Stacey Clare Interviewer: Hi Stacey thank you very much for being here. Interviewee: Hello. Thank you for having me. Interviewer: It s so exciting to have you in this course. I've been following your page for such a long time and you have the best, best ideas. Stacey Clare, a healthy mum, please introduce yourself and let everyone know who you are. Interviewee: Hello I'm Stace and the long name is Stacey Clare, A Healthy Mum and I'm just that. I'm a mama of two young little boys. I have a oneyear-old and a three-year-old, and I'm all about helpings mums show them how to eat better and how easy it can be to feed them whole foods every day. Interviewer: That s awesome and as I just said, you have the best recipes on your Facebook page that you post beautiful photos. Everybody check that out, we ll pop a link below of where people can find you. I guess it all starts with the why? Would you mind sharing with everyone why and why you do what you do? Interviewee: I used to work a very different work lifestyle which I think so many of us did. My background was advertising and all those clichés you ve heard of it are 100% true. My health was just so toxically bad as a result of it I used to eat potato chips at eight o clock at night at my desk, would finish at ten o clock, go for a beer, and then my husband and I were wondering why we couldn t fall pregnant. We tried, and we tried, and we tried for two years and it wasn t until I started looking at a different kind of lifestyle that I realised that maybe I could control my own health issues. I was riddled with polycystic ovarian syndrome and endometriosis as well. I d had two operations and I was going in for my third because that was really my only hope of falling pregnant and it was something I was always wanted to do was to be a mama so it was really, really important that I did this and after that I was pregnant literally two days following operation. I had a great few, probably two months of pregnancy and then things weren t ideal for me and I actually had my first little boy eight weeks to the day early. Every time I guess I still tear up. He came out at 35 centimeters
big and I didn t get to meet him for six hours and he spent nearly six seek in the hospital. That was a big thing for me that I just went, If there s something that I can do, I want to do it. I understand 100% places for modern medicine and I'm so incredibly grateful for it because I have my son s health, but I also think that if there s anything else I could be doing then I want to do that and that s kind of how I felt like falling this whole foods lifestyle and I guess a happy heart as well. It doesn t really annoy me to go in and make oats for breakfast because I know that that s going to make him feel really, really well and he s going to have lots of energy and all of our health is going to be better. It s a long-winded why but yeah. Interviewer: Not at all. I think we all have a passion and that s why we ask our course attendees to share their why right at the start, and some of them are quite small and then some are really long and at the end of the day we will go into why and we are all here for a reason. You ve just given me goose bumps it s an amazing story and isn t it amazing what food can do to our bodies. Interviewee: Absolutely. This little guy had antibiotics up to his eyeballs when he was in hospital, but he s never had antibiotics since he doesn t touch wood,he doesn t get sick like I'm not that family where we have common colds. He drinks bone broths out of a bottle and a sippy cup but we call it meat juice because that s easier to take. We ll go to a party and he ll eat what s there and we ll come home and we'll clean it up afterwards; he s great. Interviewer: I wanted you here to talk breakfast and lunch ideas specifically. You run a 21-day free lunch box challenge Interviewee: Breakfast challenge. Interviewer: Breakfast sorry, breakfast challenge Interviewee: Good idea, good idea. Interviewer: It s fantastic. We struggle in our house with breakfast and I think a lot of people struggle with breakfast. I guess it s one of those meals of the day where the morning is crazy, there s a certain time frame that you ve got to be out of the house by, and you get in the habit of having the same thing every day. Well, I grew up on toast and vegemite that was my breakfast every day for lots of years, 20 odd years. To change that is really,
really difficult. What s your advice on how to switch breakfast up? How do you transition into a more of a healthy breakfast? Interviewee: Yeah, yeah. I totally agree with you Weetabix at this end so I totally 100% get it. I think my biggest advice for anybody that wants to go down this avenue because we know that it s great for us that we want these tactics to get there, is to get organised the night before. I'm really great at going into the kitchen in the afternoon and that s my playschool time. I'm that mum I truly admit it my kids will watch play school for half an hour and I go bonkers in there I'm like, quick, quick, quick. If I've got the oven on then I'm going to put some sausages in to start cooking, or if I need to do some eggs then I ll put in those too as well. Just excuse me, two seconds I ve just heard the boys come home... Interviewer: Are they all right? Interviewee:... but I'm just going to close the door so that they don t come in. Let me start that again. Interviewer: Are they okay? Interviewee: They're being looked after. Their grandparents are in town so they ve just come back from the park. I found getting ready the night before so if you ve got the oven on, put some sausages in there. If you're steaming some vegetables put some eggs in the bottom in that water. Use everything that you're doing at that same time to be able to cater for another meal. The reason I love doing that is earlier on for me I had two non-sleepers my boys didn t even think about sleeping till they were one, so it was a bargaining power that I had with my husband really that s where it started that I d go, Babe, there s a boiled egg and some avocado in the fridge could you mash that up? And that s a great breakfast with a little bone broth for babies starting solids. But that would also be his breakfast because he d do a bit of toast and then he d mash the avocado and an egg. I d wake up and do the same thing but it was done from the night before. I also guess I'm a fan of using the slow cooker and that s something that I've got quite a few recipes on my website for that. One of them is rice pudding made in a slow cooker. It sounds amazing but it s some coconut cream brown rice and apples and cinnamon on top and you put all that into
