27: How To Get Your Family On Board With Anti-Inflammatory Eating

Tired of the dinnertime struggle? Juggling perimenopause, family, and healthy eating can feel like a constant battle. This week on The Family Fork, we're tackling a common challenge: how to get your family on board with anti-inflammatory eating, without the drama.

We'll explore a unique approach – think of it as "project managing" your family's meals! Discover practical strategies to:

• Gain family buy-in: Learn how to involve your family in the decision-making process to ensure everyone feels heard and respected.
• Navigate the challenges: We'll discuss how to address common roadblocks, like picky eaters and busy schedules, to keep your healthy eating goals on track.
• Create a sustainable system: Discover simple yet effective strategies to make healthy eating a sustainable part of your family's lifestyle.

Join me as we explore these strategies and more. You'll gain valuable insights and actionable tips to make mealtimes more enjoyable for the whole family.

Listen now and get ready to transform your dinner table!

Links mentioned and ways to get in touch:

• Listen to Ep. 24 for easy and fun snack ideas
• Start your plan this week with a free, 7-day meal plan for midlife moms (and their families!)
• Need a plan for emergency/911 meals? Grab it here in the Supper Club (Breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, coaching, and more!)

Ashley Malik is a women's health and life coach, helping busy moms lose weight in perimenopause. You can learn more and discover how to work directly with Ashley by clicking here.

*** Ready to lose 15 lbs in 10 weeks? The Method will give you all the tools to make it happen! We start April 2nd. To learn more about The Method, click here!

Transcript

Ashley (00:14)

Welcome back my friend. I am so excited that you are here and I feel like I say this every week But I'm really excited about today's episode

It is super action packed and you are definitely going to want to take notes. And then I have some takeaways for you.

You know, when you're listening to this podcast and to these episodes, I want you to be taking action because it's one thing to just listen to what I'm saying and recommending, but it is another thing to actually put the information into action. So today you are definitely going to want to take some notes and then I have steps for you to practice once you finish listening to this episode. All right. Now as a mom, I'm curious.

What feelings come to mind when someone in your family asks, Hey mom, what's for dinner? Do you want to roll your eyes like I do? And if you are currently in perimenopause or menopause and on that journey, then you know, you probably should be changing up what you eat and eating more of an anti-inflammatory diet. But I get it. That can be really difficult to do.

when you were trying to feed your family and they're not in alignment with what it is that you want to be making and serving and eating. I think this is especially difficult when you have older kids. So I remember when I was younger, I was probably 16 or 17 and my mom would call or I'd call her and our conversation would be something like, well, are you gonna be home for dinner?

And oftentimes my response was, well, what are you making? I only wanted to come home if she was making something that I liked. And I know that drove her crazy. And eventually she just started saying, well, I'm not going to tell you what I'm making. You're either coming home for dinner or you're not. So with older kids, it can be really difficult if you are trying to transition into anti-inflammatory nutrition because your kids are picky. They have.

different options, especially if they are driving and they're out there with their friends. They can choose different things to eat. They can go to fast food restaurants and they don't have to be home for dinner. And if you have younger ones, like I still have a six year old at home and she's in her picky phase and she doesn't like certain textures or she doesn't like anything that has something green on it. And she used to be my kid who she would eat a ton of things.

One of her first solid foods was avocado with curry powder and she absolutely loved it. But now she doesn't want avocado. just, if she has it, has to taste perfect. She doesn't want curry either. So all of this to say, I know that it can be difficult to feed your family on the best of days. But when you are trying to implement more anti-inflammatory meal strategies, that can be really difficult.

So what I want to talk about today is how you can start working with your family to adopt an anti-inflammatory way of eating without them rebelling against what it is that you're serving. You know, you don't want to like go into this and launch into anti-inflammatory nutrition and just expect that your family is going to love what you're making because they probably won't. So we don't want to just spring these new healthy dinners on our families. We want to find a way that we can work with them.

Now, a lot of the strategies that I'm going to share with you today came together when I was working with a client and a friend of mine, Jen. She was really struggling to get her family on board. Her daughters were eating at school or eating at friends houses and they didn't always like what she was making. But more often than not, the whole family was running ragged with sports practices and late nights at work and actually not even being able to cook very much at home.

