My children have been enjoying quite a bit of cooked food for a few weeks now. It seemed like the more they ate the more they were getting distracted from raw food and I was wondering what to do. Then I thought of Kate. Kate Magic Wood of Raw Living has three home educated raw boys. She has been raw for years and has brought her boys up on raw food. Her eldest was very raw resistant in the early days apparently. Well, Kate does coaching, so I thought I'd ask her all about raw kids and pick her brains about ways to manage raw food in children's diets. She had some wonderful insights. Not just about feeding the children, but about children in general.
Having spoken to Kate I have felt a lot of pressure has been taken off me. I don't feel guilty about it if the children eat a lot of cooked food now. My focus is on getting them to eat as much nutrient rich vegan food as possible, cooked or raw. I have also bought a few things that I can sprinkle on their food to add to it's nutritional content.
From a management point of view I am starting to bargain more with the kids. If they have some barley grass powder in their fruit smoothie they can have some rice at lunch time. Then I put nutritional yeast flakes on the rice, but they like nutritional yeast flakes, so I don't need to bargain about that. The main thing is that they are eating a lot of vegan food, cooked or raw. Eliminating the bad stuff is the main thing. If they feel like they are getting something of what they want, they are less likely to feel deprived and so there is less pressure on me to buy rubbish for them when I go shopping.
The other thing I learned from Kate is that if you have had a few pregnancies and have breastfed a lot, there is a good chance you may be DHA and vitamin D deficient, as these tend to be taken out of mum and given to the baby. As I've had four kids, there is a possibility the younger ones may also be deficient too, as my levels have become depleted. I've had a tendency to depression for a long time, which is apparently a symptom of this. Well I started taking two capsules of DHA a day, and within 2 days I started to feel completely different. I feel much more positive in myself. Apparently your brain is made of DHA (which is an essential fat). Maybe I've had a shrinking brain for years. No smart comments from my husband please.
