5 // What is a BALANCED diet?
What is a BALANCED diet?
This is why having the same “healthy” foods every day isn’t healthy and what you can do to begin covering your kiddo’s nutritional bases better
In this episode, Ashley defines what a "balanced diet" even is (for those who are confused about it!) and frees you from the pressures of planning a perfectly balanced diet each and every day. Instead, she shares an illustration for keeping a big picture view of your child's diet, how to build a balanced plate, and how to leverage those ideas to ensure all areas of their diet is covered.
Listen to this episode of The Veggies & Virtue Podcast now!
Full Episode Transcription
Please note this a raw transcription. If something doesn’t read correctly, toggle to that timestamp in the show so that you can listen in on what was actually being said!
00:00 You know, a good friend of mine had said something to me before that I've just never forgotten. And she said, you know when a pediatrician asks if your child eats a balanced diet, I literally don't even know what they mean. Like what is a balanced diet and how do I know if my kid even has one? And I remember thinking as a dietitian mom, that that comes very instinctually to, that of all the questions I've had for our pediatricians over the years, that was never one of them. And I remember just thinking as her being one of my closest, dearest friends, that being something that she struggled with, that surely the concept of what is a balanced diet and does my kid even have one, is probably something that a lot of parents struggle with. So in knowing that this is probably a really confusing topic for parents and one that often feels really overwhelming to understand, let alone apply,
00:48 I wanted to spend some time today in this episode to give you a visual that I think will help you understand how you can cover your bases of what is a balanced diet for your child and your family, without some of the ambiguity and the overwhelm of trying to either do it all, or to kind of aimlessly go about it and hope that you hit everywhere. And so if you're a visual person like me, I'm sure that this is a visual you have probably one never even thought of, but definitely not thought of in relation to feeding. So I hope that you will tune in and get a lot of value out of this visual and even more the takeaway action steps to come.
01:28 Hey, mama, I'm Ashley, and welcome to the veggies and virtue podcast. In this podcast, you will find simple menu ideas, kitchen organizational systems spelled out for mom life and feeding tips and tricks that are both evidence-based and grace laced. I believe that you can find flexibility when it comes to feeding your family so that you can feel calm, capable, and connected in the kitchen. As a registered dietitian and Christian mom of three myself, I want you to break free from the mealtime battles and to feel equipped while feeding your kids all day long. Pull up a stool at my kitchen counter. And let me pour you a cup of coffee and say a quick prayer for you. It's time to chat about the meal times, messes, moments and ministry of motherhood.
02:07 So if you either have a pool or have ever been in the process of installing or designing a pool, you know that there's a variety of ways to clean it. You can either do it yourself and manually do it or one of the more common ways is to have those robot vacuums with the big hoses that kind of roll all around the pool and cover all the areas and ultimately kind of continuously clean as they go, but in order to do so, they have to kind of like constantly be on guard and be moving and being turned on and in the pool. But when we recently had been looking at different pool designs and kind of contemplating the process, and if it was something we were gonna be moving forward with, there was this one pool builder who tried to sell us on this other type of cleaning system, which is basically to simplify it as much as possible for the purposes of this episode.
02:52 It's basically a sprinkler system for your pool where these valves, rather than roaming all over, like the Roomba of the pool, it goes off at different points. It's installed in the pool and it has several different valves around the pool that spray in different regions of the pool, and these valves basically scored out like increased pressure of water to help kind of sweep up and clean and cover the bases of the pool. So you're probably wondering why I'm telling you anything about this, because I'm obviously not a pool expert. I'm definitely not an engineer. And I definitely have very little understanding of how these things work, but the visual that he gave me is something that has just really stuck with me in lots of different applications that's just kind of come to mind that I think particularly in the area of feeding. Because the way that the pool builder explained it to me is that the sprinkler valves will pop up and then they will do numerous rotations to cover 360 degrees.
