How To Get Your Family To WANT To Stop Eating Junk

April: Hello everybody, it’s April Perry and Jonathan Bailor, with another SANEShow. Today we’re going to talk about how to help a spouse who is tired of eating vegetables, and I would also add any other family members who are also tired of eating vegetables. Now Jonathan, I don’t know if you have ever experienced this. Have you had any situations where people around you have not wanted vegetables?

Jonathan: Not a huge number, I just live with my wife, and she fortunately has – let’s be very clear, she wasn’t 100% sane out of the gate, she thought I was a little bit crazy. But she saw what it was doing for me back in the day, this is many years ago now, and then she tried it herself. As she slowly started to go sane she started to see the results as well, then it just became a virtuous cycle. It’s just her and I, so not too many adverse events.

April: It’s awesome and I think what’s exciting is as we’re having this conversation today, the goal is to help to make the relationships in the home continue to work well as you’re making changes in your diet. Because food is really central to the success of a family. It’s very central to the time you spend together, often you’re surrounding the dinner table, you’re eating together, you’re preparing food together, and you’re enjoying food together. Probably a whole lot of your memories growing up are surrounding the foods that your parents prepared, or the ice cream cone you’d buy as you went out to the beach to the ice cream store, things like that.

So today I’m actually going to be addressing a question received from Stephanie. She is one of our listeners and here’s what she said: “I am frustrated with the recent posts on health and the calorie myth. I love learning about health and I try to implement things I learn into my life, but find I go through ups and downs, and can never make it a lifestyle change. My husband and three kids couldn’t care less even if I share information I learn about being healthy, and they refuse to change.” And she said, “I commend April and her daughter for the lifestyle change. It’s easier said than done. This has been a challenge in my home for years and I cannot force anyone to change. How do I make it work for everyone and how do I stick with it when no one cares about improving their health?”

Oh this question just resonated so much with me and I just couldn’t wait to talk about it with you. Any initial thoughts Jonathan?

Jonathan: I’m going to have to defer to you for a lot of this stuff April, but my high level thing is SANE and my personality in general has always been one of – and I actually think this is pretty common – my father does drug addiction counseling. That’s his job. So heroin, cocaine, the bad stuff. He counsels people who want help but that’s the key distinction, right? You cannot – nobody who is addicted to anything that doesn’t think they have a problem and doesn’t want to stop, they won’t. Unless you lock them up and tie their hands up, they will continue to use. So the only thing I’ll add right out the gate is my mission – our mission, and I think anyone involved in SANE’s mission should be: To those who want to experience better health, better energy, better mental clarity, better performance, we have an answer for you. But if you’re cool with where you’re at, or you don’t care, you can come see us when you do. That’s always been my position.

April: I love that. That’s really why the message of SANE has resonated so well with me and why I’m so excited to share it with other people. Because you’re able to say what you’re going to put into this is based on your goals and we’re not here to shove vegetables down anyone’s throat. That’s not the goal, right? So one of the main things that I want to start out with is just emphasizing that if you are feeling this way, if you’re feeling really, really frustrated, you are not alone. This is something that is super common. In fact my daughter forwarded me a link to this commercial she found. It was for a bar, I won’t say what the bar is, but it’s not SANE. They were trying to say that the bar had a lot of fiber in it so it was good to eat, but really it was full of a lot of sugar and a lot of other stuff that you wouldn’t really like. But they were trying to pitch it as, “This is perfect for that husband whose fridge is full of green smoothies and whose wife is just serving vegetables all the time.” It was this hilarious commercial of this husband running around the house trying to find something to eat, opening the fridge and only seeing vegetables and feeling so upset. We showed it to my husband and he’s like, “I feel for the man! I know exactly how that feels to go to my fridge and not see anything that’s awesome.”

So we’re working on that at our house, I will say. But there have been a few things that have been helpful. We’re just going to go through them one at a time, these three ideas that I’ve put together and Jonathan, would love to hear your ideas on this as well. I know you’ve had a lot of experience working with thousands and thousands of people all over the world, so I’m sure you have more to offer to help build this conversation.

