Katie Kimball
Katie Kimball has shared her journey to real food and natural living for over 8 years at Kitchen Stewardship, a blog that encourages other moms to take baby steps to better nutrition for their families while balancing their limited time and budget
Listen to the episode on Spotify here or on your favorite podcast platform and check out the Urban Monk Academy here.
Podcast transcript:
Good health starts at home with the kids.
Dr Pedram Shojai: [00:00:00] Hey, welcome back, Dr. Pedram. Shojai the urban monk here with Katie Kimball. She is doing the good work. Why? It’s teaching people how to get their kids to eat. Right. You see all that’s going on, folks. This entire game has been rigged. The food industry has been putting addictive crap into processed food for 50, 60 years. Getting everyone sick, getting everyone on the drugs and getting everyone to buy diets because you can’t take the weight off the whole thing’s bullshit.
So how do we get out of this? How do we spring the trap? How do we wake up? And smell the whole food. Well, it starts with how we do it at home. It starts with how we teach our children, right? And so this is what Katie’s been doing. This is why I invited her on learn how to create a new relationship with food and do so with your children.
It will save your life. It will save their [00:01:00] lives and it’ll save your grandchildren’s lives. Let’s get to work.
Katie, it is good to see you. Welcome.
Katie Kimball: Thanks, p.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Listen, I’m a big fan of what you’ve been doing. It’s hard, man, is it hard to deal with kids and food? And as a parent who cares? You find yourself oftentimes in a position where you’re just saying no, not this. You can’t have the chocolate, you can’t have the Skittles.
And it just becomes very difficult until, they wear you down and they get the Twinkie or, so something happens. And so in the context of reframing health. With the lens of vitality, I thought it would be just so great having you and your voice here to help the parents understand how to manage this struggle and get out on top of it.
Katie Kimball: Sounds like a plan. Yep. I’m all about making things easier. And more practical, more down to earth for busy moms and busy dads.
Dr Pedram Shojai: [00:02:00] Yeah, so let’s start with your background quickly, just so folks get to know you beyond my little, Curt intro. How’d you get into this? What drove you to become an expert in the kitchen?
Katie Kimball: I’m just, I’m a teacher at heart. I’ve always known that I would be a, would be an elementary teacher, and then I only did that for two years because I also knew I couldn’t. Full-time Teach and full-time mom and do both of them well as a perfectionist. So left teaching in the classroom, but my brain continued to think about teaching all the time.
And so having a baby was my real food revolution. The genesis of it, at least, like this, everything matters so much more. And I was making lots of mistakes in the kitchen, spending a ton of time at the cutting board and I thought, how, how do other moms. Do this. I’m hearing from moms in my real life circles that it’s really difficult, it feel, there’s so many tensions on your budget and your time and really wanting to keep your family healthy. And I thought, what if I could teach, what if I could help other moms do [00:03:00] this? Easier and avoid some of the mistakes I made and find some of the techniques in the middle that save your budget and save time, that are healthy for your family and also for the environment, stuff like that.
So that’s where my online life was born at. Kitchen Stewardship, where we help families stay healthy without going crazy. That’s, that’s my goal. And I’m, I’ve always been known for kind of grace in the baby steps and through that the new online community that I was building. I heard the same story a lot and that was just that, Katie, this is so hard.
Like I wanna be healthy, but I don’t even know how to cook anything. My mom never taught me. It is our generation’s miss. And as my children started getting older, I have four of them. And when I was at that halfway point of parenting, my oldest was 10 and I was like, oh, like half of his time till 18 is already passed. And I realized that I really. Wanted my kids to know how to cook. Like I had built healthy habits, I built healthy eating habits. But if they leave home and they don’t know how to cut up the [00:04:00] produce, they’re going, all the habits in the world don’t really matter ’cause they don’t have access, they don’t have the tools. And so that was the point where I decided I need to teach my kids to cook and realize that my community would need that as well. That I really wanted to help family like step into that gap where. 20 years from now, we don’t want our kids to be saying, oh, I just wish I could be healthy, but my mom never taught me to cook.
So we’ve gotta start with building the preventative measures for health and the powerful, the building up measures for health, which includes the tools to know how to cook.
Dr Pedram Shojai: It’s funny is, I fancy myself as an intelligent person, I will always prove otherwise is, I found myself, I. Not too long ago, my kids are not that old, feeling resentful and just being like, you entitled little bread. I’m in here cooking you dinner and you know you’re sitting here, hitting your sister or whatever it is.
And that one little hack of inviting them in and pulling out the kitty cutting boards and getting them to get involved in meal prep as a [00:05:00] family gave us all this ritual, this something to do together. It brought us around food and it also got us out of our little like ba humbug of quiet down.
I’m cooking for you. And then, and we all joined hands and did it together. It was wonderful.
Katie Kimball: Yeah, I often say I was spending so much time feeding the children. I forgot what their faces looked like.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So how do we, let’s contextualize this. Like how does one start? You’re obviously not giving them the best knives. You’re not, you gotta phase them into the thing, right? So in your ecosystem, how do you bring people into the fold? How do they start learning about food before they’re fully cooking together?
Katie Kimball: I love that you brought up knives because that is my favorite place to start. It’s our members’ favorite and it makes so much sense because that’s the key to unlock the produce section is you’ve gotta be able to cut up the food. So I’ve actually taken the approach that we should have a seamless transition from our butter knives, just our regular dinner [00:06:00] knives. Two chef’s, knives, and so I teach the two year olds and the 12 year olds the same ways to hold the food and move the knife. And so we, the only thing that changes is the knife and the food. So the food starts out soft like bananas or cantaloupe that the parents have already taken the rind off.
