these days back to the time thing where we're all so busy that we just go, well, the kids can have dinner at five o'clock and we'll sit down and have our own dinner at seven o'clock. So we've been really intentional that way with our children. I also don't want to make two meals and don't want to do dinner time twice over. The importance of having the dinner table as a place of positive connection and cultivating that as well is so, so important. So can you see the difference between the families that do that and the families that don't?
Andrea:
Yeah. I think sometimes folks are frustrated because they expect things to change immediately, but these things take time and just like any other behaviour, you don't make a permanent change overnight. And also, you're asking others, not just yourself to make changes. So changing expectations that might come as a shock to your kids, but if you're consistent, they will understand. I think another piece that's really important is the devices that we have. And at my house, my kids definitely know that there are no phones at the table and that goes for the parents as well. That just encourages a more positive environment and gets you to be more present with your kids and have conversation. Really, when you think about it, mealtimes are pretty short. The actual time that we sit down together isn't long. So we want to maximise that as much as possible. And if we're distracted with our phones or devices, we limit how much we can really learn from each other and enjoy each other's company.
Elyse:
Totally. And when you think about it, half an hour, you can be without you find for half an hour,
Andrea:
You can be without your phone, half an hour, for sure.
Elyse:
When you look at it in that perspective where it is only half an hour of your day, and yet how it can set you and your family up and creating these traditions that then carry on like a legacy. And really when you think about it, it's only half an hour, but the impact that it can have is huge. Particularly when you think down the road of looking at it from a perspective of what your child is eating, if you just stick with it for two months, they're going to understand and will get there. Yes. Doing anything while your kids are young, two months is a long time, but in the scheme of things, what you are going to have created in that timeframe is going to be something beautiful and creating so many memories that they are going to look back on and actually look back really fondly with joy on those memories.
Andrea:
Absolutely. And there are countless studies indicating the positive benefits of having family meals. One of them is that kids tend to be more successful in school, have better connections with their family members, which that one makes pretty obvious sense. The one that always gets me is that kids who have regular family meals tend to participate in fewer risky behaviours as they become teenagers. And that one right there, that's just the seller for me.
Elyse:
Yeah. Yeah. I'm not even there. I don't want to think about that yet, but wow!
Andrea:
And your efforts now are only going to benefit them when they are going through those stages.
Elyse:
We should never under estimate the importance of family time. And I think the family table is such a beautiful time and space where we really can bring in some traditions like doing highs and lows of the week or doing a gratitude practice where you just say what you're grateful for. Just simple things like that. I know my husband's family, whenever it is someone's birthday, they all go around and everyone says one thing that they love about that person. And it's just making these beautiful connection times that yeah, you just, they're the moments that have impact. I think that it's beautiful that we can do that and do it with food because who doesn't love food. Right. It's really priceless.
Well, thank you. Can you just, before we go share with everyone where they can find you, your podcast, your website?
Andrea:
Yeah. It's "Adventures In Feeding My Fam" is the name of the podcast. That's also the name of the website. So that's adventuresinfeedingmyfam.com. And you can find me on Instagram at the same name @adventuresinfeedingmyfam
Elyse:
Easy "Adventures In Feeding My Fam" everywhere. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom and all your hints and tips for us. I really appreciate it.
Andrea:
And thanks for having me. I've really enjoyed listening to your podcast and you have such a good mission and are promoting such positivity in the household and for moms. And I think that's really a mission that should be commended.