Jen knew that if she could do more to plan ahead, they would probably have some decent food at home, but she just couldn't figure out how to put all the parts and pieces together. So when we were working together, we talked a lot about what she did at work in her career, where she's actually a very successful leader of teams. She manages teams where there's lots of different people and lots of different moving parts, and she is really, really good at it.

So what we talked about is how do you take a lot of the skills that you use at the office with your team, leading teams every day, and implement some of those strategies to be able to work better with your family when you are looking to introduce anti-inflammatory nutrition so that you can feel better as you move through perimenopause, so that you can lose weight if that's one of your health goals right now, and so that you can feel like you have more energy.

more strength and that you're actually just aging better all because of the way you're eating. Sounds pretty great, right? So when it comes to helping your family get on board with anti-inflammatory nutrition in your house, I have a five step process for how you can go about doing this very thing.

If you're in any sort of leadership or project management role at your full-time job, you're probably going to see some correlations here because it works. Just because it's your family, it doesn't mean that we can't employ some of those same tactics and skills that we're using in the office. We're just going to use them at home. All right. So like I said, there are five different steps. So this is definitely when you want to get out your pen and paper and start taking some notes. Step number one.

you need to have a family meeting. Now, I know maybe this sounds a little old school, but being able to sit down with your entire family and get everyone on board is really going to help raise your likelihood of success in making sure that anti-inflammatory nutrition in your meals gets started for you and your family. So what we're trying to do here is to get some alignment. Now,

This doesn't mean that you're gonna go in and say, well, this is what I'm gonna be doing. I hope you like it, because that won't help. What we really wanna do is get the buy-in from our family during this meeting. Now, of course, you wanna go in and say, here are my goals. This is what I'm looking to accomplish. I really wanna lose some weight.

And being in perimenopause, it's really important for me to change the types of foods that I'm eating, but tell them that your goals are also that you want to make sure that your family is liking what they're eating too. So at this point then, I want you to look at your family and say, how does this sound for you? What concerns do you have? And really listen to what your family is saying. You know, if their biggest concern is

I don't want to eat a bunch of vegetables and I don't like kale. Okay, that is totally valid. They don't have to like the things that you are going to start cooking or eating just because you're transitioning to anti-inflammatory. Really, truly take some time to listen to each member of your family, the teenagers, the six-year-olds, your partner, anyone else that eats in your home.

I have a lot of clients that have multi-generational homes. So sometimes it's their mother, sometimes their mother-in-law is eating there. Get that input from absolutely everyone and try and understand when you say, I'm going to cook healthier meals, what comes to mind for them? What do they think that that means? How can you get some alignment and agreement on what that is actually going to look like?

So again, it's not coming in and saying, well, this is what I'm gonna start doing. I need you to get on board. No, it's really, it's trying to have a collaborative conversation so that when you start cooking healthier anti-inflammatory meals, your family will feel confident knowing that their input has been heard and registered and taken into account when it comes to having the menu and the recipes and that kind of thing.

We're looking to get an agreement and a collaboration with everyone who's eating in your house. And that's really the main goal of the family meeting. All right, step number two is input and expectations. During the family meeting, you probably did ask for some input because you were trying to get this like high level idea of what does healthy eating look like for your family and what might be they be willing to work with or tolerate.

But now in step two, I want you to dig even deeper. And you don't have to do this during the family meeting. Maybe it can be later. If your family is really like technologically inclined, send out a Google form and have everyone fill it out. But some of the things that you want to ask are, what do you like to eat? What do you love to eat right now? Like whether it's healthy or not, you want to know what are their favorite meals?

When they are craving comfort food, what does that look like? When they want a quick or a fast meal, what are they craving? When they need to just grab something quick to be able to go out for a sports practice or a late meeting or something like that, what would they love to be able to pull out of the refrigerator? I really want you to go deep here. And if you have a big piece of poster board or a giant piece of paper, I have a whiteboard in my house.

I really want you to take advantage of that big space and get everyone together and brainstorm. What kind of foods do they love? By understanding what kind of foods they love, then you will have a foundation for saying, okay, I know my family loves burgers and tacos and spaghetti. Now you can start looking at what options you have for making those meals, but in an anti-inflammatory style.