We’re assisting. We’re helping, it’s like the training wheels in the kitchen and they’re using dull. Knives, like butter knives, or sometimes you can find a great, like a cheese cutting knife that’s pretty dull, but maybe it’s like a little bit of a level up from a butter knife. So we start the kids at two, three, and four, learning the skills, learning the techniques, and we have fun phrases like, up and over soldier to hold something or tug a Warhol to move the knife. And then as soon as everyone feels ready, the child, the parent feels the child mature enough, the child is interested in a sharper knife, then we move into a pairing knife. We actually have a lot of kids in our classes who are starting with a sharp knife at age four. I. Yeah, and cutting up, again, it’s the right food.
So you think of things like cucumbers and zucchini. They’re like this medium [00:07:00] density, really approachable with a pairing knife, but they’re also long so that the fingers can stay what we call hey, out of the way, on the far end of the food. And from there, again, my third son, John, he learned to use a sharp pairing knife when he was four and five years old.
And so he had a lot of practice for a couple years, and when he was seven, he came to me, he said, mom, I really think I’m ready for a chef’s knife. Seven years old, second grade, I said, alright, let’s start leveling you up, and and he asked for that. Now my fourth child is nine. He’s a little bit more impulsive. He hasn’t done as much in the kitchen, so he’s still at the pairing knife phase. So it’s very individual. But it’s also very possible, like knives are super motivating for kids, especially little boys. ’cause they’re sharp and they’re dangerous and they’re fun and you can do real authentic things like adults do.
So I, I actually prefer to enter in. With knives, and if that’s a psychological roadblock for parents, because it often is really to help out with our own mental state is don’t think of teaching your kids to cook as a item on your [00:08:00] to-do list. It’s not teaching your kids to cook. That’s a huge boulder. It’s breaking it down into the tiniest steps, the tiniest foundational skills. So teach your kid to measure a teaspoon of salt. That’s it. That can go on your to-do list and you don’t feel overwhelmed. That’s something you can do in five minutes. And so that’s a great place to start is just how do we get them to measure and now we can incorporate them into our cooking.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I love that. I love that. Both my kids are on chef’s knives, but not the sharpest of sharp. We’re not, they’re not full samurai yet, but it took a minute, right? It took a minute to trust them. And the maturity, as you said, but there’s something very powerful that I noticed very quickly when we started doing that is they started recognizing food, right?
Like a zucchini, you know what a zucchini is if you’ve spent 20 minutes chopping the dang thing, right? And so it really helped us get them familiar with the ingredients. As at first they were helping sous chef. Now it’s
Unless, [00:09:00] there’s like hot oil flying, they’re doing a lot of this stuff.
But it took a while to get there.
So you start with the knives, you start with dull and squishy. You move your way up to sharp and tight. And then at what point are they getting into the ovens? At what point are they playing with skillets? Like how do you decide when it’s time?
Katie Kimball: I think about kids’ brain development as far as like when you think about preschool skills, we’re working on small motor skills, we’re working on social skills. And then basically, once kids know how to read, that’s, it’s a magical time where everything gets better. They can read, they can write full sentences and stuff like that.
And that’s where a lot of parents. Are still stuck at the dump and stir phase. They’re, the parents are measuring things. The kids are dumping and they’re stirring while they bake. And I say, man, if your child can read, that is when it’s time to start teaching them how to read a recipe, getting them to the stove and, being safe with getting them to level up on a stool or a chair and really upping the game. For what you can [00:10:00] expect from them. So it’s typically about seven when we teach kids how to use a stove. What I like to do, ’cause kids sometimes have a fear, right? It’s hot. It seems a little scary, especially if you have a gas stove, you can see the fire. So we like to start with a cold stove or oven and play a game called hot or not. Where you say, if the burner was on, what would be hot? What would be not, and you put a pot on the stove and you say, where can I hold this safely with my bare hand? Where would I need an oven, mit? And just really let the kids explore and ask questions and make predictions and be right and be wrong. And then after, five or 10 minutes with a stove that’s off, they’re like, oh, okay, let’s turn on the burner.
And then we just practice turning the burner on and off a couple times. I like kids to feel really confident in turning it off. And so I’ll say things like, like, how do you turn this off quickly if you feel like maybe something’s boiling over that can be a scary moment. And so like in our house, the sink is to the right of the stove.
So instead of saying, turn the burner to the right, or turn the burner clockwise, not the burner, the knob, [00:11:00] we would say, turn the knob to the sink, just to make sure. Just to make sure that it’s super quick. The kids don’t have to think or process directionality or anything. And again, once, once they’ve done this training, most kids feel really confident.
I. Really capable. The oven is typically a bit later just because things are heavy. So like when are your kids’ muscles at the right point where they can get something like a cookie sheet or a casserole dish in and out of the oven safely. Typically, that’s more toward the 8, 9, 10 as they’re crossing into upper elementary.
But it’s all about. It’s really all about maturity and the kids’ confidence and then the parents’ confidence and then practicing, right? Same thing with the oven. The oven is off. You get those oven mitts on and you have the child practice putting things in and out and keeping them really flat.
’cause that’s, tipping your cookies into the oven is never very fun. So practicing with it cold is revolutionary for kids and it gives them so much confidence.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I love that. I love that. I wish I would’ve known that when we started we had a couple near misses, the relationship with food, [00:12:00] obviously there is one. Let’s start there, right? Because we grew up in a generation where people just didn’t cook and,
lost the lost art, right? And these kids that are coming through your school, your curriculum, how are they making different food choices?
