Bonus EP9-Randy Rolfe-Homeschooling and Healthy Eating: Parenting Wisdom

Guest Bio: Randy Rolfe

Randy Rolfe is a veteran speaker on nutrition, parenting, and life skills. She is author of nine acclaimed books, most recently The Single Ingredient Diet: Transform Your Relationship to Food in Just 21 Days. She has appeared on over 50 TV network talk shows, and 100s of radio shows and podcasts. A natural health advocate and family counselor now for five decades, Randy brings her message to the next generation, so that they can take control of their health and lead vibrant lives.

Where to find Randy:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/randyrolfe

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/randyrolfe10

Today, we dive into the vital connection between nutrition and family life with expert Randy Rolfe. As a seasoned speaker and author of the Single Ingredient Diet, Randy emphasizes that transforming your relationship with food can lead to healthier, happier families in just 21 days. Throughout the conversation, she shares her journey from attorney to nutrition advocate, highlighting how she used her own experiences to guide families toward better dietary choices. Randy also discusses the importance of involving children in cooking and food preparation, making the process fun and educational while fostering a love for real, wholesome foods. With practical tips on creating a supportive environment for healthy eating, this episode is packed with insights to help families thrive together.

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Copyright 2024 Kristina & Herb Heagh-Avritt

Today, I have the pleasure of introducing Randy Rolfe. Randy Rolfe is a veteran speaker on nutrition, parenting, and life skills.

She is the author of nine acclaimed books, most recently the Single Ingredient Diet. Transform your relationship to food in just 21 days. She has appeared on over 50 TV network talk shows and hundreds of radio shows and podcasts.

A natural health advocate and family counselor now for five decades, Randy brings her message to the next generation so that they can take control of their health and lead vibrant lives. Welcome, Randy. It is a pleasure to have you here. Really looking forward to this conversation.

Well, thank you, Herb & Kristina. I appreciate being here.

Yes, thank you so much. You know, we talk when we talk about our everything with our other guests on podcasts and stuff. Nutrition is so important.

Expectations for our children, helping them learn, all of these things are just woven together. And if we don't have that, then our children aren't thriving the way they really should be.

So I am super interested in hearing a little bit more about what you do with families, for families, for everybody to get this nutrition in check.

And first off, normally we talk about how you got started. How did you get started being the nutrition guru? Start talking about this on podcasts and radios. How did you get involved?

Well, yes, my first career was as an attorney. I had traveled the world with my family, and I wanted to make world peace.

And then in college, I met my husband and decided hopping all over the world wasn't going to be the lifestyle I wanted because I wanted to be with him and have children. And so I had learned from my great uncle, Scott Earring and his wife Helen. You may know about them. They were famous for their organic gardens.

And so when I was working at a law firm in Philadelphia, I was talking about the things I was learning, reading about nutrition. And I'll never forget the moment that one of my colleagues came in and he.

He burst into my office, got down on his knees and said, randy, Randy, thank you for getting me through this long case. Because I. He had asked me, how do I stay awake?

I'm staying up all night and I'm having, you know, beer and pretzels to try to stay awake, and it doesn't work. And it was a long trial, and he was exhausted, and he made it through. He said, we won, but only because of you.

So I thought, well, I really had fun with this. It was more fun than writing briefs, and that I had something to really share. So that was the beginning.

And with our kids, I realized that so many people were asking me why my kids were calm and happy and healthy. And I said, well, because we are feeding them right. We give them lots of hugs, of course, but we also are feeding them real whole foods.

And in fact, we bought an old farmhouse and had our own garden for a while, but then we ran out of money, so we came back to suburbia. But I started teaching nutrition, and it's been. And parenting. I did parenting while I still do parenting counseling.

So I have a program based on my new book, the Single Ingredient Diet. And the idea is to just have food that doesn't need ingredient lists.

Start with foods that your grandmother would recognize, because that's what our children and us too genetically are prepared for, is to use real food, not with the additives, not with over refined, and then throw a few vitamins and minerals back in. That's not what it's about. Our bodies are programmed to take food and transform it into healthy bodies.

