In this episode she answers questions on: how to shift the Covid kg, building resilience in kids after setbacks. And she also talks about the importance of the labels we put on our eating patterns. Got a question on health, fitness, parenting or career? Send it in and host Amelia Phillips will answer it.
Episode on Resilience with Dr Lyn Worsley: Raising Resilient Kids Using the Resilience Doughnut
Below is an unedited transcript of the podcast episode:
Welcome to another. Ask Me Anything segment on Healthy Her. I’ve really loved connecting with you, my lovely listeners over DM and email mostly, but you can follow me on Instagram underscore Amelia underscore Phillips. Check the show notes. And I’d love you if possible, to subscribe to my show and to rate and leave a review that just lets Apple and Spotify know that you guys like my show.
My goal here with Healthy Her is to address issues that affect moms from parenting, to health to career and relationships. But I don’t want it to be a one way street. I’d love to hear from you two. I’d love to work as a community. I love the questions that you send. I love the comments that you make, so keep ’em coming, and that’s why I love these discussions and your questions.
So in today’s show notes, you’ll find my email, my inta, and a text line. You can get in touch with me and I’ll do my best to get your questions answered. So let’s get into it. Question number one is from mu. Since Covid, I’ve really let my eating slip. How can we get out of any bad habits we’ve formed? And what’s your best diet advice?
Okay, Mu coming. Well, firstly, you are certainly not alone, but I’d love to encourage you not to use language such as bad habits and dieting because they’re labeling languages that can kind of lead us to, you know, implicitly or explicitly feel bad about ourselves. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong or nothing unusual about having moments where you focus on your diet moments when.
Let’s try to focus more on eating regime, um, on a sustainable eating pattern, and try not to kind of use shaming language around food. You know, that’s good or bad. Now, my advice to you when you feel like you have. Lost a bit of focus is to just pick one area that is your biggest challenge that you’d like to work on.
So it could be, for example, your portion sizes. It could be the afternoon slump, it could be the after dinner. Mindless kind of snacking after dinner, which is one of my pain points. And a great thing to do with those moments is to find some healthy swaps. So, couple of quick examples. You can get some really, uh, low calorie frozen yogurts if ice cream is a big one for you.
Or, you know, look for a lower calorie version that’s going to, of your favorite ice cream, that’s going to still tick that box for you, but it’s not gonna blow the bank if you are one of those people that once you pop, you can’t stop. So if there is a box of, you know, ice creams in the freezer, you’re just gonna eat them all.
Well then your answer is definitely not to have them there. But to find a healthier version where it might be a, a yogurt or a frozen yogurt or something like, Cheer puddings are great. Um, I go through periods where I will make five cheer puddings on say, a Monday or a Sunday, and they’re my five desserts for the week and they’re really simple to make and you can kind of batch those up.
So that’s one tip for that. Also, if you like, you know, chips or you into that sort of chips, you know, a kid’s size portion of popcorn is a great one as long as, again, it’s that, you know, can you. Have that discipline to just stop at one. And if the answer is no, well then yeah, you are better off getting rid of that and finding something that is gonna still satisfy that crunch, but maybe where you’re not gonna have as much.
And that might be crut taste, so vegetables with some hummus or some Ted Ziki or something like that. Intermittent fasting is another really interesting one because you have this time restricted eating plan that I think for mums often works quite well anyway, where you are so busy at certain times of the day, so you might do the 1212, which is, you know, 12 hours of fasting and then you’ve got a eating window of 12 hours.
And I just feel like sometimes just having that by mouth moment at the end of the day. For example, 8:00 PM I don’t eat after 8:00 PM I brush my teeth, I can have a herbal tea, but that’s just my hard rule. If you have felt like you’ve kind of let that eating pattern slip, that’s a great way to just reset and just go, okay, from 8:00 PM knee by mouth.
And it takes a couple of days of quite hard discipline to do that. But then after that, you’re settling quite nicely. I love batching. I’m all about batching, so, you know, really encouraging you to eat out less. And one of the best ways, or, or, or, or Uber eats less. And one of the best ways to do that is to have some real options in your freezer that you can quickly defrost.
And you know, during winter, soups are a fantastic way to batch that up. And then pass the sources are a great one as well, but just preventing that takeout because it is really hard to manage our eating when we are eating out all the. Packing a high fiber lunch or having a high fiber lunch is another great tip because when you do have that, High fiber meal in the second half of the day, it really does fill you up because all that fiber sits in your gut all afternoon, all evening, and so it keeps those hunger hormones at bay.