How are they turned on to food and ingredients in ways that their peers aren’t?
Katie Kimball: That’s my favorite part, Pedram, about watching kids. Cook. It’s one of my favorites. It’s one of the intangibles, is that they do begin to build a better relationship with food, partly like you said, because they know where food comes from. And I work with parents of picky eaters too.
And that’s I dunno, that’s my secret way in is parents are very concerned about what their kids eat. Especially if you have a picky eater, that’s a big pain point. And so I can say, I can help you with the picky eaters and ultimately I’m gonna say. Get those picky eaters in the kitchen.
’cause that’s where the superstar action happens. But you gotta start, talking about the relationship with food. The [00:13:00] reason, couple reasons that working in the kitchen really helps build that good relationship with food, both for picky eaters and just for any other kid who’s learning to eat, which they all are, right?
I’d much prefer to call quote, picky eaters. Kids who are just learning to eat right. They’re just learning a little bit more slowly or in a little different path than we expect. Humans don’t like open loops. So when a child is involved in the inception of a dish, closing the loop means tasting it, right? And so for some kids that kind of push to close the loop, so to speak on that recipe, will really encourage them to taste it. And there’s a lot of ownership there when you make the food so that ownership can carry through to the family dinner table as well. But also there’s really cool brain science that, all of us need a certain amount of exposure to a food before we’re going to accept it. Into our mouth, and we hear this advice when our babies are babies or we’re feeding toddlers. All the, well-meaning aunties and grandmas say, oh feed them peas 10 times. Don’t give up after one. Which is it? Okay. But [00:14:00] obviously not all kids are gonna fit in that number 10, because our kids are very unique and they’re very different.
So some of our kids, especially maybe are more stubborn kids or are more highly sensitive kids might need a hundred exposures or 200 exposures, and that can be really daunting. For a parent like Katie, I have to put broccoli on my kid’s plate 200 times. Before they’re going to encounter it with more curiosity and less fear. The good thing is that any exposure counts right in the brain. It’s an inoculation. So if you can take your kids shopping and they pick up that broccoli and they put it in the cart, ding one, they wash it two, they cut it up three, they cook it four, and so you can see that you’re much more quickly going to fill what I call the exposure bucket for your children if they’re involved with that food.
Again, it’s an inoculation too, of the senses. We know that when we’ve been smelling the smells of food, and maybe, your kids might have licked their fingers in the kitchen or something in a way that will dull the taste buds for the table. It’s a bummer for us [00:15:00] adults. That’s why eating food, someone else has cooked taste better because you didn’t have that sort of inoculation period of cooking. But it’s a great gift for the picky eaters because they actually might need their sense of taste to be dulled. That might be one reason why they’re picky, because they’re like a super taster. And things that to us might be bland to them, are like, fire Cheetos. So those two reasons, that ownership, closing the loop and getting that exposure to food is super powerful for building a better relationship, a good, healthy relationship with food.
Dr Pedram Shojai: It’s fascinating what you’re saying with the number of exposures in the grocery store and the, the washing and the cutting and all those being, touch points which count on the scoreboard. It just occurred to me that, we had a, back when I lived in California and gardens could actually, be a thing, right?
I live in the snow now, but we had a pretty robust garden. And I can tell you that every single food item that grew up grew in that garden is on my kids’ menu. And as you were saying that, I was thinking of not just the exposure when you [00:16:00] plant the seed, but the daily exposure of seeing this thing and watering this thing and nurturing this thing.
It, it really closed the loop for my kids. So I’m assuming,
Obviously getting a vegetable garden and getting your hands in the dirt would be a big part of that gestalt if you could do it.
Katie Kimball: absolutely. Yeah. My husband says I should start, kids grow real food as well, but I have such a brown thumb, like I, that’s not gonna be my gift and that’s okay. I. But absolutely gardening and
or even, even getting, making friends with a local farmer and saying, Hey, do you want some child labor for a couple hours on a Saturday in the summer?
And just going to pick and harvest the produce. Oh my goodness. Kids love that. And they absolutely eat more vegetables when they’ve just picked it themselves
Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah. Yeah. we just had an apple picking day and I’ve never seen my kids enjoy apples as much, but they picked them. So that
ownership, I think is a big part of it. And then what about good ingredients versus bad ingredients? Listen most studies show that if you’re gonna be cooking at home.[00:17:00]
You are going to have better kind of supply chain. You’re gonna end up putting better stuff in your meals, right? When you’re touching the ingredients, you get it. So how are we seeing the food choices of the children and consequently probably the whole family change by getting them involved.
I.
Katie Kimball: Yeah, any, you’re right. Anytime you’re cooking from scratch you’re just going to have fewer processed ingredients, right? Fewer preservatives, less junk. I do think. It’s so much easier to build a healthy palette in the mouth when you have a beautiful palette to look at. Like an artist’s palette. You can look up how to spell those people, mess ’em up all the time. But when the, you have lots of colors, it just feels better. It’s like this connection to nature almost. So I do think, and especially that’s why I like to start with the knife skills, right? That when kids are cutting up those foods you’re going to end up with better things.