I really like that you said that because I like to cook. I am not a cook. You know, I have no formal training, but people. I got. I hurt my head and I had to change my diet and I went on an elimination diet.

So I didn't get very many ingredients in my diet. And several of my friends were like, oh, I want to eat good food like you. So I started bringing them some of the foods that I was cooking and eating.

And at first they were like, oh, I hate beets. I'm never going to eat beets. And then I would bring them beets and they would like scarf them down and it'd be like, what do you do?

And it's like, well, there's only like three ingredients, four ingredients in what I cook because I made it very, very simple. My brisket. I cook a brisket. Everybody loves my brisket. There's only three ingredients. It's the brisket, it's salt, and it's shiitake mushrooms.

But it's just the way I combine it and cook it that people say it's one of the best briskets they've ever had. So, you know, it's really interesting that I kind of came to that really through. Through my diet for hurting myself.

And so now I use very, very little spices and I just let the flavors of the food do the talking.

Exactly. I really encourage people to rediscover organic food because the taste is so much better. It behaves better when you cook it.

And you just have to add a few interesting things. You know, some butter to cook it in, or a little salt and pepper and maybe a few herbs. But the real Flavor comes through.

And I always say processed foods, you eat it fast because it loses its flavor after you chewed it for a while. But real food just gets better and better, and you enjoy every bite.

Absolutely. Thank you. Yeah.

So, you know, our families are always saying, oh, well, we're so busy and it takes so long to actually cook real food and things like that. What would you say, or how can you help our families maybe make a mind shift around that?

We know it's super important for our families to have good nutrition. But then how do you either make the time or make it easy enough to get that good nutrition?

Well, it makes me think of one of my favorite workshops is when I have families come together and give them regular commercial vegetables or fruits and organic. And I'll never forget when the kids would say, hey, mom, why doesn't our food taste like this?

So you save a lot of time trying to convince your kids to eat if they like the food. And the other thing Irv was saying is involve them in preparing it.

If they prepared it, they want to try it and share it and tell their siblings about it. The other side of it is that once you have a few skills of cooking, it doesn't have to be a big production.

My husband thanks me for keeping him healthy 50 years and for making it so delicious. But I never spend more than 45 minutes preparing dinner.

And if you involve the kids and many things I'll do ahead of time so that just put them together. And most things I can have on the table a dinner within half an hour. But you have to build some skills and believe what you're doing.

But when the kids really like the food, that's a real incentive. Right.

So we're big advocates for bringing your children home for education and taking them out of school. And, you know, in our pre interview here, you said that you homeschooled your children.

So one of the things that we try and talk to parents about is as you involve the children in the housework or the cooking, then it's not. You have less time. You have more time with your children, and you can use cooking as an education tool.

So were you able to do that with your children while you were homeschooling them? Did they help out in the kitchen?

Oh, absolutely, Yes. I thought it was really neat, too, that you could take them with you to shop and they knew what adult life looked like.

Most kids in school have no idea what their parents are doing all day, and I felt like they learned fractions just helping me do a recipe. You Know, I just want half of that, you know, and let's do a quarter cup of this and an eighth of the butter.

So they learn an awful lot, and they see a purpose to it. A lot of education in school, they're like, oh, you'll need this later. But they're not inspired, and they don't remember it that well.

But at home, when they're doing things, you know, helping you with the wash and sorting things and folding things and seeing that you're reading interesting things and watching interesting documentaries together, because they say they get to pursue their own interests. So, yeah, there's so much learning going on at home. It's really a continuation of the learning they're doing as toddlers. Just if you.

If you have a busy, curious, learning life, they will know that that's the thing you do well. What can I read next, Mom? You know, that kind of thing. And I was really.

We learned so much from homeschooling our kids because we both went to school and became lawyers and they were interested we could let them pursue their interests. And we both did well in school. And by the time we were seniors, we didn't know we were what we were interested in.

We just tried to do well in every subject. But our kids knew exactly where they wanted to go. And my daughter's a geologist and a hydrogeologist now. My son has his own business in construction.

