Food plays an important in everyone’s life. Not only does it provide nutrients to our bodies and keep us healthy, it can: socially bring people together, mentally keep us focused and well, as well as prevent or help manage our health conditions such as diabetes, and high blood pressure.
March 2019 is Nutrition Month and continues last year’s theme of “Unlocking the Potential of Food”
This year, let’s keep the focus on food to help us:
FUEL
During pregnancy and parenting, I often encourage my clients to have healthy snacks on hand such as fruits, nuts, cheese with crackers if they don’t feel like eating a full meal, are rushed for time or are just hungry! This helps to ensure you are still getting some energy and nutrients to help support a healthy pregnancy.
DISCOVER
With my clients, I like to emphasize the importance of demonstrating healthy eating behaviour to their child(ren). The first way they learn about healthy food choices is by watching you. Do this by: making healthy food choices for yourself, involve your kids in food preparation and grocery shopping, or build learning activities with food such as counting out the number of slices an apple is cut into.
PREVENT
There is a lot of research to show the benefits of healthy food choices in either preventing or managing diseases. However, we all have to ensure that the food choices and changes we make for ourselves are ones that we can maintain in the long run. What works for me, might not work for you. A Registered Dietitian can help you unlock your food’s potential!
HEAL
As a Registered Dietitian, my role is to educate my pregnant or postpartum clients on how food can help manage the changes to their bodies, as well as how the foods they eat can benefit the health of their baby.
BRING US TOGETHER
I encourage my clients to put away all electronic devices during meal time and focus on themselves and their family members. This allows them to connect with others as well as focus on and bring awareness to the foods that they are eating.
During Nutrition Month, I encourage you to make at least one positive change to your eating to improve your own health!
For more information and recipes, visit NutritionMonth2019.ca or http://www.unlockfood.ca
Here’s to good food!
Love this! It’s amazing how powerful food can be! Thanks for sharing!