And also, gosh. It’s so important to me to let parents know that there’s no such thing as kid food. Like big, huge air [00:18:00] quotes, no such thing as kid food, right? Because so many people, in the developed world at least have this conception that food marketers love to promote because will spend more. That there’s kid choices and adult choices. This is ridiculous. Kids can eat the same food we do. Maybe in smaller portions, maybe with a little less spice, right? That’s about it. That’s the beginning and end of quote kid food. So we wanna talk about the mac and cheese and the chicken nuggets and the dinosaur cha shaped chicken nuggets and the french fries that are just so easy.
They’re so easy. For parents to just accidentally slide into short order cooking which is a death knoll for kids having a good relationship with food because that gives the kids way too much power. It gives them way too much similarity and not enough variety. And it’s really, it’s not giving them enough credit, right?
We’ve gotta raise the bar and expect and assume that our kids can have a good relationship with food, feeding them the same old kid foods all the time. [00:19:00] Is definitely not the way to do it. So if, I don’t know if anyone in your audience is doing the short order cooking thing and cooking two meals, I know a lot of people out there do. And that is one habit that I would encourage everyone to cut right away and getting kids in the kitchen. Of course, having that ownership, having that relationship with food is gonna be a really important step for them to accept it and not throw the big fits at the table.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah, we when you go out to the restaurant and it’s almost gamified because the kids’ menu is cheaper, right? But
it’s chicken tenders, a little cheeseburger, whatever it is. It’s just standard American fare. And they’ve, their pallets have grown accustomed to it, and
They ask for it.
And so it’s an ongoing battle with many of the families I know, right? As the
kids menu. But at home, we started doing something back in 2018 when I did the interconnected series by the microbiome where we just put up a colored food chart. I. And had to gamify getting at least two [00:20:00] colors two of different varieties of vegetables and fruits in every meal and started gamifying it.
And just with that, like they figured out what okra was. There was all sorts of variety in vegetables that you don’t get in your standard American diet either. So the ability to make friends with vegetables and understand how to. Ingest them in a way that isn’t gross or yucky or eew broccoli.
How do you deal with that? And then I’d love to see kinda where the fruit is on that, right? Because once you start changing the way they’re eating, the data shows that they’re gonna have better diversity, better immunity. They’re gonna, the autoimmunity goes down, everything gets better.
But how the heck do you get ’em to eat it?
Katie Kimball: When you said fruit, I thought you meant do your kids eat fruit? I
was
Track 1: Oh, oh
Katie Kimball: like,
Track 1: Yeah.
Katie Kimball: I was thinking about No, it’s just produce Pedro.
Okay. Yes. The fruits of our labor.
I gotcha. I gotcha. Um, we know that variety feeds the gut bugs. That’s why you started that with the microbiome series. And so [00:21:00] yes.
When your kids are used to eating those vegetables, when they’re making friends with their food, absolutely. The pallet widens and they tend to eat better. What I think is important for parents, because like we’re talking about cooking, which is a, it’s a task, right? It’s a household task, but we’re also talking about parenting here and parenting is so much more nuanced. It can be so difficult, right? We wanna choose the right words and a slippery slope that a lot of parents can slide down is requiring kids to eat. Okay? So like you said, you have this color wheel, and that’s cool because at least it gives them some choice. And agency, you created some boundaries within which your kids got to make some choices.
They didn’t have to eat X and Y at this meal and A and B at this meal, right? They got to choose their colors. And that’s really important. We’ve got to require, we can only require the work, not the results. So when I think about, my third grader right now is learning the Timestables, and I could say, buddy, you have to know all your timestables by, [00:22:00] this date. That would be ridiculous because you might not make it. But what I can’t, I can’t force that. I can’t control that. What I could control though is I could say, Gabe, every day we’re doing five minutes of times tables. It’s quantifiable. It’s controllable. It’s something that I actually can make sure is done.
And so if we think about food in a similar way, it’s really easy and a lot of our parents did it, so we tend to pair it to what our parents did. It’s really easy to say things like, you have to take three bites of your broccoli ’cause it feels quantifiable, or you need to eat all the food on your plate, or you need to take so many, so much of an amount of different vegetables. The thing is, we can only require the work, not the results. I can require practicing the times tables and the saxophone and the piano, but I can’t require or mandate like a certain level of aptitude, right? So if you think about food, we can require that our children take the carrot [00:23:00] or the okra onto their plate, but we can’t require that they eat it because technically, respectfully, absolutely.
You can’t like make your child’s jaw eat. And make their golet swallow like that. That would be, can you imagine how disrespectful and horrible that would look and feel?
Dr Pedram Shojai: people try, right?
Katie Kimball: I know, there’s really bad
Dr Pedram Shojai: guilty is charged. In the early days it was like, eat your dang broccoli.
And you get to the point where you’re like this is gonna be a test of battle of wills and this isn’t gonna go well. And you realize you can’t. Big dog dogum.
Katie Kimball: Because ultimately we can’t force those results, which means we shouldn’t start, right? If it’s a losing situation, we shouldn’t start. Why all parents want their kids to win and the parents to win. So we’ve gotta create win-win situations. Like I need you to put that carrot on your plate, but you don’t have to eat it. That is the golden phrase that every parent must start using right away. You don’t have to eat it. That’s so important. Again, because kids know like subconsciously that you can’t actually make them eat. And [00:24:00] so if they wanna have a power struggle or if they’re struggling with a certain food, whether it’s the texture or the taste, or they just have had a really bad day and they’re stressed out and stress reduces appetite, right? They know that they can just say no and everybody loses, right? That’s how the power struggles start. So parents require. Your kids come to the family dinner table? Sure. Require the work. Require that they put a bite on their plate, have them serve it. ’cause that’s a great exposure point, right? you can’t require that they eat it.
