Good morning!
My special breakfast this morning was a Green Monster Parfait!
Green Monster Parfait
Ingredients:
- 2 cups spinach
- 1 large banana (reserve 1/4 of banana)
- 1/2 scoop Vega Choc-o-Lot powder
- 1 tbsp chia seeds
- 1 cup almond milk
- 1/3 cup Power House Glonola
Directions: In a blender, blend the spinach, 3/4 of the banana, Vega powder, almond milk, and chia seeds. In a large glass add a few tbsp of the glonola. Now add a large layer of the Green Monster followed by another scoop of Glonola. Finish with remaining GM (you might have some leftover) and top with the 1/4 of banana (sliced) and Glonola.
The Green Monster Parfait was ok, but not wonderful. I think I had high expectations for it and I’m not sure I liked eating it with a spoon.
After tasting my granola again this morning, I concluded that I overcooked it! Whoops.
I guess it is possible to screw it up after all. ;)
I would suggest cooking it for no longer than 10 minutes on each side and not letting it get as dark as I cooked mine.
I also concluded that the clump factor is missing in this recipe.
Checkout my ‘old’ Glonola version…
Choco-Carob:
Total clump factor!
However, the original Glonola had too much clumping and stuck together too much. Maybe I can find a happy medium with both recipes?! :)
I think I am going to make another recipe integrating the original recipe with this one. I will have to tweak it a bit more….you know me, I am picky with my recipes!
It’s Slimming
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Are you ever out in public and you hear a conversation going on and you can’t believe what you are hearing? That was me the other night. I was at a department store looking for a gift for a girlfriend and I passed a group of 3 girls who were looking for back to school clothes. They couldn’t have been more than 9-10 years old.
Girl #1: ‘I need to get some new jeans. All of my jeans at home are fugly.’
Girl #2 & #3: ‘Yea same here.’
The girls were browsing through a couple racks of jeans and holding pairs up as they went along.
Girl #2: ‘I like these ones. I might try them on.’
Girl #1: ‘Those jeans are not slimming at all…they are too light and light colours make you look FAT.’ She scrunched up her face in disgust.
The girl quickly threw down the pair of jeans, as if they had some sort of contagious illness.
Girl #3: ‘I agree, you have to get the dark wash. You will look skinny in them. Dark colours are slimming’
‘Here, try these on. I have this pair and they make your butt look awesome.’
She handed Girl #2 a pair of dark wash jeans to try on.
Then I decided to stop being a creeper and I left the scene.
But, I was sad in my heart for these girls.
They couldn’t have been more than 10 years old and they were already concerned about having jeans that made them look skinny.
I remember being around 11 years old when my disordered eating started to develop. While I admit I didn’t know about slimming jeans (or even had a general fashion sense aside from neon and snap-on bracelets), the feelings were still very real.
It is important that we do not dismiss young girls when they talk about weight or slimming jeans or wanting to look thinner because when you are going through it it, you are like a sponge that absorbs every comment, every magazine ad, or every commercial on TV. Your surroundings are telling you to be ‘skinny’ and to wear ‘slimming’ clothes and so that is what you do.
Our weight-conscious culture seems to infect whatever it touches with messages that you aren’t good enough the way you are and that you need to change your body or wear slimming pants. These messages are hard enough to dismiss when you are an adult let alone an impressionable young girl who is fighting to fit in at school and to find out who she is.
I couldn’t help but wonder as I walked around aimlessly in that department store: What can we do for these girls?
I think two big ways that we can have an impact are 1) Educating about a positive body-image at home and setting a proper example for our kids, perhaps with a great tool like Operation Beautiful. and 2) Introducing special Body-image classes (for girls and boys) into the school curriculum. I don’t think this topic gets enough attention in the school curriculum even though the issue is pervasive and affects all aspects of a student’s life.
Have you ever overheard a similar conversation or perhaps were in a conversation when this was going on? What can we do for young girls who are developing a poor body image?
Great post!
I could not agree more about a class in school on body image, or for it to at least be included meaningfully into health/life management course material!
I was a camp counsellor my first year in University and I lead a cabin of 8 year old girls. The conversation around the dinner table was similar. “Don’t eat that, it will make you fat”, often they wouldn’t eat dinner and would want sweets later in the evening. I made a rule; everyone had to eat a bit of dinner and no negative self/body/food talk at the table. I also explained that we were very active, swimming and hiking everyday and that our bodies needed fuel for energy!
Having a tenuous relationship with food myself, my heart went out to these girls. I think the best thing we can do is lead by example and be as caring and understanding as possible!