And even though as you’re eating it, it might not satisfy that real craving you have. What it does do is it keeps that grelin hormone at bay. As best as possible. So really what I like to do is I’ll actually have raw veggies all afternoon with some hummus, and I just find, but that by the time I get to dinner, I’m almost not hungry.
Okay. That’s probably my main ones for you there, Mukai, but you’re not alone and it’s a big topic. I should probably do a whole episode on that one.
Okay. Question number two. Scully. Hi Amelia. There’s lots to talk about when it comes to building resilience in kids, but how do we do it and what are the signs that resilience is low? For example, my nine year old son struggles with setbacks. Last weekend, he missed a soccer goal in his game and his team lost and he cried all the way home.
I’d love to know your thoughts on building resilience in kids. Now that’s such a big topic and such a great question and such an important one as well. So just quickly, a definition of resilience is that ability to recover quickly from difficulties. It’s not getting rid of difficulties, it’s recovering from difficulties.
You know that, that the toughness essentially that we. Okay. And with kids, we gotta look to those age appropriate stresses. You know, I mean, what you are talking about with your son, that is a really tough deal for him. You know, especially if they lost by one goal and he, you know, had that goal in the bag and then something happened and he didn’t score it.
You can imagine how upsetting that is, but that still is age appropriate stress for that. So we know that resilience is an issue. We know that, you know, suicide is the leading cause of death in Aussies under 25 years old, and you know, that number has doubled over the last decade. So for whatever reason, and I don’t claim to know what that reason is, it really is a challenge and an issue.
I did an episode on resilience with Dr. Lynn Warley, who has a center called, oh, what is it? The Resilient, I’m pretty sure it’s called the Resilience Center, and she’s also brought out a book called The Resilience Donut. Funnily enough, when we spoke, she brought her all back to connection, and I kind of struggled at first with what.
Connection and resilience have to do with each other. But she’s saying that the absolute foundation, the underpinning of resilience in kids is meaningful connection, not just with parents, although that’s one part of it, but with the world around them, with their peers, with an adult that’s outside of their immediate family with their extended family, because that connection signals to them.
I am important. I. And someone cares about me, someone gets me. And when kids have that, their ability to get back up after these setbacks seems to always improve. And she’s got this great model called the resilience donut. And if you imagine a donut, she said in the middle of the donut is the individual.
And, and in her sort of written model, she has the words I can, I have and I am. So in that hole in the donut is the. Around the donut. The fleshy part of the donut is what supports the middle, is what supports that person. And in that donut, there are seven factors that lead to resilience. And the seven factors are the parent factor, the skill factor, family and identity factor, the education factor, the peer factor.
Community and money. And what she says is that you only need three of those to score well, And her book has like a quiz for each chapter. For the seven factors, a kid just needs to have three areas of the resilience donut scoring well to show that they have a strong resilience or a good resilience. And interestingly, as parents, we tend to always go for the worst performing areas that we wanna.
But actually what she talks about is you double down on the high performing area. So let’s say a skill factor. Let’s say your kids are really good skateboarder, for example. They score when you ask them the question, the 10 questions on the skill factor. You know, ability to perform basic skills, evidence of developing hardiness through experiences of difficult challenges.
So let’s say your nine year old, for example, is actually really great in the skate park, and you’ve seen him fall down and get back up thousands of times and graze his knees in the skate park. Then he has resilience in that skill factor. But let’s say that his education factor is really low. Let’s say he just, you know, is disengaged at school.
She’s like, that’s. We keep doubling down on those skill factors, um, and those three stronger areas and, and the resilience that they feel and that they draw from those strong areas starts to spill out into other areas of their life, and it’s got this compounding effect. So I really liked this model because number one, there was kind of like a, almost like a litmus test that you can do with your kids.
And number two, it all came back to that connection and that connection to the community. It took a lot more pressure off parents to be that number one problem solver. And to your soccer example, you know, you might reach out to the coach and say, the coach, okay, you know, what are some chats you can have with him to help him bounce back?
Because the sporting field is an absolutely brilliant resilience building. Sandbox for them and their life. So I hope that gives you a few tips there. All right guys. I think that’s probably enough chatter today. I hope, uh, you enjoyed those questions. Keep ’em coming, and I’ll see you in the booth very soon.
Recent Comments