And. And they have grandchildren. They have children now. I have grandchildren. So it's wonderful to watch.

And we did have them in school for the first two or three years, and then we thought, this is silly. I was volunteering at the school to try to influence the way they were being educated. And finally we said, let's just eliminate the middleman.

We can educate them. So we had a ball. And the other great benefit that people don't realize is that if they've had enough of you at home, they're ready to go.

And, you know, they don't. Then they didn't bounce back after college, they were raring to go.

They had the life skills, they had confidence. They had everything that they wanted to go out and live their life.

Right. Right. They'd had enough of the parents. They were ready for bigger world. But we did involve them in a lot of things.

We did, you know, trips to museums and. And they played soccer and dance, and, you know, we kept them busy. So they had not. They didn't really keep them busy.

We got them involved in things, engaged, making friends and having different experiences. Going to a potato chip factory, for instance.

All of the stuff you're talking about is why we do what we do to try and help parents get that. But now back to your nutrition. And again, in a question that helps us is what do you think about the nutrition in schools these days?

Have you, have you looked into what they're feeding our children?

Look at that face. I think there's an answer there.

Yes.

Well, when I said about being involved in the school, one of the things was I was head of the committee to try to upgrade what they were serving in the school. And it's, it's a big problem.

And I talk about it a lot because, because our regulators are so influenced by the industry that a lot of the information that kids get in schools is from the dairy industry. And there's all different kinds of biases. And the Department of Agriculture tries to dump cheap food to the school systems.

And the other piece is that the schools, the teachers say, well, all they want to eat is hot dogs and macaroni and pizzas. So we serve them something they'll eat. But with kids, you have to create the environment. Yeah, if there's pizza there, they'll probably eat it.

But if you can create the environment where they get good food, then they will, they'll thrive and they'll be able to concentrate and so on. So that's another thing. Just having control over your children's diet in home education is wonderful.

And you really, if possible, if they are going to school, to have them take their lunch because. And also have them know that they don't want to go buy the candy or the sodas that are supposed to raise money for the uniforms.

You know, the crazy stuff. I remember my, my son was. Stayed overnight with a friend and, and the mom's kind of whispered to me, he wouldn't take the Coke.

Are you a disciplined family or something? I said, oh, he knows it's not good for him. He just says, no, thank you. Yeah.

So, you know, if you tell kids, you know this, you want to grow strong and healthy, then you want to eat like us.

And they, both of them, you know, tried some of the, when they were in high school and college, they tried doing what their friends did, but then they found out that they never got sick and their friends were getting sick. So they learn my experience, it's, it's awesome.

So what I hear you saying is that you just expose them to most of it. You didn't really restrict them, but you helped them realize that, oh, I feel better when I'm eating like a healthy diet.

Things like that, or I feel worse if I do what my friends do and get the junk food and things like that. That kind of how you handled it.

Yes, and, and controlling the environment. I mean, you don't bring junk into the house. Especially at younger ages, you want them to know that food is food.

It's not coming out of a bag or a box or a can or a glass. It's food. And so then they realize it's kind of strange when everybody's drinking soda or carrying donuts around.

Yeah.

So the phrase that I heard was, you eat from the edges of the grocery store because that's where the fruit's on the edge, the healthier stuff is around the outside and all the stuff in boxes and bags, that's all in the middle and that's the stuff that you don't usually go for. So. Yeah, so we learn to eat from the edges of the grocery store.

Very good. Yes, that's exactly it. The, the food processors get their profits from the, the ultra processed foods.

So that's what's constantly being pushed in all the advertising and especially advertised to kids.

And, and they're not supposed to advertise to kids and they have these policies, they're not going to advertise to kids, but they do, you know, they try to make everything fun and cute and animals jumping around and, and that kind of thing. So, so we have to have that strong influence as parents to set the standard.

And if they say, oh, so and so gets to have, you know, excessively sweet fruit juice for breakfast and you say, well, you know, this is our home and we're doing what we believe is best for you. So you know, when you're 21, you can go do that.