the slow cooker and turn it on for eight hours and then you wake up in the morning and it s done. Interviewer: So you ll also add water in? Interviewee: Yes there s a bit of water yeah and coconut milk as well. It s a great recipe that there s no preservatives and additives making sure you buy the coconut of course, but I love that because the nut fades into things and I know we ll touch on it, but then that s their snack in their lunchbox for them to go to school with right? And for me that s my snack in the afternoons if I'm feeling low, at three o clock in the afternoon I can have that. It s has made such a big bowl with that s three probably breakfast for us as well. So yeah. The other things I love that can really, really work well that I like making in bulk is things like chia puddingsl. That s such an awesome one and I ve just had it in my breakfast challenge actually, all the guys are having it today for the first time. It s been so lovely seeing them all taste chai pudding for the first time in their life. Its consistency is actually really, really good. Interviewer: Yeah, I've always love chia pudding. I ve got that recipe on our website that I've just posted and yeah it s beautiful. Interviewee: It s so good and again that stuff that fits into lunch boxes like why can t that be a morning tea for the lunch box? You could put it in one of those little squishes if that s how your kids like it, or just for me I put it in a Pyrex glass container and it goes to school. Interviewer: For those families that are trying to transition like I know my daughter, for example, she wouldn t eat bone broth and taste her chia pudding, so what s some really simple recipes like those ones just starting out? How do you encourage, obviously it s not a process of changing everything overnight and it s a slow process and step by step gradual changes. How do you start to do it? How do you do it? Interviewee: A great example would be something like baked beans. Am I right thinking would your daughter eat baked beans Heinz all that stuff? Interviewer: Yes, I try to make them now and she does eat the home made ones.
Interviewee: You see that s exactly it. That s what you did too so that s a similar thing that I teach my guys is that start off with the Heinz if you know that s good and then make a home-made version. My homemade version I use salsa and I find an additive and preservative free one and then I put in the cannellini beans. And then do that as half and half, and leave it like that for a week or two and then it s adding a bit more of a spoonful of the homemade baked beans and it s slowly transitioning that s a great way. Similar thing with kami and crusted bread as well, I often hear that we d love toast, kids love the toast the white version. There s so many great bakeries out there that do a brilliant sourdough in the square version. Buy that and then pop on the side a carrot stick or whatever your child likes in terms of vegetables. My guys won t eat a carrot stick - it s bonkers unless I've cooked it in like it s steamed. I don t know but they ll eat a cucumber stick so that s great. I put that on the breakfast plate and then slowly it s weaning off so much bread and upping him on to cucumber sticks, or putting some tomatoes there. It s knowing that there s absolutely no pressure to make it perfect and that s something I share a lot on my Facebook page. I'm not that mum that is immune any of this kind of fussy eating and I've had written so many blog posts about it. The other day my little guy ate a quarter of a tomato like a little tiny cherry one and he s three and I said just keep going, Guys you ve got to try again. You know when you're feeling defeated, you ve just to keep trying. Interviewer: Yes, I totally agree with you. My little guy wouldn t eat sweet potato and we were really trying to wean off white potato I think because it didn t make us feel very good and I m all for eating white potato because it s a vegetable but we would anyway so I was making a lot of sweet potatoes and he would not have it and I just kept putting it on his high chair and putting it on and then one day probably took six months of wasting sweet potato, but then one day he just picked it up and ate it. I was like, Hooray! I'm so glad that I persistently did that, so yeah we're pretty encouraged to keep going. Interviewee: Clearly and find your tribe to support that. Like you mentioning you have a lovely Facebook group I have one as well, it s so awesome to be part of those kind of really tough things where you can go, Gosh this just worked or it didn t. What tips are you using? And chat with mums and stuff at the park. I'm always talking to them about ideas like if I
say they should I remember running around with a whole apple like, My kids never ate a whole apple? Until they were like, Just keep giving it to them and give it to them in the back of the car where they can t chuck it and get up and run away and play with their toys. I was like, Well that s a good idea. I guess I d be going for the cereal too because there s so many kids that love cereal because we often ate it as well. There s one cereal that my kids will eat and I hear that Weetabix is okay. I haven t really bought it we don t eat much wheat in our family and that s totally probably because it doesn t agree with me so much and I tend to like to eat a breakfast that all of us can eat because I don t want to cater for all the different what everyone wants to eat. I just want to make one meal and get out of the kitchen. Brown rice puffs really, really awesome. They ll literally pack brown rice puffs and that s it. We will often have that and that s our default. My husband if I've gone for a run in the morning and I haven t sorted breakfast he ll put brown rice puffs with some kefir and yoghurt or just milk on top. A little sprinkling of chia seeds again that s a great way to start introducing things I'm talking a teaspoon so they see them and then when they start getting them in pudding it s not so foreign to them and that s a great breakie. I do notice though that when you eat that highly refined cereal because it s still something real but there s no really good fats or really good proteins in their vegetables they re hungry by ten o clock. Whereas if I've cooked a whole heap of sausages the night before and they're having that with an avocado, they re full until eleven o clock in the day. Interviewer: Absolutely we have been finding that out as well. That s some really awesome ideas on breakfast, thank you very much, so what about lunch. Now you have the most beautiful lunchbox e-book. Interviewee: Healthy lunch box, yeah thank you. Interviewer: I've been lucky enough to read that with the wellness bundle that we were involved in and I wanted to ask you what you're favorite go-to lunches are for the kids.
