Womze - Cross Cultural Parenting

New year pledge #1
I will cook varied and healthy meals for my kids.  I will provide meals that stimulate their taste buds and promote good eating habits. 

The challenge
My 5 year old is a notoriously picky eater.  Or non-eater, depending on how you look at it.  She drinks a lot of milk and likes to snack on crackers, gummies and chips.  I try to make those unavailable but she appears just fine with milk only.  With some prodding, she would eat a few pieces of sausage, fish sticks or other highly processed foods.  I had allowed this to go on for too long due to the convenience of said processed foods.

How did we fall into such poor eating habits
I don’t really know.  At one, when she was newly introduced to adult fare, she voraciously dug into everything.  And by everything, I mean iyan and egusi, beans cooked in palm oil, rice, moin-moin, etc - all Nigerian foods, spicy and hot.  A lot of kids refuse to eat these foods, but not my Darling Angel - she gobbled it all up.  That was at age one.  Next thing I can remember, she was turning it all down and would only eat sausage or pancake or fish sticks or chicken nuggets or fries.  (Never a combination though, just one at any one time.)

Why the history?  Well, whatever I did wrong, I do not want to repeat it with Baby Brother.  His appetite currently exceeds his sister’s when she was one.  He too is gobbling everything down and has a well rounded tummy as evidence.  While I on one hand wonder when (or if) it will be necessary to start taking precautions against childhood obesity, I also wonder if he will suddenly turn away from food and adopt the picky lifestyle.

Since I can’t think of anything I did to cause Darling Angel’s aversion to food, I figure the key may be in what I did not do vs. what I did.

And one thing I did not do 4 years ago was to ensure that there was sufficient variety in our meals.  I just stuck to and repeatedly offered the foods that worked. 

Hope
As I write this, I am not yet sure what form our meal variety will take.  But I hope that Darling Angel’s new-found 5-year old maturity can be leveraged to convince her to try new foods.  I hope that she will discover or rediscover foods that she likes.  I hope that Baby Brother continues to have a good appetite and grows up eating healthy.  I hope that the effort helps me to keep up a healthy diet myself.  Hubby likes his staple naija foods but I’m hoping he joins in and tries some variety too.

After nine months post-partum, I began to worry that my post-pregnancy weight is here to stay.  The first time around, I went up a dress size and I didn’t care.  I simply went shopping for new clothes, got rid of many of those that couldn’t fit and enjoyed my baby. 

At nine months, I stopped breastfeeding and within two weeks, my clothes were sagging around me and I needed to go shopping for clothes again.  That episode made me distrust the claim that breastfeeding helps you to lose weight since I only lost weight after I stopped breastfeeding.  But I have since found literature that pointed out that some people experience the weight loss benefit of breastfeeding after they stop to breastfeed.  I can’t locate that reference now but according to a 2004 study at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, breast-feeding weight loss may be a myth.

In the first six months after giving birth, the study’s 81 nonbreastfeeding mothers lost fat from their whole body, arms, and legs faster than the 87 breastfeeding moms.

My decision to breastfeed however had nothing to do with a promise of weight loss, nor do I think any mother should be base her decision to breastfeed on that.  In fact, losing weight would have been a tall order for me considering how hungry I constantly was.  Nonetheless, I desired to lose the weight, breastfeeding or not and thankfully, the hunger went away with the end of breastfeeding.

Second time around, I wasn’t as hungry as before, both during and after pregnancy.  My lesser appetite may also have been responsible for gaining less weight so that I didn’t go up a dress size, but there was 15 pounds to lose so that I could breath in my clothes. 

With the benefit of experience, I planned to be patient.  “It will fall off after nine months”, I told anyone who cared to listen.  A friend warned me that it wouldn’t be easy because I was younger than 30 the first time and now on the other side of the metabolic divide.  I haven’t seen any literature that cites age 30 as the magical age when metabolism starts to slow.  According to this ivillage article, every decade the body loses more lean body mass to fat and a higher concentration of fat makes it more difficult to lose weight.

The reason you may find it harder to lose weight as you get older is down to changes in your basal metabolic rate (bmr). This drops by two per cent for every decade of your life. Also, you lose 3.2kg (7lbs) of lean body mass with every decade, which is replaced by fat.