How can you make some adjustments so that your family can still have the regular burgers, tacos and spaghetti, but you are going to be able to have some healthier options that still taste just as great, but maybe use potentially different ingredients.

When you're getting these inputs, it is also important to understand what your family will not eat. So again, having a six year old, I know that I am always putting things in front of her hoping that she will maybe eat the things that I make. And you know, she used to devour broccoli and cauliflower. And now whenever I cook it, she's like, gross mom, that smells disgusting. So I know that as parents, as moms,

We really want to have our kids eat a wide variety of things and we want to serve healthy food for everyone in our family. But for now, we're just going to go with the fact that there are some foods that people in your family, they're just not going to eat. They might not eat kale or broccoli, zucchini noodles. You know, I've told this story before that when I was starting my anti-inflammatory journey, my son saw me making zucchini noodles and he looked at me. He's like, you know what, mom?

I'm sorry, I just can't eat those. So I think we need to appreciate and understand what our family will not eat. And we're not gonna make this right now the time that we're trying to encourage them to eat that healthy vegetable. Just for now, understand what it is that they will not eat and just kind of go with it. One of the things that we do in my house is I really like to cook.

salmon and I would probably have it twice a week or more, but my husband, doesn't like reheated salmon. And so if I'm just, if I'm going to make fresh salmon, I'm probably just going to make it once a week. But my six year old, Suraya she's okay with salmon. She'll eat it, but she really prefers salmon burgers. So oftentimes what I will do is I'll make salmon once a week.

and we will all eat that meal. And then I'll use the leftover salmon for my salads during lunch throughout the week. But then I make sure that salmon burgers are some other night during that week because I know Suraya will love those and she doesn't even mind them reheated. So sometimes I'll make a few, I'll chop them up and put them in her lunchbox for school. But this way she's getting some of what she wants and I'm getting some of what I want.

All right. When you're trying to get input, I want you to get input from your family around what their goals are for eating. So I had mentioned my client, Jen, at the beginning of this episode, her girls were athletes and Jen really wanted her girls to make sure that they were fueling their bodies for all of the athletic work that they were doing. They had practice all the time. They had games. It was really important to her to have her girls understand

Gosh, when you eat healthy, you have more energy, you're less injury prone. There's so many benefits that come with eating healthy. But it's important to understand what your kiddos are saying to you. So again, you're going to have different goals for your teens, as you will for your younger kids. But like for your teens, you want them to be learning how to make healthy choices.

You want them to be looking, you know, how does this healthy food make me feel? And what kind of things am I doing in my life, like sports, that could benefit from a little bit more healthy food? But the reality is that sometimes our kids just need a big boost of energy. They need to like carb load before a big game. And they have certain goals too. And I promise you, your kiddos, your older kids are talking to their friends and their teammates about what they're eating and how the foods make them feel.

So really get curious and understand what their goals are. Now, obviously for younger ones, our goal is really to help them have well-rounded nutrition.

Especially, you know, in our house, sometimes I really worry. Suraya often eats the lunch at school that's served there, but I'm not sure how well-rounded that nutrition is, at least on my standards.

So my goal for her is really around good nutrition. Suraya's goal for herself is that she just wants to like the food. So we have to go into this just knowing that we're going to strike a balance to make sure that our family is getting some of what they love. And we are also creating meals that we love, but that we're trying to find some common ground among all of that. The other part of this step

Our second step is expectations. So I really, really encourage you to examine your own expectations of what you think you're going to get out of healthy or anti-inflammatory eating. Like I mentioned, it is really easy for us to say, you know, I don't have a lot of time to cook. I'm just going to make one meal for everyone. It's going to be healthy. My family, they're just going to have to go with it. I assure you this will backfire.

This is eventually going to make you give up and quit because it's too hard because your family, they don't feel heard and they don't necessarily want what you're serving. remember when you're setting, so remember when your level setting your expectations, this is not an all or nothing. It's not a, well, I'm going to feed you this and I'm going to put this on the dinner table or there's nothing else to eat.

You have to understand that there might need to be some concessions made and that's okay.