The first thing is being really flexible with your expectations, because if you think that the moment that you read the calorie myth or the moment that you start going SANE, that your whole family is going to say, “Oh my goodness! Mother thank you so much for helping us learn how important vegetables are! We didn’t know and now we’re so excited. What vegetables can I take for lunch?” I mean no one is going to say that. So you’ve got to be flexible knowing that this may just be you for a while, and it may take some time to acclimate your children and spouse. But you have to go into it thinking that everyone’s probably not going to be on the same page. Then you may be pleasantly surprised. So that’s my first idea. Any other thoughts there Jonathan?

Jonathan: I love that idea April. I think that as we get more into this, but vegetables are always such a wonderful thing to highlight because it’s almost an aphorism in our culture. It’s like, “Mom said eat your vegetables”, “Mom was right”. It’s always been this battle of mother versus child to get you to eat the vegetables. But one thing we know now, as we’ve talked about in previous episodes, we’re just here to tell you what modern research has proven and people all around the world are experiencing first hand.

Part of the reason that our moms struggled with getting us to eat vegetables is they were raised in the generation that said that fat is really bad for you and sugar isn’t bad for you. So the only way you could eat vegetables was eating raw vegetables. For most kids and most adults, raw vegetables are pretty disgusting. But let’s take a step back. When we think southern cooking, generally you don’t think about healthy foods. But when you think about southern cooking and you think about collard greens and greens in general, there’s a huge amount of vegetables that are used in southern cooking. But the way they’re prepared is they’re prepared with healthy, natural fats and they’re delicious. No one has to be like, “Oh I don’t want to eat these bacon sautéed collared greens.” They’re delicious.

So the thing that’s neat, the opportunity that we have, is as we start to learn and we can talk more about this on SANESolution.com, we can talk about it more on podcasts, but as we start to learn how vegetables, when combined with proper seasoning and proper healthy fats tastes delicious, people like to eat delicious things. There’s not, “Vegetables are gross.” So chicken is gross. If you serve chicken burnt or raw it’s disgusting and no one will – if you take soda and take all the fizz out of it, boil it, and ask someone to drink it, it’s disgusting. So no one will want to drink it. People like to eat delicious stuff. We just need to find a way to make it delicious and fortunately we can help with that. Anyway, that’s all I have to add to the vegetables point.

April: That’s great and that’s going to take some time to learn. So we just had a little story. Jonathan came to our home, he and Angela came and visited me and my family. I challenged him to make some kale for my kids to eat. So he did. He sautéed it with bacon and my kids love it. Do you know that when I make it now Jonathan that my daughter will come home from school, if there’s leftover kale and bacon in the fridge she heats it up and eats it as her afterschool snack? My thirteen-year-old daughter. And I’m watching her eating kale and thinking, “What on earth?” This would never have happened before.

But it’s this process of learning and growing. So I think if you’re expectations are baby steps, let’s just start out with a few more vegetables, let’s try some new recipes. I just made this new pancake recipe with coconut flower the other day. Three people in my family will eat it, including me. The other ones won’t. That’s okay, it’s a new recipe, and we’ll just keep trying. I think when you have that idea that we’re just going to keep trying, it’s pretty much like parenthood. I can’t guaranteed that it’s just going to be awesome the first month. I mean I cried for most of the first month of motherhood because my baby had colic and wouldn’t stop crying. So that was not fun. But as I continued to try, continued to nurture my child, things obviously got better. So number one is just your expectations.

Number two is have a heart to heart with your family and clearly explain what you’re doing and help explain your expectations. So I sat down with my husband, I sat down with my kids. I actually said, “Okay, here’s how I’m going to be eating. I’m really excited about this. I feel better, I feel healthier. Here’s what I’m going to be doing. I don’t expect you to eat just like me, but I am going to say that I’m not going to be buying a bunch of junk food anymore. So that’s just not going to be happening. So you can go online and you can find any healthy stuff you want to make and I will buy you the ingredients.” I kind of set things up for them and helped them understand what I was going to do. Yes you can still go trick-or-treating. Yes if there’s a birthday party you can have a piece of cake. I set up my expectations really clearly for them. That alone, just having a heart to heart conversation, understanding where they’re coming from, and explaining where you’re coming from was a great way for us to at least be on the same page on this journey together.

