Hello everyone and welcome. You’re listening to SuperPower Mommas, and I’m excited to be with you once again today. Today, our topic is loving yourself is loving your kids. What do you think? You know, as moms, we start out by having our children and then we find ourselves really consumed in the busyness of being a mom and taking care of so many things and there’s so many things that are brand new to us. We also are experiencing perhaps stress and exhaustion because we’ve experienced the birthing of a child, losing sleep, all the different things that go along with being a mother. How do we navigate that? How do we actually love ourselves so that we are loving our kids?
Well, today, I am so excited because Alasen Zarndt is joining me. She is the Nutrition Doula. Alasen is a mom of two. She’s an engineer and a science geek and integrated nutrition coach. With her business, The Nutrition Doula is using nutrition training to care for pregnancy, postpartum, and breastfeeding moms with the power of food. Her clients go from being stressed out and exhausted zombie moms to moms who get their ideal body weight, are full of energy, no longer slaves to their hormones, and feel like themselves again. She believes that we, as moms, deserve just as much care as our babies do, and that one of the most powerful ways to give ourselves that care is through great nutrition.
Welcome, Alasen. I’m so excited to have you here on the show.
I’m super excited too. Thanks for having me, Laura.
Yeah. I loved your website when I got an opportunity to check it out and I hope everyone will, we’ll give the address to them in the notes here. But in the meantime, what a delightful, cheerful place to land and to really research how it is to be a mom who has experienced the challenges of birthing and the challenges of having a young one and see that there is hope for something more.
Yeah, a big goal for the site is to get the message out there, for new moms especially, that it doesn’t have to be the struggle that we’re all conditioned to believe we have to go through when going through pregnancy and postpartum and breastfeeding journey. I really want moms to be able to know that based on getting the right nutrients into your body so that it functions correctly makes all of that much easier and a much happier time.
Yeah, and honestly, when we see we’re in such a transition time period right now in history and moms are really going through that change in a profound way, because how we viewed parenting and motherhood prior is shifting. It’s going from draining us because we have to be so immersed, to a place where we can actually look after ourselves without feeling judgment and have an opportunity to be really powerfully there for our children. Would you agree?
Absolutely. Yeah. I don’t know if you’ve seen that meme that’s out there, but it says we expect moms to work like they don’t have kids and parents like they don’t have a job. That really sums up where we have been, I would say, for like the last 20 years or maybe a little bit more. The mom who has it all, who does it all, the person who gets four hours of sleep a night because they have to fit everything in, and really we’re finding it’s a recipe for complete burnout. You can just Google burnout and you’ll find all these articles now, we’re standing up pretty much and saying, “No, no more. You can’t put this on us. This is not humanly right or fair or even a life that we want to have.” So yeah, I’m happy to be part of that message that’s out there saying, hey, there’s another way.
Yeah, yeah. When you think about the work that goes into being a parent in general, father or mother, those efforts that are put into that, really the children look to the parents for the role models and they also are the ones that will become the workers and the governmental officials, however that’s going to be set up in the future. They’re the ones that will eventually be making decisions in the world, and so the more powerfully we can parent in a way that sustains us, we know that our children will create habits of the same.
Exactly, exactly. It’s about teaching them the value in, I don’t really want to say self-care, it’s kind of a buzzword, but the value in caring for yourself so you can show up in your life as a whole person.
Yeah, and we’re going to get into that in the second part of the show because I know you have some information about that, that you really would like to share.
But to begin with, we always start off our show with what’s your superpower, so what’s your mama superpower?
Oh, so being the engineering science geek that I have been, I would say my superpower is I am very good at recognizing patterns in a sort of outside-of-the-box way. When working with clients and they’re really stuck, say on a certain nutrition thing or they have a habit that they just can’t seem to kick or things like that, I can often talk to them for a more expanded view about what’s going on with their life and find something that’s way over here in left field that may actually have an effect on the habit that they’ve been working on trying to change and connect those dots. Often, which the client’s like, “I don’t know how this worked, but it worked.” Or they answer like, “I never would’ve realized that these two things are actually a cause-and-effect related thing, but you seem to have found that or noticed it.” Yeah, I don’t know. I’ve noticed throughout my life that not everybody sees the patterns the way that I do. So I guess that would be the superpower.
That is really cool, yeah. What a great skill or superpower to have, because obviously you’ve already relayed a little bit about how that assists you in helping others in your work. I’m curious, you have two children, how old are your children?
Six and three.
Okay, so they’re still little tykes.
Oh, yes.
Anyway, how does your superpower assist you in that aspect of life, as a mom towards your children?
Hmm. Well, I think that one way that it helped out is, again, being sort of data driven. When my oldest was younger, I would follow along with a lot of parenting groups and blogs and whatnot and friends of mine who had kids who were slightly older than her and read what their struggles were and what they were going through, and the comments in the group is like, “Hey, is this behavior normal? Is this behavior not normal,” and was able to basically take all of those hundreds and hundreds if not more anecdotal things in and then build a model in my head based off of like, okay, 80% of the kids acted this way in this situation and these are the outliers and that situation.
So when my daughter was going through being a toddler and starting solids and all these things that as a first time parent you stress out over, I was able to scale it back and be like, “Oh, wait. No, I remember that between this age and this age, this is when this usually happens because I’ve seen this been happening with these kids who are slightly older than mine.” It was a way of synthesizing the information out there and honing that … You know that mama instinct where you’re kind of like, “No, my gut is telling me something’s wrong.”
Yes, yes.
This was a way of honing that or backing it up.
And being able to articulate it in a way that-
Right.
Gave you a chance to understand it. That is really cool. That is really cool. It’s an interesting thing that you did. For me, when my kids were younger, I was gifted with a, … It was actually developed for learning disabilities type things and to head that off, it was called A Growing Child, I think. That did a similar thing like what you said, is it kind of mapped out what to expect in different age groups each month of a child’s growth up to six years old actually. So very, very cool that you were able to see that that was a way that you could help your children and yourself through the parenting experience.
We have to take a break and when we come back, I would love to dive in more into the topic of self-care, because loving yourself is loving your kids, and how does that tie in with the modern use of those words, the buzzwords, self-care. I think you’re going to shed some wonderful light on this. It’s going to really assist our listeners, so stay with us please. Also, Alyssa, Alasen, I’m sorry, would you please share where people can find you?
Yeah, you can find me, my website is called yournutritiondoula.com, all one word, no spaces. You can also find me on Facebook @thenutritiondoula or Instagram, TheNutritionDoula, any of the social sites there. Then, yeah, that’s it.
That’s beautiful, that’s beautiful. That’ll all be in the show notes for you, everyone. Just stay with us, we’re going to be right back. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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