With Suraya, one of the things that I do, I want her to try whatever I'm making for the meal for dinner, but if she really, really doesn't like it, I will encourage her to eat the sides, the veggies, the dinner roll, whatever else is on the side, and then I will offer her some nitrate-free deli turkey slices. She really likes those, and so she always knows there's an option, but it doesn't.

It's never really different than that. It's always deli turkey. And at least I know that she's getting something healthy. She's getting some protein and she'll probably eat some bread or rolls or whatever else with it. But she knows that there is an option.

I want her to know that I'm going to work with her, but that I really want to encourage her to try something new, to try a different kind of food. So the same thing can apply if you have older kids or a picky spouse or partner, that this is what I'm making for the meal. Sure, there's probably an available option, but that option is probably always going to be the same thing.

See how this works for you and your family, but this tends to work really well and still encourages my daughter to try new things like healthier options, but she can also feel really safe knowing that there is a fallback meal if she really doesn't like what I've served.

Alright, the next step is to gather support. This is step number three, gather support.

So there's a lot of things that your family can do to help you get dinner on the table every single night. And I know, I get it. I am one of those people where I'm like, you know what? Sometimes it's just easier for me to do it than it is to ask for help or get a bunch of hassle when I ask my kids. Sometimes it's just not worth it, right? But there are a lot of other areas where your family, your whole family can participate. So let's look at a couple of those. Now,

So obviously meal prep, your family can help with that. If your kids are getting home from school at 2.30 or three in the afternoon, are there some veggies that they can chop before you get home and make dinner at 5.30? Is there something that they can help put out, put together, or can they pull some meat out of the freezer? What is it that they can do to help prepare their meals every single night? And you know what? get it. Kids are going to complain about this. It's okay.

Just because they're complaining about it doesn't mean that they can't still do the work. So just let them do the work and let them complain while they do it. But it helps kids specifically and your spouse or your partner to really understand what goes into putting a meal together. That it's nice that they get to just show up at six o'clock and have a dinner on the table. But if they understand what really goes into it, what meal prep and cooking and everything entails,

they're going to have a greater appreciation for the meal that shows up on your table. Now, when I was younger, one of the things that I used to do to support my mom was that I went grocery shopping. I absolutely loved grocery shopping. The funny thing is I still do. I still love it to this day. But as soon as I turned 16 and I had my own car, part of the reason I had my own car is so that I could drive my siblings around

and so that I could help my mom with things like grocery shopping and running errands. So that was a really fun way for me to start to understand how much does food cost? What if I have to stick to a budget? How about sticking to the list? Can I just get things that aren't on the list? It was really understanding the whole of grocery shopping, because it's a big job, right? And it wasn't just the shopping. It's checking out, it's getting it in the car and getting home, getting the groceries put away.

So all of this is definitely an area that you can solicit help from your family to just make sure that they are part of the meal process because grocery shopping, getting those groceries in, you've got to do that in order to make the meals.

One of the areas that I think is really fun to get support from your family, especially your kids, is to go shopping with them and pick out snacks. So in episode 24, I shared a bunch of brands and foods and snacks and different things that I like to buy that I still consider anti-inflammatory or healthy enough. And so you can look for some of those things. Just go back and listen to episode 24 and see if you can buy some of those products.

You know, for example, Suraya gets really excited about fruit thief, which it's just like this fruit leather or something. It looks like a shoelace, but it's made with healthier ingredients and I feel okay about buying it. So if you can work with your kids to find some snacks, then they can also start to recognize, okay. Healthy eating doesn't just mean kale. It also means making good choices with snacks that are lower in sugar.

or have fewer preservatives.

You can start educating your kids on the kind of snacks to choose, which again, it just helps them to become more independent when they're on their own. But it also helps you to feel good because the snacks are going to be in the house. And so you know what they're eating and you're making some concessions, like allowing them to have those snacks. But then you can have that conversation to say, you tried the fruit leather or the fruit thief, but you know what?

I want you to try this new dinner recipe that I'm making too. See, it's all about collaboration. So support does not just mean getting your family to cook with you or for you or chopping vegetables. There's lots of other ways that your family can be in support of adopting a healthier way of eating in your entire house. So think about it and really get creative here.