So that’s the phrase I want parents to just like tuck into your pockets, tuck into your heart. You don’t have to eat that. And for kids who have a little bit of a rough relationship with food, especially the ones that are intertwined with a little bit of a rough relationship with the parent, because of those power struggles at the table, it’s going to take some time for them to believe you. So parents always say, Katie, how long is this gonna take to work?
Katie Kimball: And I’m like first of all, let’s define what work [00:25:00] means. Because an effective picky eating strategy, an effective building, a good relationship with food strategy means that the family has a non-stressful dinner at the table. That’s the results that we want. It doesn’t necessarily mean that your kids are going to start eating more foods or more variety of foods. Yes. Ultimately, that’s the goal. But them having a good relationship with food is a much better goal. If they eat the broccoli when they’re 19 or 29 for the first time. Because you built a good relationship with food and that’s their habit. That’s much better than forcing the broccoli at 13 and having them have a really disordered, funky relationship with food where they don’t know how to listen to their signals of hunger and satiety at 19 and 29. Does that make sense?
Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah, it makes too much sense. It also, there.
katie-kimball_1_12-07-2023_162000: Ouch.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah. Ouch. Because I also, I look first generation immigrant. A lot of us, immigrated, it’s oh, there was a famine in Poland and war World War II and all sorts of old world mentality, which is finish your plate.[00:26:00]
We don’t waste food. Dad worked hard. Mom worked really hard and spent money on that and so there’s all sorts of other family dynamics that get wrapped into that. So how do you deal with that? There’s, I think there’s a lot that happens around that. That one piece of broccoli.
Katie Kimball: It’s so complicated and it’s so painful that there’s like generational pain and generational relationships with food that have to be deconstructed and reconstructed. So what do we do? First we start from no guilt, no shame for what you’ve already done. It happens. Every single one of us had a goal when we had those babies, and we have not, parented exactly the way we thought before we had kids, because parenting is hard. So no guilt, no shame for any of that generational, habitual stuff or anything that you’ve slut slid into. But when we know better, we do better, right? And so we know that forcing our kids to eat, bribing them to eat the three bites of broccoli before you have dessert, all that stuff is not serving their relationship with food.
So it’s gotta be cut. We’ve gotta [00:27:00] say things like, are you interested in trying this? I would like you to put a bite on your plate, but you don’t have to eat it. This is, I have a lot of like toolbox phrases for parents. So what happens to unravel some of that stuff? Yeah. Especially like that poverty mindset or that, that old world mindset of you gotta finish your food. It’s it starts before the food hits the plate. Don’t serve your kids a big plate of
food that they might not finish. So what I would prefer, especially if a kid isn’t sure they’re gonna like something, if a dish is new or if it’s an already known disliked food, you require just what you call a taster bite or an exposure bite. One bite. Because think about it, if your kid has a little bit of a. Scary relationship with food if they’ve been made to eat or bribed to eat or asked to eat in some way. Because sometimes just asking right from a position of authority can feel like a requirement to a child. At the moment that plop of food goes on their plate or that whole entire bowl of soup is served, or whatever the meal is, their brain is saying, you’re gonna have to eat [00:28:00] this. And their stress goes up and their appetite goes down. So it’s all about reducing that visual overwhelm. So you say, all right, honey. We’re having, meatballs tonight. I need some meatball to go on your plate. But you get to choose how big of a taster bite or of an exposure bite you have.
And yes, the child might take a knife and slice the most minuscule bit of meatball and put it on their plate, but they’ve had exposure, right? They’ve fit within the boundaries that you’ve set. They’ve made some choices in those boundaries, and you haven’t forced them to eat. The more that you do that. The more they understand that you mean what you say, because at first if there has been some pressure to eat for whatever reason, the kid’s not really gonna believe you when you say you don’t have to eat that. So you have to say it over and over to rewire those neural pathways and the, and those habits.
And those expectations. Eventually, once kids realize that they have some agency within the boundaries of this is what’s being served. Yes. A bite needs to go on your plate, then it’s like a more of a [00:29:00] playground. It’s like more of a playground than a prison. And so they can play, they can be curious, they can approach food with some interest. Remember a story of Erin, one mom who had a two year-old and just the two year-olds really, they’re like really feeling out their boundaries. That’s their job at age two is where does my parents power end and mind begin? And so she used a phrase that I teach my parents of picky eaters to use, which is, you teach your kids to say it’s not my favorite. Instead of things like EW and yuck and gross, which are really hot button, hot button pushers for parents. And so this little 2-year-old, every night would say, it’s not my favorite about something. And the parents would go, okay. ’cause that’s part of the system is being impassive and unemotional and not allowing your children to know that you’re fully invested in really emotionally, behind what food goes in their mouth.
Because then they will start that power struggle, so the parents would say, okay, that’s not your favorite, that’s fine. But there it is on the plate or on the hydro train. Almost every night the 2-year-old would, would eat multiple bites of the, not the favorite food. It, he just needed that little [00:30:00] sense of control, that little sense of agency to be able to speak his mind and then be given time at the playground of food. And and that’s generally what happens. It takes longer for kids who have had a lot of pressure. It takes longer for kids who have a complex relationship with food, but it still works. And you know what? You don’t have to waste, you don’t have to waste food, right? I don’t like wasting food either.
Even though we live in a world of abundance. I, we’re not living in poverty in my family, but I hate throwing away food. So what happens if the kid gets full instead of saying, you have to clear your plate? Because that’s teaching them to overeat because is just okay. If it’s a couple bites, we throw it away.
