Hi, this is Francisco Bujan from VitalCoaching.com. We are talking about staying fit and the topic for this video is “What if you have children?” This strategy that I am giving you now has to do with, if you want to shift for instance to a raw food diet and you have children, you have a family, and if you are a woman, and you have a husband at home or a partner and you have a couple of kids. What do you do? How do you deal with that? Because you want to shift your diet and this means maybe change for the rest of your family. So how do you deal with that? What if you are a guy? What if you come back from work, for instance, and your partner is going to prepare a meal? All these kinds of situations when you live with other people when you are in the family can be quite challenging with shifting diet. Why? Because if you are the one cooking the meal it means that you have to either force all the people to eat what you eat, or cook twice for you and for others. Or if you are not the one who is preparing the meal, the other person might prepare something that does not match what you have in mind for your diet. So all these are very challenging situations when you want to shift diet because the change that you make. Involve not only yourself but involve the rest of your family as well, the people who are there and the children. So here are a couple of tips that I think will really help you. The first thing to realize is that the changes that you make are first for your self. I know that maybe you get some great ideas. You know some really cool shifts, diet shifts, new nutrition habits that you want to implement in your life and you think “Okay, everybody has to benefit from that so my husband or my wife, my kids, everybody is going to go through the same change”. But very often that is not the way it goes because you might be committed to make those changes but the rest of your family is not at all. They are not all into it. So if you try to force them, most of the times you are going to face an extra amount of resistance which is really tough on your system. Eventually if you try to force them with you, you might end up giving all together on your efforts because you realize it is too hard to change everybody’s mind. So here is what you can do. The first thing is make changes which are relatively small in the beginning. For instance, you can change the way you have breakfast, which is going to be an influence from you. Or you can change the way you have snacks. You can add more fruits or vegetables to your snacks for instance or you can have lunch which is much lighter. These kinds of things, there are lots of places in your diet in your day, where you can shift very key eating habits without influencing the rest of your family. And this is a very good place to start because it shows that you can make some changes without having to totally revolutionize. You know you are funny and get everybody upset about your new diet habits. So, this is the first thing. So when you start doing those changes, don’t be fanatical. Make changes that you can handle which are really easy to take in the beginning and then you let those changes start impacting on the rest of your diet. One of the key moments for family, usually it would be the evening meal. This is where when everybody gets together and very frequently that is the moment where you have to either cook or have somebody cook for you, a meal that other people are going to share. So let this evening meal, a bit later. Once you have been implementing changes, positive changes in the rest of your day, then you can start making changes for the evening meal, which is going to be a bit more challenging. So once you made the changes for the rest of the day, don’t come with evening meal and try to force everybody into your new eating pattern. For instance if you decide that you no longer want to eat meat or cooked vegetable for instance and prefer raw vegetables. What you can do is very simple. You can prepare a couple of options. For instance, you will make a very big salad that everybody can enjoy and if this is going to be your main meal for you then prepare something else next to it. For instance, you can cook some rice or prepare some pastas or you can make some meat if your partner is not into becoming a vegetarian yet. So you can do all these things but simply try to be flexible, it is very important that you are not fanatical with the rest of your family. Otherwise, you will get a whole lot of resistance against you. Relax with your diet, relax with your habits and implement them over a long period of time. Remember that the changes are for you. First, once you are very good at it, once you know how to implement those changes, you can eventually try to educate your family. In the beginning focus on your self first. Okay. Take for now, bye-bye.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services