03:57 And so if you can visualize like a sprinkler popping up and you know, the sprinklers in our yard normally have like a set zone, so they're only kind of covering part of the area, but these valves that pop up in a pool, they pop up, they spray a little area, they go down, they pop up, they spray a little area, they go down and I should have added as they pop up, spray a little area, they go down, they rotate, they rotate between each pause and each break that they have. And so instead of roaming all over the pool to kind of completely cover the area these do so by shifting a little bit at a time. And if you'll just stick with me, I think that we will see how much progress we could make in feeding our kids if we apply the same concept. Because instead of just spot cleaning the areas of -paralleling to our kids' diet - of our kids' diet that we see being, we'll say dirtiest or most problematic, or kind of endlessly just roaming about, and just tirelessly, trying to achieve this standard for them of helping them to live a healthy lifestyle.
05:04 And, you know, just this overwhelming nature that we can sometimes feel, of how do we achieve this balanced diet? We feel like we just have to keep going and going and going and going. I think this valve example is so interesting because we can think about how we can make small changes each and every day in a way that is small, but sustainable and ultimately really impactful in covering all of our bases. Something that a lot of families fall into the trap of assuming is that we need to cover all of our nutritional bases every day. And I think that this stems back to my original comment of what my friend said of not knowing what a balanced diet even looks like. We kind of assume we have to check all the boxes each day in order to call it balance. But usually what balance in the diet really means is that over the course of a day and more so over the course of a week and a month and a year, we are getting the different nutritional needs that our bodies need.
05:57 And in the case of our kids that they're eating to meet the nutritional needs that they have. But we all know, rarely do our kids check all the boxes in a single day. They may have days or weeks or seasons where, you know, they really ramp up their fruit intake or they're completely aversed to meat. And it feels like it can be really hard for them to get their protein needs met. And we can see that there's just this ongoing ebb and flow in the way that they eat. And that is normal. And that is natural. But as parents, I think we can be met with a little bit of resistance because when we're trying to set up this feeding approach that supports positive, pressure-free, playful feeding as a family, and then we also have these goals and these objectives to get them to eat this quote unquote "balanced diet."
06:41 They don't necessarily sync up very well because we can feel like we need to almost pressure them to eat these different food groups each day and in different amounts and in different ways. And I think that that can just be really overwhelming for parents. And doesn't really equip parents with a day to day strategy for covering all their bases for their child to get a balanced diet. So to do this, what I want us to think about is first and foremost, and to simplify it as much as possible, I want you to start with what I would consider a balanced plate as often as possible. Again, all of these things, let it go without having to constantly share the disclaimer, no child's meal or feeding routine is perfect. Mine isn't. My kids' are not. So of course this doesn't mean every single meal every single day. But in general, when you can offer a balanced plate, this is what it would look like.
07:33 You would want about half the plate to be made up of fruit and vegetables. I'll do a whole nother episode on the benefits of fruits and vegetables and how a lot of kids' nutritional needs can be met by fruits as they're learning to like vegetables and all of that kind of thing. But for the purposes of this episode, I want you to focus on half the plate is made up of fruits and vegetables, and this would be at any meal and it could apply to either to any snack as well. And then if you look at the plate, you want about a quarter of it to be made up of some source of protein, and then a quarter of it to be made up of some source of grains or starch, preferably whole grains, but that doesn't always happen. When we look at it, particularly with kids, but this is beneficial to adults too,
08:09 we also wanna think about having some added fat in there. And that could be maybe on the, if the toast is the starch, maybe you put some peanut butter on it. If you're offering eggs as the protein, you might chop up some avocado to put with it. If you're having, you know, some fruit at a meal, you might offer some whole milk yogurt as a dip, or if you're offering vegetables like a ranch dressing or some sort of salad dressing with added fat. So we wanna get that added fat in there as well, but it doesn't necessarily kind of have a section of the plate. And none of these things have to be divided up this way, I know kids really like to have divided plates. And again, that's another episode. But when you do this, I want you to think about what would you kind of create as that balanced plate for your child?