If it’s enough to save for the next day. Then we attempt to save it and we have a conversation about how can we listen to, our belly, our feelings in our belly, and choose a good amount next time.
Track 1: Dish,
katie-kimball_1_12-07-2023_162000: So we wanna,
Track 1: time.
Katie Kimball: yeah, we wanna teach our kids to choose appropriate portions every day, their whole life.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So how long have you been at this? Like the, when you started with young kids [00:31:00] I wanna see like how many years of data do you have to see how these young adults maybe at this point are behaving around food?
Katie Kimball: Yeah, I’ve been teaching kids to cook online since 2016, so seven
years now. And working with the picky eating families for three years. Of course, I, my oldest is 18, so we are at that threshold where I’m about to find out if my parenting strategies have worked, quote unquote, right?
Because launching into the world. It’s oh man test launch the ship. Here we go. Is it gonna sink? I hope not.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah. Yeah. If this kid has an eating disorder we got a problem. So that’s the thing is like looking at the adults we are. Helping grow, giving them
agency, giving ’em the ability to understand that they have control and it’s their relationship with their body. And a lot of these things happen around this ritual of eating right that I
think most of us don’t really think about.
Growing up, how, however we grew up and, hustling to put food on the table, you don’t really think that food could [00:32:00] become such an issue until it does. And so these kids, the ones that are given agency, the one that was like the picky eater and never touched broccoli downstream, what are you seeing in how they’re engaging with food?
Katie Kimball: It’s so much better. What does it mean to live with vitality? It means to be able to enjoy life, right? It means to have good habits, to feel healthy, mind, body, and spirit. And food is huge. Food is a way that we socially connect.
Food is a way we serve others, and that’s a huge piece of it too, that when kids are involved with the food, they’re able to serve. Others, even if they’re not eating, that broccoli or those mushrooms, yet they might still be cutting it up for mom and dad. And what a beautiful gift for that family.
Unity. So we see a lot the very first thing that happens when people start to implement better, better routines, better habits, more agency for the kids, less requirement. No requirement to eat. Is the stress at the table goes [00:33:00] down. Families report that they’re conversing, they’re bonding, they’re hearing good things from their kids.
The same thing happens in the kitchen. The connection between parents and kids increases. That’s a great time. To hear about their day. ’cause kids don’t like eye contact. That’s, it makes kids very nervous if you’re like, let’s have a talk that’s horrible.
We wanna be in a car, we wanna be working on food, shoulder to shoulder.
It’s where you hear the good stuff. Family connections, family bonding is massive. And then kids taking ownership of their health. I definitely see it, I’ve got a 15 and an 18-year-old. I definitely see it in my own household that they. Choose to eat salads. They choose to eat their vegetables.
My, oh my gosh, my son, he’ll eat ice cream in large quantities too, but he’ll also eat half a bag of baby carrots with homemade guacamole when he gets home at 10 at night, from a theater event. And I’m like, okay, but it’s carrots
guacamole, so that’s good. So they definitely have sort of [00:34:00] these habits that we eat plant foods. At the beginning of the meal and with the meal, I remember when my two older kids started cooking a meal a week. They made a grain-free homemade pizza every week just to build mastery and make it be easy, but also build that habit of like, how do I get this done beginning to end? And they would make a side dish with pizza, a side vegetable.
I was like, oh, that’s so funny. ’cause most people just eat pizza. But that, to me, that was like, oh, that’s the habit. Like we always have a side vegetable. So you can see that coming out in the teenagers and in the adults and in the choices they make. My son would also when school lunches, kids don’t always like to eat their carrots or their apples or their raisins.
And so in my fridge, all the way through high school would suddenly show up these little packages of carrots and these little packages of apples. ’cause he has these, inclinations of we don’t waste food and we can eat that. We can figure out how to use that. So it’s definitely. It’s definitely a healthier relationship with food. I know I, again, my daughter was like, mom, I’m so mad at you. You taught us to eat all this good. I love [00:35:00] good butter and I love good mayo, and it’s so expensive and I’m not gonna be able to afford this when I’m in college. And I’m like, yeah, it’s a good problem to have.
You know
what I mean? So she can see that, that she’s different than the other kids, but she appreciates both the taste and the nourishment
Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah. Listen, you, you create a quality problem like that, then they have to
solve that problem by being more successful in life, which solves other problems.
Yeah, I don’t think you’ll lose in there. There’s a fair amount of environmental hacking that. Goes into some of this stuff too.
I remember as a kid, all the kids had Twinkies and crap and my mom would cut up fruits and vegetables when we came home. And so you’re hungry. You’re gonna grab at something. You’re gonna grab at whatever’s available versus the chips. Versus the cookies versus whatever. So growing up as a mom, how much of the environment did you manipulate, so to speak, to make sure the good choices were readily available?
Katie Kimball: For sure. And we’re not a perfect household. I will say we don’t we don’t have zero chips, but when we have chips, they’re generally cooked in [00:36:00] coconut oil, or they’re organic or stuff like that. So I. I try to talk to my kids about what’s good and what’s better and what’s gonna help our bodies and what might hurt our bodies, and things like moderation, although I think that’s a dirty word ’cause people explode that everything in moderation kind of becomes, we can eat everything we want all the
time that gets all dangerous. Because the kids know how to make their own food because they can make their own breakfast.
