Our environment and our culture shapes our beliefs around food, often subconsciously. In this episode with former school teacher turned homeschool mom and health coach, Mya Metzel, we discussed how to make simple changes to help picky eaters and change our family’s mindset around healthier living...
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This episode discusses:
Mya’s story of her mom’s breast cancer journey.
How our environment and culture subconsciously shapes our beliefs about food.
How to avoid overcomplicating a healthier lifestyle.
Why we resist healthy living when motherhood gets overwhelming and give in.
How to reshape your family’s perspective on health.
Why the deprivation mindset is so harmful and takes joy out of life.
How to begin reshaping picky eater’s tastes.
How to help help picky eaters take ownership of their eating habits with traffic light eating.
Why the way we talk about food with our kids really matters.
Don’t have time to listen? Here’s the episode all typed out:
Lets face it…Being a homeschooling mom who also works from home can be pure chaos! As you’ve probably already noticed, despite the occasional laugh track, life isn’t a sitcom and everyday struggles are rarely resolved in 30 minutes with commercial breaks to keep your sanity in check so the right strategies and mindset are vital for becoming more productive and less overwhelmed with all the things life throws at us. Enter the Simply Freeing Podcast…Episodes for the highly passionate, busy work at home, homeschooling mama ready to break away from cultural norms and raise life long learners. So let kick stress to the curb, throw chaos out the door and order in some peace and simplicity…with a cup of coffee, or 3.
Jackie: Hi Mya! Thank you for joining us on the show today! I wanted to start out by having you share some things about yourself and your story in how you became a health coach.
Mya: Sure! I was in my 6th year of teaching special education when my mom was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. She let my dad and I know over a phone call that she didn’t want to do anything. (My brother and I were out of the house at this point.) She was tired of her broken body. She knew where she was going. Her grandma and her mom had passed. She was ready to go and be with the Lord. I was kind of okay with her not wanting to go the chemo route because she said she didn’t want to do that for sure but I believe that it was at the moment, on the phone in the car when I just got this idea out of no where. I know it was the Lord. It was a divine idea because the way I was living, I was not thinking this way and so I asked, “What about natural stuff?”
Real quick background… I hated water. I would barely drink 8 ounces in a day. I was highly addicted to fast food without realizing it at the time. I had the normal crashes every day at 1 and 4 o’clock. I had a preschooler at the time. I just kind of thought how I felt was me. After I said that out loud, I thought...that did not come from me. It didn’t stop me though from going home and immediately getting online. I just typed in “natural remedies for cancer.” I didn’t know what I was looking for. That is where my pivot began. Actually, I really believe my pivot began with the idea to search natural cancer remedies. I had to decide to do something with that and take it into my own hands. It really became such a huge blessing for my own health and now my family’s health.
I taught for one more year. My mom did end up passing. I had our second baby girl and it was night and day because I started taking care of myself between my first and my second. It just continued to compound. Now I am a health coach and I help support moms through making habit changes in simple ways. We don’t have to over complicate things like our society likes to do. Health really is simple and it’s about getting back to the basics. I love to help moms and through that one of the cool things is that I feel like I still get to help kids too because I’m helping their mother. I’ve been very blessed by my bitter sweet blessing as I like to call it. That’s a nutshell version of it.
Jackie: So hard! I can’t even imagine having to go through that but like you said, it is bitter sweet. It’s changing your mindset and your perspective and what many would view as a massive tragedy, you’ve been able to bless your family with it and now in turn bless others so I’m very encouraged by that.
From the moment that we met virtually on Instagram, it sounds funny but I immediately felt just so happy to see someone else that had such a passion for health. I’ve always considered myself to be such a health night but it is a journey. Once you start small and you start going down that rabbit hole, it’s hard to get out. I cannot not talk about these things.
I was trying to decide which topic we could discuss that would be helpful for moms and in particular, homeschool moms, that are busy and overwhelmed and who might also work from home. How do they implement healthy eating with their children at home and what do they believe about food? I know this is something that you talk a lot about in your program and I wanted you to talk more about that.