I recently found myself getting into running, and eating healthier, including many recipes found on your blog. The initial impetus for this was to lose weight that I’d put on over the past two years. I found myself telling people these past couple weeks that I’d be totally okay with not being able to get back to my 26 year old weight. If I am leading a healthy lifestyle, my body will settle at the size it should be. I am 30, and I only came to that realization now. At 11, there’s no way they can come to that realization without help from us adults (in terms of advertising, your body image class ideas, the brilliant Operation Beautiful post it projects, etc).
Great post Angela!
As a mother of a 3 year old daughter, I think it’s sooo important to stop the fat talk at home, allow your child to see you eat and to see you eat healthy food, to have her watch you exercise, walk, yoga, etc but doing so in moderation, and to just lead by example by being a strong confident woman.
They will emulate what they see and hear. If there is no negative body talk at home, and they see their mom being strong and proud, they will hopefully come to take refuge and solace in that. Not that the bombarding of it will stop in society, but we all must be that one voice, that one light, hoping to raise and change the overall consciousness of society.
Great topic :)
I’ve tried eating my Green Monsters with a spoon before too, and I agree: it’s not my favorite. I like drinking them and getting a green mustache. :)
The clump factor is definitely important in granola. I can’t wait for the “perfect” recipe.
Wow, that is so sad about those girls!! That makes me want to cry. Age 11 is about when it all started happening for me, too. You are crazy influenceable at that age and you have to be so careful. I can’t believe those girls were already worried about how their butt looks and what jeans make them look skinny. I guess it isn’t much of a surprise when all we see on TV is this new slimming jean that makes you look this many sizes smaller. I definitely agree that a positive body-image class would be helpful, but at the same time I’m not sure that it would be. No matter how often you are told “You are beautiful just the way you are” there is still the desire to look like that perfect girl at the beach or that skinny dancer on DWTS. Ah, it’s so hard.
Some days I feel the world is going crazy. The media portrays body image as the solution to all your problems, as the key to happiness! Ironically enough, for me at least, being at peace with my body image is the key to my happiness. If I find these messages overwhelming, I can’t imagine the pressure young girls have to deal with. Sometimes I do find myself wondering about the challenges that my future children will face. This motivates me even more to be at peace with my body because I strongly believe that kids start building their confidence at home.
On another subject, snap-on bracelets ruled!!!!! Haha!
It blows me away how image-conscious young girls are today. I don’t think I ever gave a second’s thought to what was “slimming” when I was 10. I’ve heard some pretty outrageous tween conversations lately, one in particular was last week at the cinema where 2 girls were talking in bathroom stalls about boys and I couldn’t believe how low their self-worth was. Operation Beautiful and classes with the same message would be so helpful.
That’s awful!! So sad :( I remember overhearing a conversation between 2 first graders, FIRST GRADERS, about how they were fat and needed to go on a diet. It broke my heart.
I agree that it starts at home. Dads are super important too, as they help girls build an understanding if what a man is and how they should be treated by a man. I think that has a lot to do with body image as well.
Conversations like that make me so, so sad.
While I never had an eating disorder where I didn’t eat enough, I did have a problem where I ate too much. Despite being a pudgy kid, I never felt bad about myself until I was around 11 years old. In middle school I became hyper aware of the fact that I was larger. Right down to my own friend announcing, “You have a big butt!” when I was putting on my jeans after a sleep over at her house. I didn’t have the willpower to restrain from food, but I did try to hide the fat however I could. I started wearing huge shirts and men’s jeans to hide my figure. To hide my shame. What started when I was eleven continued on until I was twenty-five. And even now, though I am much more balanced and educated, I still get uneasy.
The idea that those little girls are running around, thinking that they are fat, that they need to find clothes that make them look skinny, and that they even need to have good looking butts in the first place is a tragedy. Ever since I started to try and find health and happiness in my own life, I’ve been crying for the eleven year old me who got told she had a big butt. For all of the years where I missed out on life because I felt like an ugly thing like me needed to be in the shadows.
I agree that there needs to be education and involvement in projects that teach these girls to love themselves…and each other. That teaches how much this stuff really hurts and damages a person. I really want to get involved in reaching out to kids on this subject…not sure how I can yet…but I do want to make it a goal to try. Girls shouldn’t have to grow up like that.
Yes! I used to take public transportation daily, so I’ve heard a lot of disturbing body image discussions. Additionally, my STUDENTS (11-14 years old) sometimes felt negatively toward their bodies. It was SO SAD to hear KIDS talking about how they were fat or ugly or how they had not eaten all day.
It is disturbing to note that focus on weight/body image at increasingly younger ages. I think that we need to also keep in mind that the goal of being slim has been around for quite some time. Having a slim figure at the age of 11, however, does seem to be a newer issue facing our culture.