All right, step number four, I want you to post your dinner plan on the refrigerator. So if you have looked at my free meal plan that I have for moms and perimenopause, I'll link to it in the show notes, but you'll see that there is a chart that you can print out and put on your refrigerator. Now, the benefit of doing this is to guard against what I talked about in the beginning of the episode where I used to call my mom and say, well, what are you making for dinner?

That would help me to determine whether or not I was actually going to show up. So just like you would do at the office in your career, if you were working on a big project with your team, you would have a plan posted somewhere, right? Now, it doesn't have to be printed out. It could be in an app like Asana or Trello or something like that. But regardless, you need a clear roadmap of where you're going. OK, here are the things that we talked about.

here's what dinner's gonna look like this week or this month or however far out you have planned. This way, there are no surprises. And everybody knows what the dinner plan is, including you. You've made the dinner plan, you've purchased all the groceries for that dinner plan, and you know exactly what you're gonna be cooking every night of the week. So again, that free guide that I mentioned, it has a whole seven day dinner plan plus breakfast and lunch recipes.

but you get an actual plan, like a chart that you can just print out and put on your refrigerator. Also this way, if there's a meal or two that your family just doesn't like, or they're not super excited about, maybe they can try it because they know that one of their favorite burgers or tacos or spaghetti, something that they actually love is also coming up later in the week. This is where that collaboration becomes so important in the family meeting and really adjusting

your expectations to make sure that you have listened to your family and so that some of what they want is also included, even if you're finding an anti-inflammatory way to make that favorite meal. But by having your dinner plan posted on the refrigerator, there's no surprises. So it's just really a clear roadmap for what's happening during the week and it helps everyone to get on board.

All right, last but not least is step number five, and that is to re-evaluate. So in my work with students in my programs, this is exactly what I see happening all the time. And I bet if you listen, you can totally relate to this. So you get all gung-ho about new recipes and a meal plan. You go grocery shopping and you get everything that you need. You're so excited. You've got your fridge totally stocked.

And you even decide, you know what, I'm going to clean out some of the things that are probably aren't going to serve me or aren't very anti-inflammatory. And so you just feel like ready to go for this healthy meal approach. So Sunday night comes around and you've cooked something and it was actually really good. Your family didn't hate it. Not even your teenagers complained a lot. They even ate it. So you're feeling pretty good. And then Monday night comes at, Whoa, Monday it was hard.

You had a really busy day at work and you got home kind of late, but you know what? You decided, I am going to stick to my plan. It's Monday. I'm going to stick to it. I'm going to make it happen. And then Tuesday rolls around and you hear that your partner is running late from the office. They're not getting home till like 7.30 or eight. One of your kids all of a sudden needs a ride, even though they are supposed to get a ride with a friend, but now they need a ride from you. So you've got to go pick them up. And that feels annoying and challenging.

And so Tuesday night, you just quickly throw in a frozen pizza, because you're totally out of options. Then Wednesday rolls around and you're just kind of feeling frustrated. You're frustrated because the week hasn't turned out the way that you thought it would. And then Thursday night goes by and Friday night. And before you know it, you realize, great, I quit on Wednesday. I was so excited about this plan on Sunday, but what happened?

Is any of that sounding familiar? Have you been in that situation before? I know I have. So just like we would do with our teams after a big product launch or something like that, we would sit down with our teams at work and we would do a retrospective, right? We would evaluate what worked really well. Did our marketing plan work well? Did our product development work well? You are going to have to do the same thing with your family.

So after the first week of eating on this healthy meal plan, feel like you've done all the things. You've gotten all the input, you've adjusted your expectations, you've asked for help for where you think you might need it. And you've been really clear about posting that dinner plan or that chart. What I want you to do is start by saying to yourself and your family, what worked well? What did we actually like about this week? Were there dinners or recipes that we liked?

Did we like that dinner was ready at six o'clock every night? Did we enjoy sitting together as a family and maybe having some family conversation? What did we like? But then where did things break down? It's gonna be really easy to point out those things that you don't like, it's gonna be really easy to point out the things that you didn't like about that week. And I assure you, your family, especially if you have teenagers,

they will definitely tell you what they didn't like about the week. That's why it's easier to start with evaluating what did work. What worked really well? What do you want to repeat? What would you like to see again in the coming weeks? And then when you look at what didn't work well, how can you fix it?