Mya: Here’s what I have discovered. At this point, I’m about five years into my own transformation journey and I remember what it was like in the beginning. I understand it and I see it now in moms around me. Our environment has influenced how we do things. A lot of it is subconscious. We see things that happen. We get input in a variety of ways and it starts to form these little stories and beliefs that we start to adopt and take on and start to kind of act upon because it just seems to be “the norm” and so unfortunately by default, we have adopted this belief that health is in certain boxes. It’s not an ongoing thing. It’s not a lifestyle. It’s not lifelong. It’s, I’m going to do this 30 day thing. It’s, I’m going to do this three day cleanse. It’s, I’m going to do this type of diet. Instead of looking at health as a step-by-step basis like, the end goal is that I live a healthy life and when I die I know I did what I could to live as long as I could. We don’t have that type of mentality anymore. Instead it’s just like, what can I do quickly? For moms it’s very overwhelming. We feel that if we can’t get at what we want, we’re not going to be successful at it. That’s very defeating.
When it comes to kids, if they resist food for example, that gets super defeating and exhausting because there’s resistance there. Moms get so dang tired because they’re overwhelmed and overworked and they have so much stuff on their plate. Now, even more so with kids coming home and homeschooling which I now have that experience. I chose to homeschool my oldest and so it is really been about our first becoming aware of what you believe about certain things and why you’re choosing the same behaviors and habits that you choose and then being open to changing that. Once you start to change it, that’s where the pivots happened. That’s where the trajectory starts to slightly get redirected as I’m in it’s more beneficial and serves not only that mom but that family. We can’t do everything by ourselves. Mom is try to and we would like to because we’re servant oriented I believe, that’s how human nature is. We really do want to help others so it’s hard to look inward first so put motherhood on top of that…oh my gosh kids are so needy. They just need their mother so much and we often think that’s our role now…we’re mom. When that’s not who we are. That’s just a portion of what we do and so it’s starts in the mind. As silly and cliche as that sounds, it really does. It’s because of all these factors that just play into it, and then you can start to take that action and change that trajectory because it really is simple. It’s so simple. God didn’t complicate anything for us in the beginning. It was perfect right? But then what happened? Humans screwed it up. Then we’ve had to try and figure it out ever since but really we were given just peace and simplicity and harmony and so it’s not like we’re going to achieve this perfection but there is a more simple way to do things and to be healthy for example or healthier because it makes it more of a lifestyle. It’s not this end goal.
Jackie: I know for myself in the past, I’ve given up so much. I became “the healthy one” and I was made fun of. Oh that’s mom. She’s eating kale again. My children have even made videos called “kale life” 😂. I think that pushing them too much instead of just modeling a lifestyle for them has been to their downfall. It hasn’t been good for me to push it on them. I like your approach and the things that you teach are so much more manageable were you change the way you are and then that modeling will change everything. They watch everything that you do. They see the way you eat. They may not like all the food all the time but eventually I think they start to change. Healthy eating is a long game for sure.
Mya: That’s where we have to shift the perspective first because if not, we will get defeated and feel like we want to give up because it’s just taking too long. We can reshape tastes but it’s probably going to take a couple of different exposures and preparing the food in a lot of different ways before that taste gets reshaped to where we can make it and that child just eats it.
There are a lot of factors that I think as a culture we’ve just come to ignore and no longer consider because we are in such a microwave society where we want something quick. Our attention span is so short now. It’s barely the length of a goldfish. That’s like mere seconds and so it’s hard because motherhood isn’t quick right? We have our children for 18 years, maybe longer if they live in our house after that but they’re always our child. Just because they don’t live with us doesn’t mean that we still don’t have influence on them and so the perspective, the modeling and then implementing of systems and letting your children see that it doesn’t have to be a binge weekend of cleaning. It doesn’t have to be, today we’re eating nothing but this this and this. This is our health day. That’s not how it should be approached because then there is going to be this unhealthy mentality of like, OK it’s Thursday so that means I have to eat this and this and there’s no fun in it.
Jackie: So true. I think as moms, we don’t place as much of an importance on healthy foods just because it’s in the day to day. We just get tired of it. It’s a lot of work but it doesn’t have to be thought of as a lot of work if you change a little bit at a time.
Mya: Amen! Honestly, we live in a fast paced culture that thrives off of things that are processed and packaged and bagged loaded with chemicals and additives and so our bodies are not craving real food anymore. There are external factors. If we give ourselves some grace and recognize this isn’t just because “I don’t have the willpower.” My environment has to change too. I have to become aware of places that I go and the things that I buy. I have to acknowledgment that that some stuff isn’t nourishing or fueling health. I’s actually getting us more disconnected from what real food is. Then just taking those little steps and slowly reduce and put something healthier in so it’s not just “I can’t have this.” This helps to reshape tastes too. This perspective makes it so much easier to adopt.
