The Importance of Empowering Our Kids to Make Healthy Choices

Last night, we saw how Randi's family managed to completely change their lifestyles and complete an incredible fitness goal together.

Randi's parents worked hard to empower their children to make better choices around food, and that led to them making some impressive changes. They took their children from having very little interest in or knowledge about healthy eating, to becoming pint sized nutritional experts.

Randy's mom Terrie explains that although she did have a firm knowledge of what good nutrition was (her mother was a nutritionist) and that the family for the most part did eat healthily at home, they just weren't making the right choices all the time which led to the family's health suffering.

"I am always surprised by how many people have absolutely no knowledge about nutrition," says Terrie, "and I didn’t want my girls to not be knowledgeable, or my boy for that matter. So it was really important to teach them what a healthy diet looked like."

For Terrie, teaching her children how to eat right is an ongoing process. The kids go shopping with her and are involved in meal planning, which is a great way to get them invested and interested in what the family is eating. All three children now know how to read a nutritional label, and know what a serving size should be.

“I thought it was really important that our children could read a serving guide on the side of a package and understand what that meant,” says Terrie, “because so many people really don't understand that a serving size is stated for good reason - if you eat the whole box of cookies or whatever, then you are eating 1000s of calories.”

On last night’s show, we saw 8 year old Randi give a healthy eating demonstration to her classmates. “Randi wanted to do this presentation at school, so we got information for her to teach the kids. Our whole journey was really about wanting to educate ourselves and others as to what a healthy lifestyle was,” says Terrie, “and not focusing so much on the scale and your measurements as much as it was just choosing healthier things to eat.”