83 // 3 Mistakes You Are Making That Are Making Mealtimes Harder + 1 Thing To Make Them Easier
3 Mistakes You Are Making That Are Making Mealtimes Harder + 1 Thing To Make Them Easier
Do you feel like you are getting stuck with making progress to feed your family?
Is the indecision of how to handle your child's picky eating leading you to be all or nothing - setting unrealistic expectations or floundering in feelings of defeat?
Are you getting overwhelmed because the endless decision of "what to make" each day feels daunting?
If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, then this episode is going to help you look at three mistakes you might be making and ONE thing you can do to not fall into those traps.
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!
[00:00:00] With the holidays upon us, we just have one more thing as moms to think about. And maybe that actually means like 10 more things because it's from decorating to holiday plans, to family travels, to gift giving and all the different things. There is a lot going on this time of year that is adding to that baseline mental fatigue that we may and likely already feel as moms.
[00:00:24] And so that's why in today's episode, I want to help highlight three of the mistakes that I think you might be making already when it comes to coming up with meal idea. And it's making meal times harder. And I think what we can get to in this episode is some solutions that are gonna help you realize the skills that you.
[00:00:45] In order to simplify meals and decrease that mental fatigue that comes with meal times.
[00:00:55] Hey mama. I'm Ashley and welcome to the Veggies and Virtue Podcast. In this podcast, you'll find simple menu ideas, kitchen organizational systems spelled out for mom life, and feeding tips and tricks that are both evidence. 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.
[00:01:14] As a registered dietician 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.
[00:01:35] Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I found myself shopping for a rug for our living room. If you've seen in some of my Instagram stories over the last couple months, we'd gotten some new couches and Max had chewed up our existing rug from when he was more of a puppy and things like that. So anyways, it was time for a reset was looking through, you know, the Black Friday and the Cyber Monday sales and everything, and I found myself so overwhelmed.
[00:01:58] I do not have. Experience or really understanding about interior design and things like that. And while I do love, you know, decorating my home and making it feel comfortable and consistent with our family's preferences and lifestyles and things like that, I really don't know the first thing about shopping for a rug.
[00:02:14] And so as I was going through this, I caught myself thinking how I am just not skilled. I am not skilled to do this, to shop for a rug. I wish someone else. Pick one and tell me where to put it and how big it needed to be and what tight, and just make all the decisions for me. And yet this was a decision that I needed to make.
[00:02:34] I didn't have anyone who was gonna make it for me, and ultimately I needed to come to a decision on. But what really stopped me was thinking about how much this parallels to feeding our family. Because while buying a rug for my living room, thankfully, is not a decision that I have to make frequent. And you know, it is a large purchase, so it takes, you know, a lot of thought and calculation and things like that.
[00:02:56] But once I've made the decision, I'm kind of done with it. But as I found myself Googling, how was I supposed to put the furniture on the rug and where both feet of our little arm chair is supposed to be on it, or just the front feet and how, you know, far under our couches was this rug supposed to reach and all these things that I was like, someone who is skilled in this area just knows the answer to this and is not having to Google.
[00:03:20] But for me, I was finding myself Google searching such seemingly simple things that I just didn't know, and it was making it really difficult for me to come to a decision on what rug to buy with. And so the reason that example comes to me as I think through this episode today on the skills we need to be able to feed our family is because I know that one of the biggest things to making a big decision, a big decision, That maybe takes us a while to come to a conclusion on like a big purchase of a rug or just the big decision because not so much that it's so infrequent and yet larger in scale like a rug purchase, but rather the big decision of feeding our family because.
[00:04:04] The number of times it comes up is so repetitive that it feels big. What we feed our family for breakfast tomorrow is not that big of a deal and all of us can say that, but what we feed our family meal after meal, day after day, year after year, that's a big decision and it can weigh on us in a similar way.
[00:04:23] And I found myself thinking about how so often I, those, those, I guess I should say the small. That maybe you would be Google searching about how to feed your family are things that I would never think to Google search because they're just simple to me. Just the way, if I were to ask an interior designer how I should put the legs of my chair on a rug, they would just know and it would be easy because they already have those skills.