Jackie: Yes! The deprivation mindset is all around us with everything. It’s like all or nothing.
Mya: And how can you find joy in that?
Jackie: I learned about traffic light eating from you and I just wanted you to share a little bit about that. How would you help a mom that has a picky eater to make some changes in their home?
Mya: This is the teacher in me. I had to differentiate instruction with every child. I didn’t like just a blanket statement that says, this is what we’re going to do. This is how things are going to go no matter what these kids abilities are just because that is not going to create any success for the child.
If you have a picky kiddo, it’s the same type of approach. You’ve got to differentiate and find out what they really enjoy. You know the things they like and what they don’t and so maybe you say, “We’re going to start making smoothies!” Maybe you make it mostly for you and give them 2 or 4 ounces worth. They aren’t even realizing their body is immediately starting to get exposure to different foods. You can increase it over time.
You can also compromise. If your child loves white bread but you want them to eat wheat, you can make a sandwich with one of the slices of white bread and one of the slices of wheat and talk about the traffic light system. This is where you approach food by looking at it in three different categories kind of like a traffic light. We have red yellow and green. They mean something to the cars. You have to stop slow down and go. That’s how we look at our food and so the kids really understand how to then look at what they are eating and say “Oh! This is a green light food. I get to have more of this or this is a red light. I can’t have that. That’s an every once in a while type of food.” It’s a really cool system because it does help the child actually be able to visually keep themselves accountable as well as the parents. I say it’s for kids that are 3 to 12 but I think adults could benefit from this as well. When you realize that you have all yellow and red light foods on your plate you begin to think differently.
Jackie: My kids loved when I started talking about food in terms of traffic lights. They really enjoyed going to the grocery store and I heard them saying things like, “Let’s buy some more green lights.” They would head to the produce section. “You don’t need ice cream! You already had a red light food today!” I think putting the visual in front of them really helped. We need visuals in our life to make changes. I have a stoplight on the refrigerator now. It definitely helps.
Mya: It’s really the language. I think that is another thing that we have lost. We think about something in a certain way and that’s how we talk about it. We really have got to restructure our perspective and our language because how we talk about things really impacts how we feel about things and then ultimately how we behave. You guys being on the same page and being able to talk about food in relation to colors is really cool because the kids are taking ownership and responsibility but then they are helping you take ownership and responsibility.
Jackie: Yes! It’s a team effort. Before we end, I’d love for you to share your programs.
Mya: I have a free 1 page PDF that I would love to pass along. I went into the Target grocery section. I looked at all the ingredients and wrote them down. I want to be able to empower moms, not overwhelm them. I focused on 5 ingredients. I wrote down the health concerns for those ingredients and what it’s contributing to and also the brand.
I have been on this journey for five years and I have so badly wanted to help moms on a grander scale. I created this eight week program that is a condensed version of my eight years. We highlight 4 specific habits. (Two weeks on each habit) There’s homework each week where you get a chance to implement it with your family because it’s not just about mom getting healthy. Kind of like you mentioned Jackie, like oh that’s mom’s food. That’s mom’s thing. That’s not how it should be when it comes to health. Health is for everybody. Our greatest gift is our temple that we’ve been given. We have a responsibility to tend to it. This eight week program focuses on things like connection and the language around food and the routines and the creativity. When we become mothers we have to be creative and think outside of the box especially when it comes to food. Like I said before, our society has gotten used to eating a certain way so when you try and change that, the individuals are resistant. (Whether that be the adult or the kids.) This program gives the tools, systems and community to be able to just come together and empower one another and encourage each other and learn how you can start building that foundation.
I don’t believe in the magic pill. I don’t Believe in a 21 day fix. It is literally giving you tools for your toolbox to lay that solid foundation so that after the program, you can continue to build on what you learn as the years go by with your kids.
Jackie: So so helpful! Thank you so much for sharing and I enjoyed our conversation. I know this is a topic that is not something you can bring up one time. It’s a lifelong topic. The more you learn, the more you realize how nutrition can impact your family in amazing ways. Making small changes here and there makes a difference. I’ve seen it my life. I love talking about health and wellness. I’m so happy to have you on the show today!
Mya: I appreciate it! I Love that you are doing this because I think sharing health is sharing hope! As long as you have breath in your body, there is hope right? Thank you for having me!
Jackie: Thank you!