I Would Rather Teach My Kids to Curse!

Zeeby does not appear happy

I would rather teach my kids to curse. In fact, I would rather teach my kids how to properly offend another person using colourful profanity then have them subjected to “Diet Culture.” Pretty bold statement I know and I mean every F*@#ing word. Now to be clear, I value kindness above all things and it is the value that I preach in my house daily. If you were to ask my 6-year-old, what makes a princess beautiful, she would answer without hesitation “How she treats other people”. So, let me provide context to why I feel so strongly.

Years ago, sitting in a female studies course in college, I remember hearing about girls as young as 8 putting themselves on diets. Restricting their intake of food because they desired to look a particular way. I could not believe it, how naive of me. Kids are sponges. Isn’t that how we sum up how quickly kids learn from the environment around them and the adults and media we expose them to? Around this same time, I started to note how often my friends were talking about what they were eating or how they wished to look. One was always doing some kind of ridiculous juice cleanse to drop weight and rid their body of toxins, or my favorite “intestinal sludge”. I remember thinking “ok, so you are purposely inducing diarrhea and starving yourself for a few days, along with headaches and mood swings so that your jeans fit better? Sounds like fun.” I overheard my mom’s friends and my coworkers talking about “the Zone” or “Atkins” along with “Weightwatcher’s” and “Jenny Craig”. To be clear, I am not going to rip these programs apart, I am strictly going to talk about why I think diet culture is dangerous. Dangerous to everyone and terrifyingly dangerous to kids, in my opinion. I think “Diet Culture” promotes a form of mental illness or at the very least it leads to unhealthy obsessions and judgments of our bodies and the bodies of others. Why would any parent want their kid spending one single moment doing either of these things? They would not.

If you take a second and think of about your personal exposure to these types of messages you might realize January is the worst time of year for this. Media outlets assault us all month long with images, and messages designed to prey on our insecurities and fears about our physical self, and the physical presentations of others.  They wrap these messages up in cloaks about living our best “healthy” life. But is that really what is being promoted?

What does the word Diet mean to the average person? Well from my years in the Health and Fitness field, to most it refers to calorie restriction for the purpose of losing weight. It doesn’t matter what “Diet” you want to list, the outcome recorded and advertised is weight loss, not health. We see adds everyday encouraging us to start working on our summer body, to slim down for that special event or to attract that special someone. It messes with almost every adult I know. It is commonplace to observe loved one’s yo-yo and put their body through periods of extreme stress. It has messed with me at times. Eat this, Not that. Replace one meal a day with a shake that tastes like sidewalk chalk in order to tame the muffin top, yummy. While we are sitting listing to our spouses all we ate that day or what the scale said that morning, we are not noticing the kids are listening, and learning, and emulating. We seem to have forgotten that in preschool, while learning about the animal kingdom, we were taught the true definition of the word “DIET” meaning what form of nutrition a species consumes. Remember T-Rex was a Carnivore, Horses eat hay, orcas like salmon, and lions eat antelopes. We don’t teach our kids that Simba’s girlfriend was working on her summer body or that Black Beauty only ate so many carbs because he was maintaining the figure of his youth. And yet, this is what the word “DIET” refers to on the shelves of book stores, on our Instagram accounts, and at our kitchen tables.

So, in my house this word is less accepted than if my 5-year-old dropped an F bomb in the car on the way to school. Why? Well, I think we have royally messed ourselves up over the years. We forgot that food is nourishment. It is medicine, life, love and tradition. It connects us to our family and to our heritage. We celebrate with food and at times, it helps us grieve.  Food is not the issue, the messages we put out in the world about food are. Messages like: Carbs are bad. Sugar is poison. Avoid gluten, soy, wheat, red meat, fat and the list go on. These messages are dangerous, and a lot of the time the people repeating them have no background in nutritional science, and it is a science. Carbs are not BAD, or GOOD, we need them in one form or another for sustenance, and energy on a cellular level. Bread has carbs, chocolate bars have carbs and broccoli have carbs and none of these things have ever done me wrong. Bread makes me think of family meals, or lunches my mom made. How can this be bad? If I eat it in excess will it support my body the way I need? No, but is it bad? NO! We have created a culture that has most adults discussing their ideal macro splits (otherwise known as the quantity of carbs, fats and proteins they are allowing themselves) but if you asked them to list the foods that support their ideal micronutrient requirements or how much water they personally need to consume to maintain hydration and electrolyte balance they would look at you and shrug in confusion.  But these are the most important aspects about the food we eat and how it relates to the science of proper nutrition. There is not one way to eat or best way to eat. There are nutrient dense foods, and there are foods that support our bodies’ most basic functions but have little nutritional value. There are foods that support our emotional, and spiritual connections more than they do our bodies. We need all of these foods to support a well rounded and healthy life.

Every parent wants a well-rounded, healthy life for their kids. As a whole, we need to see that what we think we know is wrong because on average, people don’t know enough about the foods they eat. Kids are rapidly growing, constantly moving, little balls of what seems like endless energy and we cannot impose our calorie restricting, body scrutinizing ways upon them. If I am a 40 something year old woman, who spends 7 to 8 hours a day sitting at my computer or walking around my workplace, I need to recognize that what my body needs in order to maintain a healthy weight and ward off illness and disease will be vastly different from a prepubescent boy, who plays sports everyday, and is growing out of his clothes every 3 to 6 months. Food is not one size fits all! I often don’t eat the same thing as the kids or at least I don’t eat exactly the same meal. I am no longer growing, I’m grown. When asked about my plate I talk about how I want to be strong, and how the food I have supports me. Or I talk about what the food means to me or what memories I have around the meal. I don’t talk about my body as if it is sectioned off or a bunch of parts. There is no “Mommy is trying to shed a few lb’s”.