08:50 Because with most of the families I work with, they could spit out easily, two or three that are their go-tos for breakfast, their go-tos for lunches, their go-tos for dinner, and probably the same for snacks, because we know what our kind of our standard go-tos are, where we feel most confident in offering it to our kid. One, because we know our child might eat it. And two, because we feel like, okay, check the box. This is balance. You know, it may be, okay, I know my kid I'm gonna stick with an example throughout, just for consistency's sake, but for today, for my son, for example, when I fed him breakfast, we had eggs with cheese, we had an English muffin. He had strawberries and he had avocado. If I knew that we didn't necessarily have a lot of variety in his diet to kind of meet what I would assume, those overarching balanced diet goals to be, I may be like, that's a really good go-to breakfast for him.
09:43 Cause I feel like I'm meeting all the categories, check the boxes. Okay, good. But what happens with that is that our kids become really familiar with this, which is great. We want them to be familiar. We want them to prefer a lot of different foods and, you know, to develop some favorites that are healthy staples for us, we all need that. But what can happen is, is that then we just default to that and we keep offering the same balanced plate and in the big picture and what I'll call the whole 360 view here of bringing the valve back into this concept is that we only have that one rotation. We only have that one bit of balance. While that meal is balanced, if your child, my child, in this case, if my child ate that breakfast example that I gave every single day, I would not consider that to be balanced anymore because I'm looking at just one day instead over the course of a week and a month and a year, how are his breakfasts balancing out?
10:40 And so what I want us to think through today is to come up with some, you know, two to three of those breakfast, those lunches, those dinners that you would consider, this is a balanced meal for my child. And then what I want us to do is to think about how we can make small rotations to each of those meals. So in the feeding world, or if you follow me on Instagram, you've probably heard me refer to food chaining before and you know, dietitians, food therapists, we all love that phrase. We love the concept. We love researching it, all the things. But as parents, I find it really hard for parents to not only wrap their head around, but more importantly to actually apply to their life because it kind of is this extreme that the links in what we'll call the food chain are kind of hard to connect.
11:28 And it's hard to understand how we get from a pop tart to our kids eating strawberry yogurt. And that's kind of an obscure example. If you don't have the visual in front of you, but you know, we kind of forget how or we lose sense of how these connections are made. And so instead of losing you in that example of food chaining, what I want you to think about in the example that I gave you with my son's breakfast and this concept of a balanced diet is how can we take these balanced plates that are great, they're go to, but they're not all encompassing. They're not something that we should be offering every single day. We, in order to create a balanced diet, we need to continue to add variety so that our kids can continue to get the nutrition from a variety of different foods, without us also feeling that overwhelm as parents, that it's just this never ending, never gonna meet the needs, never going to achieve the balance that they need.
12:24 So the way that we do this is by creating rotations to those balanced plates. And so, but what I want you to think about is how, how can you change the shape, change the color, change the taste, change the texture, or change the temperature of something that you're offering. And this is just one rotation at a time, going back to the pool example. I mentioned how these sprinkler valves pop up. They do their work. They go down, they rotate. They're just, it's like a clock they're just rotating like 12 to 15 times in order to make the complete 360. But in doing so, they're covering all their bases. So this is not you needing a Pinterest board with 400 ideas for lunches each day. This is you coming up with what are my starting places? Where is my family at right now? What is my child eating right now?
13:16 If you have a really particular eater, you might find that your rotations have to be really small. So you might be doing more rotations because they're smaller, you know, degrees being pivoted each time. Where if your child is a little less finicky around food and can embrace change in the way food is offered a little bit bigger or better here, you might be able to do fewer rotations and make bigger jumps between each one. To give you some more concrete example, to walk through the example of what my son ate for breakfast is what I want you to think about is that balanced plate. Just take one of the examples you have. And so for my son, I'm not looking to come up with 32 other ideas for breakfast. What I'm looking for is how do I make a small rotation or create a new variation, or as I mentioned, a food chain to something that's slightly different.