Whether my friend is right or not about the difficulty I would face with losing weight simply because I’m now over 30, I decided to be proactive about my fitness and hit the gym.  After 6 months at the gym, I’ve barely lost two pounds. 

Imagine that, two pounds in 6 months!  But I was not discouraged because I could feel the results, I could breath in my clothes.  I could close the buttons on my pants.  I could see the definition of my waist - not striking, but visible.  I could raise my arms up without fearing that I would rip my shirt sleeves.  All good, but everyday (yes, everyday) when I climb on the scale, I find it hasn’t budged. 

Now, I don’t want to be nitpicky since I have achieved my desired results and I’m breathing in my clothes.  But I was bothered, if I can’t manage to lose weight after 6 months of working out (I concede this sometimes involved only one workout in a week or none at all, but some weeks, I got three in), what hope do I have as I get even older.  So I decided to turn things up a notch…address the FOOD angle.  

I was doing okay with food, I thought, until I decided to write down everything I ate.  Walking by the kitchen counter, pick up a packet of crackers, pop into mouth, make baby’s bottle, notice second packet of crackers on the kitchen counter, grab it, tear it open, oh my goodness!, what am I doing?  I’m not even hungry!  It’s after lunch and I’m clacking away on the keyboard at work, I need a break, I take a stroll, to the vending machine, get a pack of Famous Amos cookies, crunch crunch crunch…oh my goodness!, I didn’t even want that! 

I wrote down everything I ate for three weeks, and in that time I lost 2 pounds.  6 months of working out, I lost two pounds.  Three weeks of mindful eating, I lost 2 pounds.  I guess you shouldn’t plan to lose weight without addressing food intake.

This week Baby Brother did not seem overly interested in his dinners, whether cereal or the varieties of jarred stage 2 dinners.  We even tried stage 3 mushy dinners with tiny floating chunks but his response was the same.  Perhaps it’s because he’s teething.  He’s had a fever, maybe he’s fighting off something and is experiencing a loss of appetite. But even before then, his interest in food seemed to have decreased.  He still drank his milk so I wasn’t worried.

When I sat him in his seat at the dinner table and cooed and cooed, trying to get him to eat some mixed cereal and fruit combo and he stubbornly resisted by averting his mouth from the spoon, I concluded that he was not hungry, that he had no appetite.   So when Adoring Father joined us at the table with a plate of ogbonno (a West African soup) and Baby Brother practically leaped out of his seat towards daddy’s plate, I was surprised.  “Could he want that?”, I wondered aloud.  Adoring Father gave him a chunk of something from the soup and the boy mashed it down with his gums and two teeths and called for more.  I was shocked.  Not because I can’t stand ogbonno (it has a strong odor aroma) but because I didn’t realize an 8 month old baby could be that selective.

Could he be bored with baby food?  Could he be ready for bigger-boy culinary delights?  Could I really serve him from our dinner plate?  I hadn’t experienced this with his older sister as she ate within my dictated guidelines till age one when I removed all restrictions and fed her from anything we ate.  I remember she was very delighted to join us at dinner but she was one year old.  I didn’t have to worry about sharing an omelet with her since egg whites were now okay.  And I was a lot less worried about her choking on food bits.

Now that I know that baby’s not “not hungry” when he turns his mouth away from his chicken noodle dinner, macaroni and cheese (which was a favorite), sweet pototoes in pureed form, I’m trying to cook baby-friendly meals that he can eat.  I found a baby food guide at WholesomeBabyFood.com and I improvised with foods I have at hand.

So far he’s done very well with my home cooked meals.  He’s cleaned up his bowls and ‘asked’ for seconds.  We’ve had:

• Spinach rice - very soft boiled rice, added a dash of leftover stew (tomatoes, onions and peppers), crumbled spinach into it and crumbled in a boiled egg yolk.
• Egg noodles - Noodles boiled very soft, added dash of leftover stew, added a crumbled egg yolk.
• Cheesy egg noodles - Noodles boiled very soft, added mozarella cheese

I need to go grocery shopping with baby in mind and expand our food repertoir while he’s very interested lest he grows up to be a picky eater like his sister is (or like I was once).