Creating Healthy Eating Habits for Kids With Lara Field of FEED Nutrition Consulting

Lara Field, MS, RD, LDN is the Owner and Founder of FEED (Forming Early Eating Decisions) Nutrition Consulting, a private nutrition consulting practice in Chicago. She is a pediatric expert with more than a decade of clinical experience at top-ranked pediatric hospitals, including the University of Chicago Medical Center and Lurie Children’s Hospital.

Laura serves as a member of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and is active within the Chicago Dietetics Association and the Chicago Food and Nutrition Network. She’s also been quoted in national publications on infant feeding practices, food allergies, celiac disease, and other health topics. As a mom herself, Lara always strives to provide realistic and practical guidance for busy families.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

What inspired Lara Field to pursue a career in nutrition consulting?
Tips for talking to children about health and nutrition
The impacts of COVID lockdowns on families’ eating habits
Lara talks about how to effectively handle picky eaters
How to help kids form healthy eating habits
Lara’s advice for maintaining healthy meals as a busy parent
Resources for parents to improve their family’s eating habits

In this episode…

As a parent, teaching children to maintain a healthy diet can be challenging. Some kids are picky eaters, while others splurge on junk food, so it’s crucial to approach the topic of nutrition sensitively and appropriately. So, how can you develop healthy eating habits for your children and family?

According to Lara Field, introducing a new food takes 9 to fifteen times before a child accepts it. To simplify this process, it’s beneficial to form a comparison between trying new food and practicing a new skill to increase the child’s receptivity. By setting realistic goals and making small changes to your family’s diet, you can begin to form a healthy lifestyle.

In this episode of the Coping Podcast, Dr. Leigh Weisz hosts Lara Field MS, RD, LDN, the Owner and Founder of FEED Nutrition Consulting. Lara talks about the value of healthy eating for kids and families. She shares tips on how parents can handle picky eaters, how to teach kids to form healthy eating habits, and how parents can maintain healthy meals despite their busy schedules.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Coping Partners.

Coping Partners is a mental health practice dedicated to helping children, adolescents, and adults manage various challenges including anxiety, divorce, behavioral issues, relationship problems and much more in the Chicago suburbs.

Our practitioners are devoted to building on our clients’ strengths and bolstering weaknesses.

To gain insight and tools for getting unstuck check out our website at CopingPartners.com, email us at support@copingpartners.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01

Welcome to the Coping Podcast where we share strategies for coping with the stressors of life, especially the difficulties of parenting. And here is your host, Dr. Leigh Weisz.

Dr. Leigh Weisz 0:15

This is Dr. Leigh Weisz. I am the host of the Coping Podcast where I feature top experts on topics like raising healthy children, parenting and so much more. Check out my recent interview with Dr. Michelle Cutler where we talked about how to talk with children about traumatic events. This episode is brought to you by Coping Partners. Coping Partners is a mental health practice in the Chicago suburbs dedicated to helping children, adolescents and adults. We help manage various challenges including anxiety, divorce, behavioral issues, relationship problems, and much more. Check out more episodes of our podcast and our website at copingpartners.com And you can contact us with any questions you have. Just a quick disclaimer, the information provided is for educational and informational purposes only. This is not intended to provide mental health treatment and does not constitute a client therapist relationship. The information provided is not a replacement for being assessed and evaluated by a licensed professional and is not intended to replace mental health or medical advice. So before introducing today’s guest, I want to give a big thank you to our guests husband, Tom Field, who is a wonderful family law attorney. I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating on divorce cases with Tom and he does wonderful work for the families he works with. And he gets credit for introducing me to Laura years ago. So I’m going to introduce Laura Laura Field, a registered dietitian and today’s guest founded her practice FEED, which is an acronym for Forming Early Eating Decisions. So clever. In 2008, in Chicago, while in clinical practice at the University of Chicago Medical Center’s comer Children’s Hospital, you can go to her website, feednutrition.com, or her Instagram handle @feednutrition and get more information about her. She also has several other nutrition experts working with her to get to help more families make eating a priority right now. So I’m really excited, I thought you’d be a wonderful speaker for our audience. Because eating and feeding our children can be a stressful topic for most parents. Some kids are picky eaters, some are hoarding candy in their closets. And in general, it’s really tricky for parents to know how to approach this topic, sensitively and appropriately. So we’re really excited to learn from you today.

Lara Field 2:47

Well, thank you, thank you so much for having me here. I love I love you know chatting with other professionals because there’s so much that we both do, or all of us do. I said, I’d say to help our, our clients. And I think we can reach so much more when we do work together. So I’ve enjoyed collaborating with you. And they’re very happy to be here today too

Dr. Leigh Weisz 3:10

Thank you, Lara. So before we kind of dive in, can you maybe tell us a little bit about how you got started doing this work, you know, what inspired you to to do this career to pursue this career?

Lara Field 3:21

Sure, I’d love to. So actually, it started when I was a kid, I was 10 years old, and my dad had really high cholesterol. And you know, at that time, it was not as easy to access health and nutrition information is it unfortunately, or fortunately, he is now and he read a ton of books and you know, tried to suck in as much knowledge as he could and realize that eating healthy can really affect his cholesterol and his outcome. And, you know, I was a kid that just like any other kid was just eating whatever my family had available. And we kind of got rid of a lot of things at our house and change from you know, bacon and eggs to oat bran and everything. And I really was impressed by and of this change so much so that when I was kind of trying to figure out what I was going to do or major in my college career, I found that you could be a registered dietician. And that was pretty cool to me that you know, I can have something that I have been learning but also I loved working with kids I babysat and did you know a lot of interaction camp counselor and such. And, you know, working with kids and families was really exciting and sounded fun to me. So but putting these two together was also just felt like it was going to be rewarding. So I kind of traveled down the path of college and grad school and an internship and an exam and, you know, wanted to start my career in clinical practice, and working in hospitals and tyna just learn honestly, I love learning. And constantly as an adult still love learning and challenging myself. And but after a while, I felt like there was so much more I could read, I wanted to reach more, I wanted to kind of do other things just than the day to day in a hospital environment. So I did always want to start a private practice and start and focus only on kids. And so that brought me to founding FEED, which is thank you for elaborating stands for Forming Early Eating Decisions. And that acronym really speaks to my journey, you know, the starting when I was a kid, and learning kind of how to eat on my own. And my goal really is a registered dietician and our practices to be realistic. And I’m a mom of two kids of my own, that are young teenagers. And, you know, so I have little experimental subjects in my own home. And I find that nutrition is very confusing these days, because of that access to all this information that we have on the internet, and so forth. And everyone has their opinions and wants to share them, which is great, but it just, it does make it very confusing. So I find my job nowadays is really this somewhat of a mythbuster, trying to figure out helping people navigate this really daunting space of health and wellness. So it’s incredibly gratifying. It’s super rewarding. I do feel like I’m actually helping people, which is just is always what I wanted to do. So it’s pretty fun.

Dr. Leigh Weisz 6:43

Without a doubt, we’re always we’re always happy to be able to refer to to you.

Lara Field 6:47

Thanks.

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