We’re not going to need to rely on things like cereal or Pop-Tarts. Not that Pop-Tarts are in my house anyway, but they, they know how to make their own eggs. They know how to heat high quality sausages and put it with the eggs and make avocado toast with gluten-free bread from Costco or whatever it is.
They know how to make their own snacks. They don’t usually, but it’s, if they can cut up an apple, we do a lot of apples and peanut butter or nut butter here in the fall in Michigan. ’cause we’ll buy like 200 pounds of
apples. Like you said what’s in the environment is what you get.
I also personally have a rule, and this comes from, the days where I really needed to watch my budget. I still feel like it’s prudent and good stewardship [00:37:00] to watch my budget if something’s in a single serve package that is only to be eaten outside the house. And so that’s just. Part of our habit here in the Kimball House that if it’s single serve, it’s only for to go.
And so they know they’re having their afterschool snack, that there’s no, bars or Paley Valley meat sticks. Like those are just for on the go. So I think that does help. And that’s a, an important strategy for a lot of parents who are struggling. With kids who are maybe overs, snacking or wandering into the pantry.
A lot of my homeschooling families say, Katie, what do I do? Like my kids we’re home all day. They just wander into the pantry and they serve themselves and they eat and they grab the pretzels and the chips and the muffins and whatever. I said first of all, you’re still the parent. You can say things like, the kitchen is closed. So I think it’s really important to have dedicated snack times. Also, again, to teach our kids that this is how our bodies work. We have times we eat, we have times we digest. We can’t be eating and snacking all day long. Those are the boundaries that parents need to set. That also can really help picky eating too, [00:38:00] because kids know kids can build an appetite and they know what hunger feels like. That’s a healthy feeling to be able to say, oh I’m hungry. This means I need food. What kind of food do I need? Oh, and we talk about fat and protein and satisfying foods and what will fill you up till the next meal versus what’ll be like. Too quick of energy that it’s burned off and you’re hangry by the next meal.
So that’s not a four-year-old conversation. That’s maybe a 9, 10, 11, 12-year-old conversation. But that’s how we build ownership, right? Is talking about high satiety snacks and it goes the opposite too. Sometimes my little guy will forget to eat a snack and it’s 5:00 PM I’m like, oh no. This is way too close to dinner. But he’s also gonna go over the edge and be hangry if we don’t give him anything. So I’ll say, okay. Your past snack time, I’m gonna bend the rule, but you need to eat something that won’t fill you up. So maybe that’s where you have just the apple or maybe just, an orange or something that’s really light and doesn’t have a lot of fat and protein. So knowing some of that stuff is empowering. I. [00:39:00] For kids and teaching kids to listen to their bodies. Again, something that we did not do. We were not taught to listen to our bodies. It can you imagine like how many more food sensitivities would’ve been discovered in today’s adults if we were taught to listen to our bodies as kids?
So that’s a great gift that parents can give too, is okay, like you, you’re. Whatever you ate, like how does it make you feel in your tummy? How does it make you think in your brain? And just help kids draw that connection between what we eat and how we feel.
Dr Pedram Shojai: There’s a number of people listening to this right now that are like, man, my kid’s 16 already.
Too little late. Wish I would’ve listened to this lady a decade ago. So what do you say to someone who feels like, the train’s already pulled out of the station for their kids. I’m assuming it’s somewhere along the lines of it’s never too late, but I want to hear how you have that conversation with these folks.
I.
Katie Kimball: You stole my line. It’s never too late. For me, I just, I talk about my own husband because he [00:40:00] grew up in a super processed food household and, liked what he liked. He came into our marriage. He said, I don’t like sweet potatoes. I don’t like cucumbers. I don’t like asparagus. He had a pretty long list of plant foods that he did not like in air quotes and. In his thirties has learned to love sweet potatoes. He’s learned to love asparagus cooking and bacon grease. People come on, and he still will not do cucumbers, but my kids have a ball getting him to eat a cucumber once or twice a year. And just watching his like, ridiculous reaction about how much he dislikes it we’re like, it’s cucumbers.
They taste like nothing. They taste like water. So your palate is not set. Never even at 80 or 90, we can still learn to like new foods. So for a 16-year-old, absolutely it’s not too late. Our habits are not set right. So we’ve gotta apply a growth mindset and at 16 it’s just a different entry point, right?
You might have less [00:41:00] control over what the 16-year-old is eating, but you think what does the 16-year-old love to do? Maybe it’s drama, maybe it’s band, maybe it’s soccer or jiujitsu, right? Maybe it’s academics. And so you use, hopefully this is a logically brained kid with the brain cells that they have developed so far.
We know their brains aren’t fully developed by 16 but, you can start to talk about like, how food fuels your activities, and what kinds of macronutrients, what kinds of micronutrients you’re going to need to be that best singer, to be that best soccer player and let them experiment. Themselves, right? What happens when you carb load? What happens when you eat a really high protein meal and how do you feel? And again, it’s really helping them take ownership of your health. It’s very tricky with teenagers. They don’t wanna listen to us in any way, shape, or form. But for those who do want to perform their best, that’s a nice entry point. And for others, some kids are just really cheap. You can hope you have a cheap teenager. ’cause then they won’t wanna go waste their money on junk food. [00:42:00] You can change the environment still if you don’t buy it, hopefully they don’t eat it. Some teams will go buy their own junk food and again, it’s at that point the apron strings are pretty long. They’ve got some of their own responsibilities. They got their own cash. They might have car keys that you have to teach about nutrition and taking ownership of their health, and it might not work. It might feel like you, you’re talking to a wall, you might see no results as teens, but trust that you’re building some roots. If you’re doing it in a really respectful way and hopefully in their twenties, they’ll begin to come around.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I really appreciate that. So my last question is about. summitiers in the folks that get a lot of health information from, air quotes experts, and a lot of the. A lot of the suggestions that I hear out there, everyone is everyone’s pitching for a grand slam, right? What you really need is this [00:43:00] mangosteen berry that is only found on one endangered bird that poops it out once a year and it’s $12,000 an ounce.
