Hello, and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. You know, I was talking this week to a mum and a dad who were really paying attention, great attention to their child's diet, and they use this term, empty calories. And I've heard it before, you know, in terms of diet, but it seemed that there was like a metaphor, perhaps, of the same sort of thing applying to our kids' lives in general.
Now, you know, I was driving home after this conversation and thinking, yeah, you know, empty calories, that's what we try and avoid for our kids to eat, you know, foods that are laden with solid fats and refined sugars and just, you know, packaged stuff that we know will make them, you know, it won't give them the nutrition they need, and we know it won't do much for their health, and eventually, if they keep eating that food, you know, it's going to have pretty negative health effects and obesity and so on. Now, we know that in kids' diets, and even though some of that food sneaks into many of our kids' diets, it's something that we really are, most of us, I'd say, like a vast majority of parents are really onto that and try and avoid doing that for their kids. And even if we are doing it more than we should, somewhere, somehow, we know this is not quite right, even through economic necessity or whatever, we know that it shouldn't be this way.
But the same is kind of true for our kids' lives in terms of what we bring them, not just with food, but with what they sort of consume, if I can put it that way, in their daily rhythms and schedules. We want them to have things that are full of value and full of not just nutritional value, but full of family value. I think there's the same sort of thing as empty calories has got to do with, in one way, giving our kids stuff in their daily life that we know is not nutritional, that we know that it's not good for them.
For example, we really try and, you know, in the Simplicity movement, we try really hard to not give our kids too many toys, too many books, just too much. That too muchness is like just too much food, right? It just leads to obesity. Too many toys, too many books, too much clothing.
It leads to a kind of an obesity, but an obesity in a much more sort of subtle way in that it's just this sort of passive, weighty, junk-filled too muchness that can come into our lives. And the same is true when we overschedule our kids. If we're taking them here and there and here and there, it's okay.
Some of it, a little bit of sugar is fine, like a play date there, a play date here. It's all good. But when it starts sort of getting edgy, when we know that it's edging towards empty calorinas, in other words, that play date wasn't strictly necessary.
That extra sports club, you know, did we really have to do it? Does he, she really have to be on that travel team? Did they really have to have that extra after-school activity? It starts, again, becoming too much. It starts just not being okay. And you could say, well, you know what? Those play dates are with good families.
Those clubs are with, you know, those sports clubs, they're with good coaches. Those music lessons are with good music teachers. And it's all costing an arm and a leg, but it's good.
Okay, it's good. Well, here's another metaphor that occurs to me. It's not so much empty calories this time.
It's over-vitamizing. Now, I heard this term of over-vitamizing, and I had no clue what it meant. But there was a nutritional panel speaking at a workshop that I was helping with a little while ago.
And they were saying, basically, if you have a relatively, if you have a good diet, you simply eat well, nothing sort of spectacular, but you're just eating sensibly, then what a lot of people do by taking supplements, and more and more supplements that are not particularly recommended by medical professionals, they're just supplements for supplement sake, more vitamins, more minerals, and so on and so on. The case they were making is that the body doesn't necessarily absorb them. More vitamin B, if you're getting enough vitamin B through a healthy diet, is just going to be excreted.
Same with vitamin D, vitamin C. If we're eating a good balanced diet, taking supplements, and particularly taking, they were saying, taking too many supplements, is actually just not being absorbed. Now, I don't know if you can see where I'm going with the metaphor of this, but, you know, these clubs are all good, and so on. But if we've got a balanced, you know, roughly, more or less, rhythmical, balanced home life, that we do our best just to keep it sort of all in order, and we're feeling, you know, we could do better, but it's okay, you know, we're doing fine.
That's kind of all most children, almost all most children need, in my opinion. They, by having too many clubs, too much activity, too many playdates, it's just like taking vitamins on top of an already healthy diet. There's just no point, and they have no place to be absorbed.
And so, these two metaphors, I've been thinking about over the last week or so, of empty calories, and this over-vitamizing really did occur to me that they have, they have real meaning when it comes to judging how we live our lives. And in a funny old sense, it gave me a little bit more of a permission to say to myself, you know, maybe we don't need that extra club for my daughter. You know, maybe we don't need, and you know, obviously, I'm pretty bought into this, but just applying the what is good for our body is also good for our soul, and good for our spirit.
I think there's an enoughness about what we can create in our homes that is of real nutrition, both to our soul and spirit, by having confidence that we don't need to do all that extra stuff. Okay, I hope that's helpful. Bye-bye for now.