What to me is the real problem, is that there *are* quite a bit of unhealthy behaviors that kids adopt at a younger age, and that many of these kids *are* out of shape, and eating unhealthy foods. Instead of appreciating quality foods, and healthy behaviors, kids seem to only appreciate a particular “look”. Although I have a deep belief that the home determines a child’s outlook for the most part, I do believe that have incorporating a series of speakers who are female atheletes to discuss health could be good on a school/community level. I vividly recall an assembly on AIDS when I was in high school, where many myths/areas of confusion were cleared up by the group of speakers. Something like that could make a difference.
This is so sad. It’s true that schools don’t focus enough on body image — we talk about eating disorders briefly from time to time, but the feelings behind them are never really addressed, and even the students without specific eating disorders may still have those strong feelings of inadequacy and striving to reach some ideal impossible image. I think classes like that would have been helpful for me when I was young, and now that I’m nineteen (but turning twenty tomorrow!) I have to sort of figure those things out for myself… long after those feelings of inadequacy have already sunk in. It’s hard. But hopefully future generations of girls won’t feel the way I do, or the way other girls who struggle with weight and body image do!
I hate hearing anyone talk negatively about their looks and body, especially young girls who have so much ahead of them.
I make it my mission to never refer to the way I look or “feel” outloud, and it actually has helped me stop having negative body image thoughts as well. I also try to steer conversations away from body talk when I’m with friends who are about to start bashing themselves.
As positive as I try to be about my body, there are times it can be very hard to find a balance between thinking and feeling confidently. Some days a cute outfit or fun makeup DO help me to feel better, and I think that’s okay sometimes. I have to remind myself that these are temporary and its a positive body image in the LONG run that will keep me happy consistently.
I think we have to start by feeling good about ourselves. I have so so so so many girlfriends who constantly say “ugh, I look fat” and “I can’t wear this because I’ll look like a whale” etc etc. None of us have kids yet, but if we already think this about ourselves now, how will we feel about our bodies after they change drastically in pregnancy and we have kids? I can’t imagine it’s going to get much better. I think it’s so sad and we need to embrace being healthy instead of being thin. I know I am guilty of having those moments too, but I try to be aware of them so I can stop the negative thinking in its tracks.
I very much agree with this. In the last month, I have really started to work with myself through writing to overcome some deep-seated (but not often-acknowledged) struggles I have with body image. By all accounts I’m healthy, active, fit, happy, and successful in life/career/family/etc. If *I* can let go of absurd notions about body/life perfection, why would I expect young girls, who are just barely understanding their world, to be able to let them go?
If I ever have a daughter, or regularly encounter a young girl/woman, I would want to represent that a generally healthy life, combined with following one’s true passions brings happiness and fulfillment far beyond anything you “achieve” by fitting into a particular size clothing.
Love this point…very true
This breaks my heart! I think I was about 10 or 11 when my disordered eating started and was full blown anorexic by 16.
My daughter is 16, a dancer and couldn’t be more proud of her strong athletic body. I have always told her as long as you eat healthy foods to fuel your body, no size is too big (fat) or undesirable. I wish the world would see people for their beauty!
When we celebrated my daughters seventh birthday this year i asked one girl (6 years old) if she´d like to eat one more piece of cake. She answered: “No, if i eat more i will get fat.”
I was totally speechless!
OMG!! That is so sad :(
I think it is really important to start a conversation with young girls when they start talking like that. I was looking at my wedding pictures with me 6-year-old niece when she mentioned how “fat” I looked. Well I WAS. I weighed almost 100 pounds more back then!
But we talked about how “fat” isn’t something nice to stay. I talked about how happy I was that day because I was marrying a very special man. And how he loved me for everything I was and still am.
It really worried me because at a play place a little girl had told my niece to move her “big fat butt.” I think that’s where she first heard the word and I don’t want her to think there is anything wrong with the body God gave her.
I worked at a kids camp during the summer and often the lunch time scene was horrifying. There were kids as young as 6 years old discussing calories- I wanted to cry..6!!! I didn’t even know what a calorie was until I was like 12 or older. I had 9 and 10 year olds saying, “You shouldn’t have more than 1200 calories a day.” I obviously jumped in and said my part, (Umm, 1200 is not enough guys! You are growing kids and we don’t count calories- we eat when we are hungry and our bodies tells us we need fuel!) but I really think that the parents definitely play a HUGE role. Media is huge as well. Things like Operation Beautiful are awesome too! One person CAN make a difference, so I feel we all have an obligation to speak up if we feel able. It may make a difference in one young girls life! :)
You should have put the GM in a BOWL!!! With glonola on top!
I’ve definitely heard little girls talk about being “fat.” It’s very surprising and sad how young these negative thoughts can start..