Like I said, I often find that by Wednesday, the plan, it's gone out the window. And it's not because the meal plan or the recipes or the food are bad, or it's not necessarily what your family likes. It's because life happens. Things come up, schedules shift and plans don't go according to plan. This is why in the supper club, which is my monthly membership, I give you a meal planner that is an emergency or 911 meal plan.

The idea here is that you stock your pantry with the right items so that you can have a meal on the table from start to finish in 10 minutes or less. I'll put some information about the supper club in the show notes, but you need to have some backup options. And so maybe you didn't plan any backup meals for the week. Maybe you didn't have those 911 meals. Just because the first week was hard does not mean that the meal plan didn't work.

or that you won't ever be able to eat anti-inflammatory or healthy. Okay. Let me repeat that. Just because the first week was hard does not mean that the meal plan didn't work. It just means that you need to make some adjustments and think back to how, how would I handle something like this at the office? You know, if you are having a product that's launching and it does okay, but it doesn't go really well.

You're not going to scrap all of that product development and time and effort and money. You're going to look and say, okay, what did work? How do we do more of that? What didn't work? How do we adjust for that?

If you don't evaluate with yourself and your family, this is when I see most women just quit and give up. And then this is that time where you will be inclined to say, you know what? I've tried, I've tried everything and I can't eat healthy. I can't stick to it. I can't lose weight. Like all of these stories start coming up. But the reality is that we just need to be patient and we need to do another week. We just need to make a few adjustments.

So I want you to reevaluate your process and your system with your family at the end of week one, at the end of week two, at the end of a month, and then again, monthly after that. And hopefully by that time, you and your family have gotten into a really good groove of what they like to eat and what they don't like to eat, where they're more inclined to like take a risk and try something new.

what kind of emergency or backup meals that you need to have on hand, and really how well you are setting your expectations for like what time you have for cooking, like the amount of time you have for cooking. And again, what your family will eat, not eat, and really what you're enjoying about this whole process. Lots of evaluation.

So as you can see, I think that a lot of times most moms, they pick a meal plan, some recipes, they wanna go all in and try it, but the family doesn't like some of what's offered. It's really hard, right? And maybe the recipes are challenging and by Wednesday, you just give up. It happens. I see it all the time that women give up by Wednesday when they start on a Sunday. So.

By looking at your meal plan with this very different lens, like you are project managing your family or project managing your dinner plan, I promise you're gonna have a lot more success.

All right, let's review those five steps. So first, you're gonna have a family meeting. You wanna work to get that collaboration and alignment. Number two is input and expectations. Again, know what your expectations are and what your family's expectations are. Number three, get support from your family. And remember, that can look a lot of different ways. Step four is to post your dinner plan and the

ever, ever important. Step number five is to re-evaluate. Now I want you to write all of these things down and I really challenge you to go try it this week. To help you out, just check the show notes. I have all the resources you need. If you want a seven day healthy anti-inflammatory guide that is built for you and your family, go grab that in the show notes.

If you want something that's a little bit more detailed and really walks you through like breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks, and some other details, make sure and check out the Supper Club. Both of those links are down below in the show notes. The Supper Club membership also, I have to note, will not only give you meal plans that are going to be easy for you to implement with the charts already made and everything, but you will also get those emergency 911 meals. So you always have a backup.

along with tons of other resources. get live coaching with me throughout the month. And if you're doing this plan and you have roadblocks as you're working through these five steps, I will be there to help you out. All right. So like I said, links for both of these things are in the show notes, but I just want you to try this for one week. Have your family meeting, understand your input and expectations, get support, post that dinner plan.

and then reevaluate. I really would love to know how this works for you and your family and what you think about this approach of being able to project manage your family when it comes to healthy anti-inflammatory meals. I really invite you to leave me a message on Instagram @theashleymalik It's me that's responding and I really just would love to hear from you and hear how this process is working for you.

And if you're implementing this week and you have questions, let me know. Let me support you and help you out. Because I really, I know you can do this, but sometimes it just takes an outside person to give some encouragement and some feedback. All right, go review your steps and promise me that you'll give it a try this week, OK? And I will see you right back here next Tuesday.