CBC’s Big Block Sing Song Eat says it best:

“Eat, eat, eat, I know I’ve got to eat

I’ve got to crunch, chew that’s what I like to do

To make my brain grow big, my body grow strong

I’ve got the eat, eat, eat, to feel good all day long.”

Pretty simple stuff. And it is all kids need to understand. The second message is, horses eat hay, Cows eat grass, and mom and dad make every meal with love. We can control what we put in our bodies and as parents we control what we provide to our kids’ bodies and minds. That includes nonverbal messages, filtering industry driven dangerous sales pitches designed to feed on our insecurities, and rich nutrient dense fruits and veggies, healthy fats, delicious baked goods made with love and Dad’s nachos.

Dad’s Nachos recipe and technique

Dad here.  I’m a strong advocate for everyone developing a solid staple of easy, delicious and familiar meals that can rival any fast-food joint if you end up strapped for time.  You don’t have to break the bank or model to the family that one should defer to the drive through instead of taking the time to put stuff on the table that feeds their bodies and contributes to a tradition of eating home cooked meals together as often as possible. Now just know that this is something that took me a long time to figure out, and I’ve definitely benefitted from the partnership and support that Stacey and I have created together in our later years. I’m very grateful that I managed to get the hang of this while the kids are all still young enough to benefit from it.

I also beleive that Home cooked can be achieved using store bought ingredients.  I’m not so naïve to think that everyone should be making things from scratch as that is just too tall an order for many people.   I know it is for me right now.  But the act of bringing groceries home and taking the time to put things together, all while hopefully getting to laugh and debrief the day or get to the business of running the machinery of home is something that I look forward to.

I have a pretty conventional selection of meals in my rotation with everything from steaks, garlic mushrooms and buttery mashed potatoes to an incredible spaghetti sauce. But I’ve also started to branch out and show some growth which resulted in me making a surprisingly good basil tomato bisque and my very first brisket. But one of my earliest meals that I could manage for me and the kids when I was single and just trying to put it all together was a big meaty, cheesy batch of nachos. They became such a hit and so enjoyed, that they quickly became “Dad’s nachos” thanks to the way the kids talked about them with excitment when helping out with meal planning.

For me, the secret to great nachos is all in the layers.  A single layer of nacho chips gets too heavily saturated with the cheese and the grease and the goodness and the chips end up being incapable of supporting a sufficient salsa/guac/sour cream scoop.  A big clump of chips with cheese and ingredients sprinkled on the top makes for a bland and tasteless pile that ends up getting picked over once all the good stuff is gone. So, for me, layers is where it’s at.

Here’s the way we do it:

(Feeds a family of 6)

·  2 big bags of your favourite nachos.  We tend to like Tostitos whole wheat bite sized rounds

·  1 Bag of shredded cheese.  I use about 500 grams/1 lbs of Tex Mex shredded cheese. A block of Marble Cheddar does the trick when I have the time to shred it myself.

·  1 lb of lean ground beef.  I find extra lean to be too dry, so I cook down the lean ground enough so that it’s not swimming in its own grease, but not bone dry.

· One package of Old el Paso taco seasoning mix.

· One large red pepper, diced.

· Bundle of Green onions, Diced.

· A bucket of your favourite salsa. 

· A healthy dose of love layered throughout the entire process.

· Whatever else you weirdos like to put on your nachos.  Stacey likes jalapenos, so  they’re available on the side at our house because I’m a gigantic softie when it comes to heat and I just can’t hang with obviously harder, tougher people.

I prefer to make mine in the oven, because it ends up toasting the chips slightly and heating more evenly.  But you can totally do this in the microwave for smaller plates.

1. Brown the meat using the directions on the taco seasoning mix.  Something that you also need to consider is how the different consistency of meat changes the taste of the final product.  Because I don’t season the meat ahead of time, I tend to like to break the ground beef up as tiny as possible to ensure the flavouring is spread in every bite.  Large chunks of unseasoned beef end up tasting bland and throw the whole nacho experience off.

2. Dice the peppers and chives and whatever other veggies you are going to use while the meat is browning.

3. Once the beef is seasoned, it’s time to layer. I tend to like a very loose double layer of chips for the base.  Then a light sprinkling of shredded cheese to act as the glue for the good stuff.  Then add beef sprinkled across the entire surface.  Then add veggies. And now a solid layer of cheese to lock in the good stuff onto the chips.

4. Here’s where I add a second layer, but generally only a single chip strata at this point.  Another dust of cheese, then meat, then veg, then cheese.  And so on up to the sky if you like.

5. Allowing kids to participate in the process at several steps along the way almost always leads to them stealing a bit of cheese or veggies and gives an opportunity to teach them things and interact with them along the way with love and humour, two essential ingredients to a home cooked meal.

This is such a crowd pleaser at our house, along with a very frequent hankering for taco nights, that I like to cook a bunch of extra beef so that I can freeze multiple servings for easy defrost when crunched for time. Feel free to comment on your nacho preferences or give the method a try and let us know your thoughts.