Jonathan: Having that heart to heart talk, I think it would be worth taking a step back. In any family life and in any relationship there’s going to be things that are going well and things that are a little bit more of a struggle. What you can do is maybe look at some of the things that are going well. When Angela and I had a chance to visit you April, there was a lot of things that your family does automatically that I found hard to believe. Like I just didn’t even understand how you could do that. There’s a lot of things that your family does that are positive that I don’t even know how you do that.

Why do I bring this up? Because anyone who’s in any relationship or any kind of family where there’s something that works. So if your family does something that not every other family does, and you’ve done that, are there ways you can learn from that? Like how did you make that happen? What did you do to make that happen? And can you learn from that experience and tie that experience back to SANE eating? One thing I can promise you is I bet the way you made that work wasn’t by white knuckling it and demanding that everyone comply right out of the gate. There was some other approach. So maybe that would be helpful.

April: Yeah, and I think that you’re giving the exact advice that I really appreciate and that’s worked for us in so many other areas. When you are able to dissect your own life and your own success that’s actually a really powerful technique to have success in other areas of your life. I feel like we’ve been very blessed with great kids who generally get along, they’re really obedient. But sometimes I’ll go into another home and I’ll see kids who aren’t being obedient to their parents, or aren’t being respectful, and I’ll watch the things that the parents are doing. I’ll think oh, I didn’t even know what was helping this situation well in our family.

I’ve also had the converse happen where I go to a friend’s house and her kids are behaving ten times better than my kids. I’m like wait, what on earth are you doing? So I’ll watch what she does. That’s really how I learned to be a mom is I had this little baby all day, nowhere to go and I was home full-time. I found a full moms in my area who I admired and wanted to be like them. I called them on the phone and I said, “Can I come over to your house and just kind of hang out at your house and just talk and watch what you’re doing with your kids? I can even be helpful, I can play with your kids, or I can help do dishes or whatever.” And they’re like, “Sure, come on over.” So there were several moms that I think really fondly back on those days, where I just went back to their homes and I would just observe them. I would watch how they talked to their kids. I’d watch how they set the standards. I’d watch how they organized their house and worked together. As I was able to dissect that, then I was able to say okay, this is what I want to be more of.

It was even really helpful when you and Angela came to visit and you were showing us how you eat, how you order at restaurants, and what you’re doing on a daily basis. And I’m like ok, alright, I can do this now. Sometimes you just have to see it so you can understand what it is you’re not doing or what you want to do more of. I would also add that your family, as they’re watching you and seeing what’s making you successful, happy and strong, then they will want to replicate that as well.

Jonathan: I really, really like that April. I think that modeling – one thing I can tell you definitively from an eating perspective is there are people, that’s actually how I closed the Calorie Myth book. When you think about it, it challenges. A lot of people when they hear about SANE Eating their initial reaction is, “Well that’s just not possible. Okay, next. That’s crazy.” There’s an undeniable counterpoint to that, which is you look at the people who are vegetarian and vegan and live in the United States. You look at people who are kosher or halal, or follow the Word of Wisdom very strictly in the United States. There are plenty of people. There are tens of millions of people who their entire family does not eat the way the standard American eats. So it’s possible to do it. Now what can we learn from those families is kind of what you’re saying and I think that’s a great example.

April: Yeah, I love that. Just one third suggestion I have is start with something like making modular meals. This is something that’s so easy. You don’t want to say, “Okay, I’m eating SANE, so here’s my food on the left side of the fridge, with a piece of tape going down the middle. No one touch my food. Here’s all your food.” You guys are just eating junk and I’m eating good food. Then you’re just trying to polarize.

My bedroom growing up, my sister and I, she’s eighteen months older than I am and we shared a bedroom for about six months. That was pretty much all we could take. I actually had masking tape down the middle of our bedroom because I wanted my side clean and her side just had junk all over it. We still laugh about it now because she just does it, it’s not her thing. It was very divisive. You walk in the room and here’s April’s side and there’s Page’s side. It was pretty funny. So we ended up getting our own rooms and that worked fine. But as a family, you really can’t do that to your fridge and you don’t want to do that at dinner time either because then it not only takes more time to prepare two different meals, but your family’s going to feel like, “Okay, so you care about yourself but you don’t care about us. But you’re too good to eat what we’re eating.” All that kind of stuff you don’t want to get into.

