I ran the Disney Princess Half Marathon last week – at age 60 this was my first!!!! It was so much fun and so rewarding to know that I had disciplined my body to run 13.1 miles by exercising and eating healthy. Emphasize these disciplines in your children while their beliefs and habits are being formed. Teach them that our bodies belong to God who made us and we are to honor God in the way we take care of them. (1 Cor. 6:19-20)
During training I could definitely tell a difference in running on the day following a day I had not made wise food choices. What you eat does make a difference! Green Smoothie Revolution and Green for Life by Victoria Boutenko have greatly influenced my diet.
Victoria has now written books for children to help reinforce good eating habits. Below are two of them and another, Green Smoothie Magic, will be available soon.
A Gift From Little Bear is such a cute little story that teaches a couple of lessons. The bear takes unhealthy food from the children and gets a tummy ache. He learns from his mommy that bear’s ‘berry’ food is good for everyone and he decides to share his good food with the children. This is a wonderful, subtle way of teaching better eating habits – and sharing!!
Buy some berries and pretend to be the little bear sharing with the children. As yall eat the delicious berries share ‘God satisfies your mouth with good things,” (Psalm 103:5)
Fruits I Love is a great way to introduce children to a variety of fruits. The book’s colorful pictures are visually inviting to children, and what child doesn’t enjoy a rhyming book! I appreciate the fact that in reading this book to a child, you are doing more than just reading words or looking at pictures, but you are actually making fruit very appealing to them.
After reading this book with your children, purchase each of the fruits depicted in the book and have your children actually examine, smell, taste, find the seeds, and rate the fruits according to which they like best. This is a delicious way to begin a love for fruits! Again emphasize Psalm 103:5.
states “The time we start preparing for an anti-disease susceptibility is many months before conception. If, however, that is too late and the child is here and sick at this time, we will have to work on the present cause, but this effort could be eliminated if we had started a few generations back.”
. She writes, ” just as we can inherit either a fortune or debts, so in the spiritual realm we can inherit either spiritual blessings or those liabilities (unabashedly called ‘sins’ in scripture) that hinder our development into mature persons.”
refers to this as “grandad’s bent” and points out that the bents in our lives toward particular sins must be broken for the good of the children that will come after us.