Women In Wellness: Sarah Almond-Bushell On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Allow yourself some compassion — Sometimes you might slip up and say in your children’s earshot “my tummy looks big in this dress” or “I’d better not eat that pizza if I want to fit into my bathing suit” and when you catch yourself you might feel bad. But don’t, changing the way you act is going to take time, there is a whole lot of unlearning that has to be done. Follow up with: “Sometimes I’m not very kind to myself I’m grateful that I have this amazing body that gave me you”.
As a part of my series about the women in wellness, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sarah Almond-Bushell.
Sarah Almond Bushell is an award-winning Registered Dietitian, ex NHS Consultant child nutritionist of 22 years and founder of The Children’s Nutritionist™ who is working to reduce the stress around mealtimes for parents and is passionate about helping them think differently about how they feed their children as well as how they were fed as kids, and in doing so cutting the ties of generational eating habits, fueled by misinformation and desperation tactics.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?
Growing up I was always a fearless foodie. From growing veggies in my grandad’s allotment to baking with my mum, to hosting dinner parties as a teenager, food has always played a huge role in my life.
Sharing a meal was our family’s way of showing how much we loved and cared for people, an everyday luxury made extra special with guests around the table.
It was no surprise that at school I had a flair for cookery and being good at the sciences led naturally to a career as a nutritionist. But being highly ambitious I wanted to train further to become a Registered Dietitian, a step up from a nutritionist because I felt the intuitive pull towards helping people manage their health conditions through food.
After graduating with a BSc in Nutrition & Dietetics I specialised in paediatrics where I got my masters degree in children’s nutrition and worked for the NHS in a busy London teaching hospital and later at a specialist children’s hospital on the South Coast till I left 22 years later at the top of my game as one of a handful Consultant Dietitians in the UK.
I’m now self employed and my business called The Children’s Nutritionists is how I help families.
My aim is to prevent children developing feeding problems by helping parents get the right information about food and feeding from the very start, through my large online information hub which is free of charge. And I also use my clinical expertise to help those families whose children have fussy eating or challenging eating habits so that they can help their children learn to like new food.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?
My journey into helping parents whose children have challenges with food and eating began while living through my own experiences of despair struggling to feed my own children. I truly embraced ‘responsive feeding’ with my first child (which was the new concept in child feeding at the time), but he had a stubborn temperament and was incredibly demanding. The result was iron deficiency anaemia because I was too ‘responsive’ caving in, to his frequent demands for milk.
My second child grew up learning that food hurt her. She vomited continuously from day one and failed to thrive. It transpired that she had an undiagnosed egg allergy which was only picked up at 9 months but by then the damage had been done, she had developed a feeding aversion and whenever food came close, she would clamp her mouth shut, turn her head away and cry.
I felt helpless, and despite being a senor paediatric dietitian with over 10 years of experience at the time, both my children had feeding problems. I knew exactly what to feed them, but I just couldn’t to get them to eat.
Moreover, I discovered that none of my NHS professional colleagues could help. I realised that despite our extensive medical education and years of experience, there was still something missing.
And so, I did what anyone in this situation would do, I turned to Google. I found a child psychologist and feeding team in Colorado USA and studied with them to become a SOS trained feeding therapist and set about implementing what I learned with my own kids.
The results were remarkable, especially when applied to my food phobic daughter. My child went from being frightened to even look at new food to wanting to order takeaways so she could experience food from new cultures. She’s 13 now and she wants to be a chef when she grows up!
Now, I use my skills in nutrition as a Paediatric Dietitian, my knowledge of positive food parenting and my SOS feeding therapy skills in combination, when I work with families who are also struggling to feed their children.
Can you share a story about the biggest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
When I first qualified, I went to work in the NHS because that was ‘expected’ of me as a new graduate Dietitian.
I loved my job and got immense satisfaction from knowing I’d helped children with their health needs through my nutrition and feeding advice.
However, the NHS red tape, rules and restrictions meant that I was limited to who I was allowed to help and who I had to turn away. And I actually felt that my career following the NHS path was a mistake.
I was frustrated, I felt I had a really important message to share that went beyond the walls of the NHS and I just couldn’t share it.
It was actually this frustration that started me blogging. I learned about search engine optimization and suddenly I’d found a way that I could help parents simply by answering the questions they typed into google.
4 years later I have a thriving online business called The Children’s Nutritionist where I can help families across the globe and I’m reaching around 90K people each month. That feels amazing.
Let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?
When we become parents, we bring with us our own unconscious bias around food, and unwillingly we pass is on to our children simply by doing what we’ve always done.
Think about how you were brought up around food and eating, many of us heard phrases like “clean your plate” or “no pudding till you’ve eaten your dinner” or our parents pre-plated our food rather than letting us decide how much we wanted to eat.
This is cultural, it’s not based in science and many of us never question how we feed our children and yet these food parenting practices have a profound impact upon our children’s relationship with food. Often a negative impact.
We talk about certain foods being good-for-you or healthy, and other foods being bad or unhealthy, but what our children understand is that eating ‘bad foods’ is wrong, and this can lead to feelings of guilt and shame when they do indulge in those foods. And not eating enough foods that are ‘healthy or good’ can make our children feel like a failure.
We know from the psychology research that there are 4 food parenting styles, three of which can have negative consequences for children.
Parents who display the controlling food parenting style, such as restricting certain foods, hiding goodies, pressuring children to eat “2 more bites” or even rewarding them with ice cream for pudding when they’ve eaten well, have children with poor appetite regulation, often overeating and carrying extra weight. They have a preference for the reward type foods and devalue other foods and can feel unworthy when they eat those reward foods if they feel haven’t earned it.