What I suggest is you make modular meals. You make mostly SANE meals, where you’re going to eat the SANE part. Then if your family wants some other things on the side, or something for dessert, and they have some things that they want, let them help plan the meals. But plan it so you can actually all sit down and eat together and find common ground. I mean mostly you can have a vegetable at dinner that everybody will eat, or at least learn to eat, and I’ll have a variety. Then you can usually have some sort of nutrient dense protein that everybody will eat. And whole food fats, you just kind of put it out there. Then the extra stuff that they might want to add in, okay that’s fine. You won’t be eating it but you’re not looking down at them for eating it. But you’re making sure you’re using food as a way to unify your family. Then keep studying, keep learning, keep coming up with new recipes because pretty soon you’re going to make some awesome meals and your whole family’s going to love it and they’re 100% SANE. You’re going to go to bed that night a little giddy because you just ate SANE with your whole family and they didn’t even know it. That makes it even better.

Jonathan: I think that’s such a key April. One of my favorite videos we’ve ever done on the SANE solution site is how to stay sane at fast food restaurants because most people say it’s impossible. One of my favorite fast food, I think it’s called fast casual, it’s a new genera, is Chipotle. So Chipotle is a perfect example of how to do modular meals. You can go to Chipotle and you can get a burrito, wrap it up in the big flour tortilla, you can add a bunch of rice to it, you could put a bunch of cheese on it, and do a bunch of other stuff. Or you can get a burrito salad. Everyone can eat there and everyone can have their thing, but it’s what components am I going to have. Or just even we talk about if you had to eat at a McDonald’s or a burger joint. Would it be possible to just eat the hamburger without the bun and to get a side salad? It’s the same kind of thing what you’re talking about where we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of SANE certified recipes. There’s no shortage of them. So unless you’re literally eating like a box of donuts for dinner, there’s a way – unless it’s a pasta based dish, like unless it’s spaghetti, there’s a way to just componentize it like you said, and people can pick the saner or less sane components to their heart’s content.

April: I think it’s fun you brought up pasta because actually we had some pasta last night and I had my zucchini noodles right there on the side. We did some turkey meatballs that went on it and it was great. Some of the kids are actually starting to try the zucchini noodles which is really exciting. So I think exactly what you’re saying, it’s so possible and it’s so fun in the process to get to learn together. But I think a lot of it is your attitude. Like if I go into it angry, if I roll my eyes every time someone wants to eat a Snickers, or something like that, or if I’m continually getting upset with my family, that’s just going to create a mood in the home that’s going to make me want to give up too. Because I don’t want to live like that. I don’t want to feel like I’m the militant food police officer, or something, has to go around and monitor what everyone’s putting in their mouths. That’s stressful. But if I’m just like, “Hey guys, now we’re going to watch this video and study what diabetes actually is, and let’s show you how awesome vegetables are. Let’s talk about how many grams of sugar. Let’s talk about how to read labels.” I mean I’m teaching my kids skills that they’re going to use their whole lives. So I think that’s really helpful, really easy.

So what we would suggest as your next action, because we always close the show a next action, something you can do today, is to assess the greatest pain point for you right now. So thinking about your day, when do you feel the most stress with your family? Is it dinner time? Is it packing lunches in the morning? Is it breakfast? Is it when you’re going out for fast food? Is it date night, like when you’re going to a restaurant? When are you feeling stressed out? Then start zeroing in on what could I do to research more breakfast options that are SANE? What could I do to look at how we can make lunches in a really simple way? What could I do to find more modular meals for our dinners? You just want to take the greatest pain point and then simply and figure out what’s a solution? What could I do to make this better? You’re a smart person. You’ve overcome challenges in so many other areas of your life already. Now all you need to do is figure out how you’re going to overcome the challenges here, because it’s worth doing and it’s going to help and strengthen your whole family.