Interviewee: Yeah. Number one left overs I probably sound like this horrible mother that likes to doesn t cook too much for her kids but it really is that it s the easiest way. I jazz them up differently and that s a great way choice especially to your tribe that s often catering for allergies or wanting to make sure they re moving away from additives and any processed food. If you can give them what you ve had for dinner, slightly differently, it s a lot easier to know that it s real food. Great examples for those that I've written down is things like if you ve had spaghetti Bolognese, putting an egg through it and some cheese and then baking them into little muffins, perfect. Interviewer: That s a great idea. Interviewee: Leftover stir fry, add more rice to it, kids love rice you know that, if you cook it in some broth that is perfect and roll it up in the spring rolls right. Any leftover you are talking about sweet potato that your little guy wouldn t eat that s also going to be used now. Mine were similar. I got to these recipes that they were leaving half an avocado so I mashed that through rice and then that was the glue to make a sushi. So I d just roll that up with some tin tuna and then that was it. Interviewer: You re a genius. That is so awesome. Interviewee: I think with the lunch boxes is so often because we all grew up with is a sandwich is that that s kind of where we got to. I would really recommend and as you said it can be quite polarising for kids especially with school age ones if they go in school and they want to look like everybody else, so they want to get up, eat something quickly and get running. You start doing things differently on the weekends so just say, I'm not going to have any sandwiches on the weekend. Just so that you can start showing them a different way to eat. That could be something in going I'm going to cook up a whole heap of chicken drumsticks and we ll have that again with some cut up vegetables on the side or we ve got some leftover pasta; let s have that for lunch. I will often cook a big frittata and that s a really common lunch for all of us and I ll freeze them up, and I guess the thing with that is just something to keep your mind is that don t always give them the same lunch. We don t want to eat the same lunch everyday so they probably won t. I love food and I want to eat as much of a different variety that I can.
Try and give them things differently and get them out there making lunch with you. My little guys have one of those beautiful planetbox silver pinto boxes and I make their lunch box when I'm making dinner and we ve got two little stools that they literally both are on. My one-year-old will stand or I ll often put him up on the bench and I make sure it s safe so no one judge me there but I ll say, What are we going to put into your lunch box? And if I'm chopping up some carrots to have with dinner, they will put that in and I ll chop up some fruit at the same and I find that if they re really empowered to put their own foods in, there s more often that they ll eat it. I ll talk through with them at their level of why we re including things, so a great lunch box is we know there needs to be a good heap of protein and every family is different. Some like to have a meat form of protein and some like to have their proteins from a legume and vegetable source. For me, I eat it from an animal source I just make sure it s the most ethical and best meat that I can get my hands on and we eat very little of it. So we will buy sausages and we ll have one of those in our lunch box with a really good fat which is something like half an avocado or again it could be something like an egg which is a protein and a good fat source as well. I love doing that because then I know that their blood sugar levels are going to stay constant as well. Hormones are made of fat and proteins so that s going to be level and especially for me having two little boys their testosterone going through them at the moment is as much there is when they go through puberty. Interviewer: Is that probably what s wrong with my son? Interviewee: I know. Yeah, I know right? If you put in sugar into the lunch box of a natural source, try and combine it with a fat. The way I say we re doing that is if you're going to say cut up some fruit have a little bit of cheese with it. What the fat will do is that when you're eating that sugar is it will basically piggyback on the back of it and it will make sure that sugar is released slower into our blood stream so that we don t get these tubes blocked. If the kids are at home, if my ones are eating fruit, I ll give them a little bit of yoghurt or some nuts or whatever it is on the side and they ll eat them at the same time. It s just combining those together just to always try and