14:11 So if you can visualize this valve just rotating, you know, 10 degrees, it's just rotating 10 degrees, each meal. We're not looking at you changing your child's plate on them in a really drastic way. We're looking for small changes. So with my son's breakfast, it might be that I change the way the eggs are cooked. It might be, you know, maybe I give him a boiled egg instead of a scrambled egg with cheese. It might be that I roasted up some sweet potatoes instead of offering avocado. It might be that I put the avocado on the English muffin instead of having jam. It might mean instead of strawberries, maybe we had a little strawberry smoothie on the side. So these are really small, small, small rotations. But if I make small rotations every day, day after day, consistently, I will cover the grounds.
15:05 I will make a 360 impact on covering my child's nutritional bases and giving them that balanced diet that they want and that they need, but that can be really hard to achieve when we're focusing on just a single meal or trying to make the 360 rotation all in one day. It just doesn't work like that. It doesn't work like that in my home, even as a dietitian mom with three different kids and three different feeding temperaments. And it's just not realistic to real life for any of us. So what I want to encourage you to do is to come up with a few ideas of what you usually would offer as a balanced plate offering and, you know, come up with as many as feel natural for you. For some families you might kind of just alternate between two go-to balanced plates. If your child eats a little bit more adventurously, you might have a long list, but just come up with a few that you wanna work with and then think through how can you change the color, the taste, the texture, the temperature, or the shape of the foods that are in there.
16:03 Maybe just one at a time. Again, we're not, we're not trying to cover all the grounds in just one meal, but how can you continue to pivot and rotate just a little bit each time so that over the course of the week and the month and the year you are helping your child eat more of a balanced diet. If this is something that you feel like you need more help with, I do have combination cards and on each card I offer I wish I called it rotations, but on the cards they're called variations, but it's the same purpose that we're talking about here. I give you examples of 10 breakfasts, 10 lunches, and 10 snacks, kind of like base ideas as sticking with this example of eggs for breakfast. I show you eggs for breakfast. I show you maybe how you would offer it depending on if your child is still learning to like it, if they like it, or if they love it and kind of how the portions may shift and kind of the liberties you can take accordingly.
16:56 And so on the back of it, I'll show you several different variations of how can you change the color, the taste, the texture, the temperature, or the shape of eggs, so that you continue to rotate through all these different ways of offering eggs, but ultimately getting more exposure to more variety, and with that more nutrition through each of the ways that these foods are offered. So if that's something that would be helpful for you, I have 'em in hard copy, they're like a plastic laminate card that you can flip through with your kids in the kitchen. They wipe clean, super easy, or you can buy the PDF version and just keep it on your phone. Super helpful for coming up with ideas when you kind of feel like in a rut. But if you feel like once you come up with these balanced plate offerings, you need some added ideas,
17:41 I have endless ideas on these cards. So you're welcome to those two, if that would be helpful for you. Otherwise, I'm going to sign off with a quick prayer and I hope you have a great day. Dear Lord, thank you so much that you know all of us. Thank you that you cover us completely. Thank you that you have a 360 degree view of who we are, what our needs are and what our life looks like God, and I pray that you will be these moms today. I pray that you will encourage them and inspire them and give them insight into where their next rotation is with their child. Lord, I pray that any areas of their life, that they may be feeling defeat in feeding their families, God, I pray that you will speak new life into them. I pray that you will show them small, sustainable steps and the realistic rotations that they can make to continue to nourish their families in the ways that you call us to and to fuel our bodies in ways that help us to love you and serve you and live for you even better.
18:47 Lord, thank you so much for this time and this space. And we pray all these things in Jesus name, Amen.
18:56 It has been a joy having you on podcast today, and if you've enjoyed it as well, I have a quick favor to ask. Do you mind hopping over to apple podcast and leaving me a written review? This will only take you a hot second, but it truly blesses me every time I get to read what one of you write over there. And it allows me to bless others through this podcast and the episodes to come. The other thing that you can do is to take a screenshot of this episode and tag me over on Instagram @veggiesandvirtue. I would love to see what action steps that you're taking from this episode, and also to support your family in the journey moving forward. Until next time, thanks for coming over to chat at my kitchen counter. Remember that you will always have a seat and a snack waiting for you here.