Jonathan: I love that next action April. Can I give a bonus next action that you’ve inspired out of me?

April: Yes.

Jonathan: But I love what you said about you’re a smart capable person, because I think sometimes we all don’t give ourselves enough credit. Like you’re really smart. You’ve done things that are way, way more complicated than this. One tool I found to be very helpful that I think you’ll find helpful as well is imagine almost that every time you’ve got to give some food to your family, it’s almost like you’re your own public relations agency. Let me give you an example of how you want to spin messages in a positive, sane light. So the action item is to pretend you have a SANE PR agency in your head. Let me give you some concrete examples of that.

So we talked about spaghetti. If you wanted to make SANE spaghetti you would use zucchini noodles, zoodles as April referred to, or spaghetti squash is one of my favorites. What I would recommend like the SANE PR agency would recommend that you do not go to the dinner table and say, “Hey, instead of spaghetti guys, we’re going to eat this. Ha! And you’re going to like it.” Instead, you would just say, “Hey, I made this new dish and it’s got zucchini noodles – or rather it’s spaghetti squash”, you don’t present it as – or for breakfast. If you’d made scrambled eggs, you probably naturally don’t say, “Hey, I’m going to give you scrambled eggs and I’m never going to give you pop tarts again, just so you know.” The scrambled eggs will be perceived very differently. But if you just made scrambled eggs, folks would be like, “Oh, I like scrambled eggs. They’re good.” So just have that little PR agency in your brain, like how can I present this not in a way of here’s what I’m taking away from your, or here’s what’s never going to happen again, versus here’s a positive, new, cool thing that we’re going to try.

April: I love that. That has worked so well in our family lately. When I talk to my kids about what I made, like I made those coconut flour pancakes the other day. I was like, “Hey guys, look what I just made! I’m so excited about these, I can’t wait to eat them, I think they taste so good! Do you want to try them?” Some of the kids are like, “Uh Mom, these really don’t taste very good” they’re kind of making fun of me. But I’m so excited about it that they kind of laugh at me. It’s almost like oh yeah, there goes mom. But it’s in a really loving way.

Just a little evidence of that I saw my seven-year-old son, Spencer, was talking to me one time while we were sitting on the couch snuggling. He said, “Hey Mom, when I grow up, I want to find a house that’s really, really close to you. I’m just going to buy the house that’s closest so I can live there with my family. And I’m going to come over and I will bring you vegetables.” I was like look at this! My little guy knows my love language is give me vegetables.

We went camping and we took a ton of vegetables in the cooler. You and I had recorded a whole SANE camping with Angela on how to camp sanely. So we had a cooler totally full of vegetables. It was like seven o’clock in the morning, I got up and unzipped the tent and the whole family was already up, my husband let me sleep in. He’s got all the kids out there around the campfire, and he is standing at the picnic table with a cutting board and a knife, chopping red peppers for me. I took a picture of him, I’m like he loves me! He loves me! He’s chopping vegetables on a campout because he knows how much that matters to me. Now is he eating a lot of those vegetables? He eats some, but he’s not passionate about them. But it was the sweetest thing in the world to see how my husband and my children are now coming together.

Even one more quick story, I know we want to finish up. But one more quick story is that my daughter and I, we both eat very, very sanely and we were on a road trip with the family. We stopped off to get dinner and before we went and chose our restaurant, Eric my husband said, “So is there something SANE you can eat there? Is this restaurant okay for you? Or do you want to go to a different restaurant?” It was just so sweet that he was thinking about us and considering what we wanted and our needs. I just think that that starts to happen, as you, the one who wants to be SANE, as you are respectful and loving to your family and doing everything you can to serve them, they reciprocate. They want to do the same thing for you and take care of you. When you show them how much that means to you. When you thank them and create this environment of gratitude and love in your home, then it doesn’t have to be about being frustrated and angry. It’s all about creating beautiful memories that are around food that will continually get healthier over time.

Jonathan: Boom! There is no better way to close the show than that! I love it! Everybody that was April Perry and you just need to play that back a couple times. I am Jonathan Bailor and we hope you enjoyed today’s show. We always love chatting with you. Remember, stay SANE.