[00:04:48] But for me, I have to break it down to. The smallest of things in order to gain some level of confidence and thus confidence in order to make these big decisions like what rug to buy. And that's really what I want this episode to be for you is helping you to understand using this rug example, but paralleling it to feeding our families how you can begin to simplify the decision making process.
[00:05:18] So that it feels smaller, because again, the decision of what to feed your family is not necessarily a big decision in and of itself in any given meal, but the decision fatigue that comes with having to do it every day. Is real and it's big. And I think there's a lot of parallels to some of the mistakes that I found myself making and the struggles I found myself feeling with this rug decision that you might feel with yourself when it comes to feeding your family.
[00:05:45] So I wanna go through three mistakes that I think you might be making in your kitchen that are making meal times harder than it needs to be. So what is one thing that you could learn how to do and start doing so that you do feel a little bit more skill? And more competent and ultimately more confident that you can do this, that you can feed your family.
[00:06:06] I won't stick with the RU analogy too much throughout, but I will say that with the rug example, the first thing I found myself realizing I needed to know was the size. I needed to determine the size for a space. But once I knew that, I could begin to determine what's a reasonable price point for that size rug that aligns with our family's budget for this given.
[00:06:27] And once I knew the price point, then I could begin to see which brands aligned with that price point. And once I knew the size and the price point in the brand, then I could begin narrowing it down to the styles we liked, the fabrics, the lengths of the rug, all those other different things. But when I looked at picking this big rug, ugh, even thinking about it now still brings anxiety.
[00:06:48] Cause it was just a big decision and it hasn't arrived yet. So I don't know if I like my decision or not yet, but I had to break it. Into smaller bite size decisions before I could get to that one big decision. And the same goes with feeding our family. It. Again, one given meal may not be, may not feel like a big decision, but the mistakes that I see that we're making are often very similar because we're not simplifying the decision.
[00:07:19] So we might first be deciding what do we need to eat up, and then from there, what do we have to go with it? What else do we maybe need to get at the store? What you know, do we already have on hand? And then looking at the whole picture, do we have anything in this given meal that we've come up with that our kid will even eat?
[00:07:38] That's always the wild card. Right? And you know, I talk about my love it like learning it framework. Often I teach you how to work through that in my times made easy method. But we have to break the big set issue of what's for dinner. Into a series of smaller decisions that naturally flow into the next, because that is where so many times I see families getting hung up and ultimately it's making our meal times feel harder.
[00:08:04] And the decision of what to do when it comes to feeding our family feel that much bigger than it really is because we haven't learned the skill of how to break it down. So let's dive into what these three mistakes that you might be making in the kitchen are that do make meal times feel hard. than they need to be.
[00:08:21] The first thing is we can often just get stuck. We can just put off the decision in general, and ultimately we find ourself being indecisive. But ultimately being indecisive is the decision to do nothing. So you might have found yourself six months ago feeling the same way, but if you didn't do anything, you just stayed stuck and you put it off.
[00:08:44] You're making a lot of small decisions to do nothing every. But I would ask you to look at yourself and look at your space and realize, has anything changed? Because like with this rug decision, we've just had an old ratty rug that the dog has chewed up for months and months. And while we waited for our couches for months and months, I could have been doing all of this, but I was just putting it off.
[00:09:05] It just felt so big. I didn't even wanna think about it. So I needed that impetus of Black Friday and Cyber Monday to be the catalyst for me that I was gonna make a decision with. And I'm hoping that today's episode is a catalyst for you where you realize you don't have to stay stuck. You don't have to keep putting off this decision of how to.
[00:09:25] You know, make meal times easier for your family. But another mistake that often we can get hung up on. And the second one I wanna address is we can get too idealistic. We can become very all or nothing. And even with this rug, I'm like, unless it like coordinates totally. And other people who know what they're like, who have the skill for interior design came in my house and we're like, oh, that looks fitting in this room.