But this is gonna change your stars, and this is what brings help. Versus just getting more carrots or broccoli every day and getting those base hits. And so would love to get your perspective on the long game and how to eat for vitality versus the hyperbole of the, the ever, ever changing super food trends that.
Keep making it into all the summits and all the podcasts and they, I think they distort the message. So I’ll step out of the way of that ’cause I’ve got opinions. Would love to hear yours.
Katie Kimball: I like that you call it the long game. That’s pretty much what I remind parents is that we don’t want a parent for today. We don’t wanna parent for this age, this grade that our child is in, but we’ve gotta look at the long game. I. So what does that mean for kids? It means they need a good, healthy relationship with food.
That they’re able to listen to their [00:44:00] body’s cues of hunger and satiety, and that they’re not dictated by, rules, like we need to clean our plates. That they understand that food grows in the ground. That it’s, that it’s a gift to us through our hardworking farmers. And that we can take that and have the tools right to cut it up, to cook it, to process it at home, and to make it taste really good. There’s nothing, I don’t think there’s any more powerful gift we can give our kids than a healthy relationship with food. The knowledge that food does impact how you feel and a sense of agency over our health, right? Like I think that’s something that has changed for me.
Like when I was a kid, if you get sick. My mom would gimme Kool-Aid and maybe we’d go to the doctor. But it was like the doctor held the keys to making us feel better. And I think my kids like, they absolutely can see that. I feel like I hold the keys, that their body holds the keys to making them feel better. And what amazing mindset, to go into adulthood with that. If [00:45:00] something goes wrong, I can change the way I eat. I can right examine the way I eat and see if it’s something I’m putting in my mouth that’s making me feel cruddy. I can turn to herbs and homeopathy and like all these things, I’m leaving the kitchen here.
But it’s all related. It’s all realizing that your body is an amazing being. That you are an amazing being and there’s so much complexity that we can’t control it, but we can figure out what the inputs are. They can make the outputs better. They can make us live with vitality always. We can always be changing.
We’re not a fixed entity.
Dr Pedram Shojai: It’s funny you say that. My grandpa. Made it to, I think one month short of 1 0 5 and Covid
got him right in the nursing home.
And he was, since I, my earlier memories of him, there were certain foods where he’d be like, nah, that doesn’t sit well with me. And he was so self-aware of what foods just didn’t work with his body.
Dude made it, into triple digits. So there’s something to be said for [00:46:00] becoming, that gnosis of understanding your relationship with different foods as well. And maybe the sulfur and the broccoli isn’t ever gonna turn that corner for you, but at least you tried.
Katie Kimball: Yeah, that totally makes sense. It’s definitely what’s funny is that our relationship with food is not always about the food, it’s about how our body. Reacts with it, whether, whether that helps our senses, whether it helps our digestion or, hurts us. So it’s, yeah.
It’s not about the one berry that’s for a dog unsure. It’s about figuring out whi which berries are healthy for you. Which berries make you feel good,
Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah. Yeah. And which one? You could afford to consistently buy.
You don’t wanna bank up all your money for one basket of berries, you’re gonna have to eat next week too, right?
So people listening to this who are like, oh, heck yeah, I need some of that in my life. How can they find your courses?
How can they engage in further exploration in this, kitchen, the wonderment that you’re bringing to the [00:47:00] kitchen?
Katie Kimball: Yeah, I love to share. We’re at kids cook real food.com and there’s always a free preview. Usually it’s our knife skills class. ’cause our members love it. The kids love it. For ages two to teen and run Instagram is where you see a little bit of our real life, a little bit of my actual children cooking the kitchen.
But yeah, kids cook real food.com. There’s always free resources there.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Excellent, katie, you’re wonderful. Thank you so much for holding the torch on this. And I think that. A generation from now, there’ll be so much of an explosion from the work that you’ve done right in the last decade. And hopefully this changes the way we all engage with food with our children.
And we can turn, literally I see us turning chronic health, chronic disease around within a couple generations by taking the kitchen back and you’re a big part of that solution. So I really take my hat off to you.
Katie Kimball: Oh, that would make my heart happy if we could see. See that pendulum come back from the processed food
world. Thanks,
Pedram.
Dr Pedram Shojai: we’re doing. Thank you.
Well there, you have it. [00:48:00] Folks. Hope you enjoyed that. I love Katie. I love the work that she’s doing. Highly recommend you check out the courses that she is offering. Just go to our website. And, , learn how to do food differently. You’re either going to eat right. Feel good. Function correctly in your human body, or you’re going to be dealing with inflammation and toxicity and putting yourself on drugs and weight loss, drugs, and headache, drugs, and all the other crap. Look. We understand we’ve been duped now. You could get mad about it, but what are you going to do about it?
It all starts with how you cook. It all starts with how you deal with food in your house, with your children. In your kitchen. I hope this inspired you to do the right work, to go to the grocery store, to pick the stuff out of the right aisles and get the crap out of your home. I promise you, you start doing this, the lights start coming on. I’ll see in the next show.
Thanks for watching.www.theurbanmonk.com