make the food count a little bit more rather than just putting in straight sugar. Interviewer: Okay, okay, awesome. What s your opinion on seeds because our most common I guess frustrating thing when it comes to lunches it s the allergies at school and not being able to pack nuts, and not being able to pack seeds and some are dairy free and it can get a little bit crazy. I understand why those rules are in place but it does make it really hard. I love my kids eating nuts and cashews and almonds and stuff, but obviously they can t go to school. What s your opinion on fats when it comes to pepitas and sunflower seeds and things like that. Are they a good alternative over nuts? Interviewee: Absolutely, absolutely. They re fantastic. I love cooking with them because I will literally start with using the recipe from nut meal, almond being the most common variety of the nut meal. You can substitute them basically one for one. Just keep in mind that they can be a little bit more bitter so adding in a little bit of extra vanilla bean can help with that or if there s a slice that you re adding in cinnamon rather than using sugar to counteract that bitterness; a little bit of citrus or something. Interviewer: Okay, so what would you switch for almond meal? Interviewee: I would switch half pumpkin, half sunflower seeds. Interviewer: Okay, cool which is great for when it comes to school. Interviewee: Absolutely. Interviewer: That s awesome. Interviewee: Yeah, yeah. You can make that kind of stuff up too. Like I often find it easier because I don t have a Thermomix but if you did you could whiz that up and make like half a kilo of it, put it in the freezer. That s where I store all my nuts and seeds. Nuts and seeds are incredibly high in fats that were just talking about which means that when they are exposed to oxygen and light they start to decompose. They ll lose a lot of their goodness in there. If you pop them in the freezer that will, all of those nutrients will stay in and then you can still literally eat them straight from the freezer but you re going to get a longer shelf life out of them. For us all that are buying
good quality nuts and seeds you want to make sure that you re getting as long as you can out of them. Interviewer: Sure. I could talk to you all day. You are up with it all. So if you could give me one piece of advice to our families out there what would that be? Interviewee: What do I say? Use your time really well in the kitchen so you don t have to be in there for so long. Interviewer: Yeah, think smarter not harder. Interviewee: That s right and that could be anything from spending two hours on a Sunday afternoon in there or it could be like what I do is that I go there most days and I spend a good half an hour in there. That s because I guess I've done the meal plan work. I've written down what we re going to have and I ll usually say breakfast, lunch and dinner. I don t do it every week by any means; I wish I did because the weeks that I do it feels so good because I know what we re eating and there s no anxiety about, Crap! It s five o clock. But it just means things can flow quicker because I can actually write when we re going to have cold pork burritos for dinner, okay that feeds into lunch the next two days and breakfast I ll make into a fritters with some shredded sweet potato and we ll crack some eggs on top and that will cook underneath the grill while I'm getting the kids for changed for the day. I think really using your time really, really well and make sure it s a really nice environment in your kitchen. I understand that we can t all have the bells and whistles kitchens but that might be just saying, I want to buy a really nice chopping board, or I'm going to go and get my knives sharpened, and this is something I do now, every month down at our local market in my town I can get my knives sharpened by a professional. It sounds silly but it makes me really happy I come home and I'm like, Look at these tomatoes. Look at how easy that it cuts. Interviewer: That doesn t sound silly at all, that sounds brilliant. We talk about mindfulness when we interviewed Amy from Health Mama at the end of our course and she says the exact same thing that sometimes it s not about making the little things in life that make us really happy. It doesn t mean that we have to do an hour long yoga session on our own when you
can t fit it in and you're feeling stressed like it can be as simple as going and getting your knives sharpened. I love that. Interviewee: Yeah, absolutely and I think I love them well I'm insane because I think that s so often true when people are finding all of these tricky the three side things it's actually that that s more of an issue and that s awesome, that s not a bad thing, that s going great. I found what my reason is for finding this hard, I'm going to solve that and then everything else will start flowing. Interviewer: Yeah, thank you very much. We better wrap it up but where can people find you and we ll pop all the links below. Interviewee: Yes you can find me on staceyclare.com and I also have a Facebook page which you can check that out too. And I guess the last thing to say is I am a Health Coach I work one-on-one with mamas pretty much every night of the week and helping them with stuff like these so how can we bring in together on a one-on-one level? So, yeah. Interviewer: Thank you. Interviewee: Awesome don t worry, nice chatting with you. Interviewer: Bye. Interviewee: Bye.