Parents who display the indulgent style of food parenting are more likely to cave in to the demands of their children, saying yes to requests for snacks, or catering to their likes over and above what they want them be eating to ensure good nutrition. Kids parented this way are more likely to have nutritional problems, their diet it limited, they tend to carry extra weight and have a poor sense of appetite.
Parents who display the uninvolved style of food parenting tend to have little structure or routine around eating and children grow up feeling insecure about food availability. They tend to be very focussed on foods, overeat due to scarcity fears and as a result often carry extra weight.
In addition, as adults we often talk negatively about our weight, our shape, our bodies or even our children’s bodies, our kids link this to our messages about food and eating which can have a profound negative effect on their relationship with food and even cause disordered eating.
My mission is to raise awareness around how we parent our children around food. I want people to stop and consider how they feed their kids rather than just continuing to do what they’ve always done.
I want to end this cycle, to help parents get the right support so that their children develop healthy eating habits which they pass on to their own children invoking generational change, and children’s mental and physical health for the better.
Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey towards better wellbeing? Please give an example or story for each.
1.Take note of how you currently ‘food parent’
You don’t have to have all the answers right away, it’s hard to raise children to not only be happy, healthy eaters but also to have positive body image and self esteem.
Begin simply by starting to notice how you talk about food in front of your children, not just at mealtimes but when you’re grocery shopping, at the cinema or even happen to notice a picture of food in a magazine. Food is everywhere.
Notice how you serve food at home, how you respond to your children’s requests and does this change when they are being demanding and short tempered?
2.Question where you get your food and feeding information from
Early childhood experiences often set the tone for how we interact around food as adults, but this can be altered by where we get our information from. Sadly, there is a lot of misinformation online and in the media with unhelpful advice from names that we trust such as TV chefs or celebrity influencers.
Doctors, health visitor and even school teachers are all professionals who you might approach to get help on food and feeding but as amazing as they are, actually none of them are nutrition professionals and they don’t have expertise in the psychology of feeding. Only Registered Dietitians are educated to the right level and their practice is governed by law as a quality assurance marker so you can trust their advice.
3. Allow yourself some compassion
Sometimes you might slip up and say in your children’s earshot “my tummy looks big in this dress” or “I’d better not eat that pizza if I want to fit into my bathing suit” and when you catch yourself you might feel bad.
But don’t, changing the way you act is going to take time, there is a whole lot of unlearning that has to be done. Follow up with: “Sometimes I’m not very kind to myself I’m grateful that I have this amazing body that gave me you”
4. Role model at mealtimes
Children learn from watching what their family members do. If they see parents and siblings sitting around the dining table, sharing a meal, and happily eating family foods, they will learn these social skills and value mealtimes too.
Use this as an opportunity to role model how you would like your children to behave at the table, show good table manners and positive conversation.
If eating dinner with the children is impossible due to work commitments, make breakfast the family meal. It doesn’t really matter when children see you being a positive role model, they just need to see if often.
4. Appreciate your role and your child’s role in the feeding relationship
There are two of you in the feeding relationship, the parent and the child. As a parent, it is your responsibility to make a decision on what food is on the menu, rather than asking them what they want to eat. Children will always ask for their favourite, easy to eat foods. They don’t have great nutritional knowledge!
As a parent it’s also your role to determine where you will eat the meal or snack, and when your child will eat, so their routine or schedule across the day.
And that is all.
Your child’s role in the feeding relationship is to be in charge of their own body, they need to be autonomous and decide what goes into their body, which can mean whether to eat or not, and if so and how much and when to stop.
Acknowledging each others roles in the feeding relationship is respectful and prevents worried parents from overly encouraging fussy children to eat. This is important because young children interpret this as pressure, and pressure switches off appetite, resulting in less nutritious food being eaten at mealtimes.
Children are extremely good at self regulating their food intake and stopping when they are full providing they are being ‘food parented’ in a positive way.
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?
Children are our future, and we have an opportunity for generational change if we can just get this important message out to parents. My plan is to create an awareness week and a huge campaign with people of influence in support, so that my message has global reach.
I’m also teaching my fellow Registered Dietitians all about positive food parenting, something that is missing from our university curriculum.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?
- You don’t have to work in the NHS when you qualify as a dietitian.
- Food and nutrition is only half the story, to help families properly you have to learn the psychology of feeding and food parenting.
- Rumors that being self employed means that you get no sick pay, holiday pay and is isolating and lonely are just rumors and are absolutely untrue.
- You can help parents and children just as effectively in the online space as seeing them face to face in real life.
- Working so publicly and in such an emotive arena means you will get negative comments or online hate, that’s OK. Food, feeding and raking up past experiences can be triggering for some people. Remember negative feedback is often a reflection of your troll’s own psyche
Sustainability, veganism, mental health and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?
They are all linked to food and nutrition, but I’d have to say mental health is the most dearest to me and that’s because children’s mental health can suffer from the way they are parented around food.
We know that restriction of goodies leads to children feeling guilty and shameful when they eat them. We also know that children who have been brought up where food was scarce can be obsessional about it. Foods that are labelled as ‘treats’ make some children feel they aren’t worthy of them or that they haven’t earned it, it can really affect their self esteem and in some cases we see disordered eating as a result.
I think it’s fair to say that none of us want this for our children.
What is the best way our readers can follow you online?
My online information hub has a wealth of free advice, blogs and recipes: www.childrensnutrition.co.uk
Instagram as @thechildrensnutritionist https://www.instagram.com/thechildrensnutritionist/
Facebook Group called The Children’s Nutritionist’s Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheChildrensNutritionistsCommunity
Thank you for these fantastic insights!
Women In Wellness: Sarah Almond-Bushell On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.