Balancing Act

Living a healthy lifestyle is all about balance. We search for work/ life balance for healthy relationships with our family and friends. We try to find balance in our personal life and make time for ourselves but finding balance in our diet is often over looked.

I've often gone off on long winded tangents about keeping balance in your diet but like most advice I dish out, I often need to be reminded of it myself. I've always tried to feed the toddler as organically as possible and even managed to avoid giving him any refined sugar till nearly his second birthday. The holidays are the hardest time for me to keep our healthy lifestyle going as I tend to get caught up in the nostalgia of holiday meals past. Today was one such day.

Halloween is just a couple of days away and I kept seeing fun little posts on Pinterest about making little pumpkin shaped rice crispy treats and instead of making my Salted Maple Cashew Crispy Treats I decided to make the real deal. As the toddler and I were melting the corn syrup laden marshmallows with my organic butter I started to feel really guilty. I should have bought the organic rice cereal and why didn't I make the marshmallows from scratch with out the corn syrup. Ugh, I'm feeding my child garbage all for the sake of nostalgia! Then a little voice in my head told me to chill out.

Balance, we have always said we want the toddler to grow up with balance. We don't want these types of treats to be treated as taboo or else the second he is out of our sight he is going to feast on the forbidden foods. I don't want to tell him he can't have what the other kids are eating at the birthday parties. So I feel if he gets to eat them from time to time it won't be a big deal. As for today after I cut him a piece of rice crispy s treat (I didn't shape them into cute little pinterest worthy pumpkins after all) he ate a few bites and asked for some carrots, because at two he is already learning balance.