Healthy Brain Connections, Brain Boosting Foods, and Tricks for Kids
Food affects the brain the most, for better or worse. Choosing foods that support optimal brain health is key to overall wellness. It will help your brain grow healthy cells, make healthy connections and operate calmly and efficiently. As a mom, I truly want the best for my kids. I want them to be able to focus on schoolwork, grow a healthy brain, and feel good overall. However, we all know it’s not always that simple, right?
Healthy connections are how the brain makes sense of information, creates memory and signals muscles to react and move. Four factors influence brain health. Today we are keeping it stricktly to nutrtion chat.
Your brain needs:
5 Brain-Boosting Foods:
Starting the day with a good breakfast was actually true just like mom said! It jumpstarts the gut, jumpstarts the brain, and keeps you lean! Eating a "brainy breakfast" includes both green and yellow light foods with the right balance of complex carbohydrates and proteins to both stimulate and relax the brain for optimal performance. As a health coach, I really love using traffic light eating concepts for not only teaching my clients but my own family in order to help us pay more attention to how we are fueling our body. Green light foods are you “go” foods. Your fruits and veggies. You need them every day. Yellow Light foods are ones that you may need every day but not as much and you want to use caution. Protein perks up the brain and, because the body takes longer to digest protein than carbs, it helps you stay comfortably full for a longer period. A high-fiber breakfast of slow-release carbs prevents midmorning crashes and sugar cravings.
When reading a label for breakfast cereals, look for:
Dining out with kids? Noticed that the "kids menu" tends to be the same stuff across the board and is very bland in color? 3 tricks:
Being a parent is hard enough as it is that worrying about doing everything right seems insurmountable and overwhelming at times. Here’s the thing, I’m not asking you to be perfect. I’ve learned to not expect my own self to be perfect. If we were, we sure wouldn’t be living here on earth anymore. There are things we will undoubtably get wrong. Our kids will grow up and likely learn how to do some things better than what we did.
As the saying goes, we don’t know what we don’t know. But once we DO know better, it means nothing if we never actually DO better. Choosing to care for our family the best way possible doesn’t mean you have it all together and do it all right the first time. It doesn’t have to mean you have to go broke trying to force your kid to eat his vegetables. I don’t think healthy living should be difficult, complicated, or expensive. I do think we have to decide what is a priority.
You don’t go into church and leave trash laying about, tracking in mud, sitting on the podium, and destroying it, right? We treat it with respect. How much more should we treat our bodies? Maybe today you aren’t sure where to start. I hope you’ll take the suggestions I’ve mentioned here and bring a few to your table.
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Email: courtney@imperfectlypollyanna.com
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Email me: courtney@imperfectlypollyanna.com
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