[00:09:47] You know, had given their blessing on it or, I just, I would get hung up on so many of these details that ultimately they didn't matter to me and they didn't matter to the function of us just buying a rug. And so we can get so all or nothing that it perpetuates that first mistake of us doing nothing.
[00:10:07] And so with meal planning, oftentimes we can start the week and we can realize, oh, I didn't meal plan for the week. Well, I guess I don't have a meal. And because we haven't done the whole week or we haven't done it in advance of grocery shopping, or we haven't done all of it in the way that we ideally would like to, we do nothing because we're being too idealistic.
[00:10:27] And while I think the quote, when you fail to plan, you plan to fail, has merit in certain applications of life. I think we also need to realize in motherhood and in our jobs of often operating the kitchen and our homes and the way our family gets fed, there's also a lot of. And just make due attitude, but it doesn't mean we just stay stuck in patterns and in lacking the skills that are gonna support us from making these daily decisions without it feeling so difficult to us.
[00:11:00] So the third mistake that often I see families making is that we get really overwhelmed. And so when we look back at being too idealistic and maybe why we didn't meal plan for the. And just kind of recognizing we didn't do it for the week, and so now we failed, but why didn't we meal plan for the week?
[00:11:20] Well, oftentimes because it feels so overwhelming, rather than saying, we could knock this out in five minutes and setting a five minute timer and just doing it, it becomes this daunting task that we dread. We just put it off as long as humanly possible, and so it might be that the task itself just feels way too big or overwhelming.
[00:11:41] It also might be that we look in our fridge and it's just so cluttered. We're overwhelmed with options, and so we still can't make a decision and we still can't find ourself coming up with a simple meal idea. Here we have a full fridge and no idea what to. And that seems so counterintuitive cuz we're like, we have so many things here, but the mistake we're making is that we're getting overwhelmed and it's again, too big of a decision.
[00:12:09] The same is true if you're looking at an empty fridge and you know you have to go grocery shopping, but you're trying to figure out what do you fill it with and what is on your grocery list. That can feel like a really big decision and we get overwhelmed with it and it all kind of spirals into we're overwhelmed.
[00:12:25] We have a lot of ideals that don't necessarily match up or align with our actual energy levels or abilities for the week or skill levels. And then we get stuck. And so these three mistakes together all spiral and feed into one another to create meal times that just feel harder than they need. And so in order to help you take action and in order to help you break down this big decision and the decision fatigue that comes with things like feeding your family meal after meal, day after day, I want you to think about something that you can do to overcome these three mistakes, and that is pick one thing.
[00:13:06] Like I said with the reg example, I was so overwhelmed. I was way too ideal. I had been stuck for a really long time and indecision about it, and it was making the decision to buy a rug way harder than it needed to be. And so with you in feeding your family, I want you to find, what is that one thing For me, it was picking the size of the rug that was gonna be my starting point.
[00:13:31] That seemed like a natural starting point, and it seemed like it would help perpetuate the next decisions that needed to be. . But for you, I want you to think about what is the one thing that you wanna start with. If you're looking at that cluttered fridge and you're overwhelmed with options, and you're saying, we have a full fridge.
[00:13:50] I've already grocery shopped, but I haven't meal plan for the week, don't go down the rabbit trail. If I didn't meal plan for the week, and this isn't ideal, and da da. No, no, no. Stop your roll mama and just look at your fridge and pick one thing. What is one thing you wanna work with? Do you have a gigantic Costco sized bottle of marinade that is just your Achilles heel because it doesn't organize well in the fridge and you wanna use it up?
[00:14:13] We'll pick that. Pick that as your one thing. Do you have raw meat that you bought that you didn't use over the weekend that it's gonna spoil if you don't use? , maybe you're gonna pick that. Do you have vegetables that are on their last leg and they need to be eaten or else they're gonna throw away? And that's gonna perpetuate a whole nother cycle of thinking and mental spiral we can find ourself in, of speaking words of defeat o over ourself instead of ability and capability.
[00:14:42] And so I want you to find, what is that one thing in your packed. Come up with that one thing That is the impetus to all the things that are going to follow in that given meal. The same goes with an empty fridge. If you have very few things in your fridge, maybe you do see, oh, well we have eggs. You can do a lot with eggs.
[00:14:59] Any meal of the day, just start with the eggs and say, that's gonna be my one thing. It doesn't require you to go to the store today. If you do get to go to the store today, great, but it also buys you some time if you don't with something you already have on. or if your fridge is empty and you just got back from vacation and you were like really, really empty and you have three eggs, and that's just not enough to get by with the whole family.
[00:15:19] Go to the pantry. Do you have a box of pasta? Do you have a can of beans? Do you have tuna? What do you have that you already can just right now as you're listening to me with AirPods in, or when you get back to your kitchen area from whatever you're doing right. , go find one thing that is going to help make tonight's meal or today's meal, whatever meal of the day that you need to be making easier and pick that one thing.
[00:15:47] And then from there, go back through those questions that I mentioned at the beginning. Things like, what do you have to go with it? Do you have other things in your home? . Well, if you do, pull 'em out. This is where I walk you through how to do a DIY dinner bin and something I'm gonna teach you in an upcoming workshop, which I'll include the link for in the show notes.
[00:16:05] You can go to veggies virtue.com/workshop and get signed up. I'm gonna show you this whole process of how to begin making these big decisions. How to begin giving yourself the skills so that you know how to turn a big thing like feeding your. Into a smaller, more sustainable skill that just trickles from one to the next.
[00:16:28] So you pick your one thing and then you decide, okay, what are we gonna do with this giant jar of marinade? What are we gonna do with these eggs? What are we gonna do with this? Can beans, do I have those things? Okay, I don't, well, that's where my grocery list starts. Okay, I do. Well, I'm gonna put 'em together so they're in the same spot.
[00:16:42] And that again, reinforces less decision, fatigue, less mental energy when it comes time to make this. Now you have your grocery list already being prepared, and then you're looking over this whole meal that you just came up with in literally less than two minutes. Just due today. Don't work. Don't focus on the whole week.
[00:17:02] Don't get ahead of yourself. It's the holidays. Everyone's overwhelmed. Everyone's brains are going a million miles an hour. Don't go into that idealistic space of getting stuck and overwhelming yourself. Stick with this one thing and let it perpetuate the next decision, and the next decision. And the next decision.
[00:17:17] And look at the. Does it follow the love it, like it learning it framework? Is there something that you can feel comfortable offering this meal in a responsive way to your child because you know that there's something available that they're likely to eat and enjoy. Okay, well you've done it. You didn't just make the meal and serve the meal and all the other things that follow, but you broke down that one big decision that felt daunt.
[00:17:42] And you simplified it into these small little steps that you need in order to be successful and to make this sustainable. So I want you to go and take action on this right away. Go stand at your fridge, go in your pantry, pick your one thing again. If you already have dinner planned for tonight, pat yourself on the back.
[00:18:03] Do this for tomorrow because your tomorrow self is gonna thank you that today you went ahead and did this because you don't know what tomorrow brings. And you may need that idea already laid out for you. So go and practice this because this is some, this is a skill that you can continue to do and the more you practice this skill, the easier it's going to get.
[00:18:20] But I would love to also help you with this skill, and that's why in January I am going to be doing a free workshop where you can sign up@veggiesandvirtue.com slash workshop and I'm gonna run through how to begin setting up these systems and gaining these skills in your home so that you know for 2023.
[00:18:40] How to make feeding your family feel easier, how it doesn't need to feel like this big, lofty, idealistic, overwhelming goal for the whole year, but how you can become more equipped with some really simple skills and sustainable habits in this. System set up in your home. So this just flows one, just flows into the next, flows into the next.
[00:19:02] It flows into the next. It's breaking down these big goals into really small, doable habits. So make sure you're signed up for my free workshops and for two.com/workshop, and I'll have all the details shared there.