So when you're, when you're counseling and working with families, is this where you go, do you start with diet and education around diet or what is it that you really work with with families?

That's a great question, because I've, I had many families would bring their kids to me that they weren't eating or they, they were having trouble at school or they weren't sleeping, and I would talk to the kids a few minutes and then I bring in the parents and find out what's the diet like, what's the schedule like, are they over scheduled, going to too many different things and catching a hamburger on the way. So so often it's, it's, the parents need education. There's nothing wrong with the kids in most cases.

And so I gently move it towards lifestyle and having time with the kids sitting down for a meal, and one family that just never sat down for a meal. And then she wondered why they didn't eat when they were with friends and trying to sit down.

So we found two times, Tuesday nights and Sunday mornings that they could actually have a meal together. So getting down to the hard tax of what does a lifestyle work look like can really help.

And that's.

Yeah, that's so amazing because that's part of, you know, what I help families also kind of discover when they're trying to trans move to homeschooling. They're like, oh, what am I going to do with all this time? Or I'm going to have too much time.

It's like, well, once you get your rhythm routine, your kind of schedule, your basics kind of blocked out, then you know where your boundaries are and then you build in the other things kind of in between and around. So the schedule, the classes, the rhythm routine, so important for families to look at so the kids know what to expect.

You know, we as adults, we've been trained for years how to pivot and turn and take things, you know, just really quick. But our children are sort of learning that, so they need those routines and boundaries and schedules.

Yeah.

One of the way I phrase it is like if you're growing a tomato plant, you put a cage around it. The cage doesn't keep the tomato plant from growing. What it does is it gives a structure, a framework for the plant to grow more healthy.

But if you don't put that structure around it and it just grows across the ground, then it's a really chaotic and it doesn't produce as good of fruits. So you put, you put the cage around the boundary around.

It's not to limit your kids, it's to give them the framework to grow towards the light better.

Yes. That's so, so important.

You're creating an environment where they can grow and pursue their, their curiosity and their learning and, and learn about relationships that the, the situation in a school is rather artificial. Having 25, 30 kids with one authority they don't even know, telling everybody exactly when to move it, very artificial.

And there's so much you can do at home, but creating that proper environment and having some limits and being clear about them and consistent about them is really important.

Yeah. One of those artificial things is putting all the kids at the same age together.

The only place you ever have that is in school, in college, you've got the four years and when you get out into the workplace, it's, it's all over the place. But.

But people think that you need to be around children your own age to socialize, but they need so many differences of age and learning so that the kids can say, oh, hey, I need to learn that. Oh, hey, I want to try that.

Whereas if you're just with a whole bunch of kids your age and you all don't know the same stuff that you all don't know, then how are you going to figure out your individuality? And oh, I like that better. I want to go that way.

Yeah, that's so true. And I saw in families, often the siblings did not get along because, oh, you're in fifth grade, I'm in sixth.

And, and it's so, just so sad because you want that your kids to enjoy their relationship for life.

Absolutely. So talking about that a little bit socialization.

So when you were homeschooling, you know, what did you do to help make sure that your kids were well adjusted and knew how to talk to different ages and stages and things like that?

Well, we definitely made it clear that we would arrange any kind of social get togethers with children of our personal friends. And also if they liked somebody at soccer or dance, we'd make play dates for them, make that really easy.

And also we connected with other organizations that were supported homeschool. There's usually a local association of some kind or more than one that actually range field trips and stuff like that. So.

So they, I don't think they ever. Maybe when they were teenagers it was a little like, oh, I'm still stuck at home.

But, but they have, they, they both have lifelong friends, which I see some of my school friends at reunions, period.

Yeah.

Now I actually don't have any actual friend because they moved away or they went college or. And. But they have lifelong friends that they made because they were. And, and that many of their friends were going to school and were very envious.

Very envious. It was funny. They thought that they were going to be strange, but their kids were like, oh, where do you do your homework?

And you know, when do you get to do this and that? And they were. And then they, they would, when their parents came to pick them up, they'd say, this is pretty cool, you know? Exactly.

So as we wrap up, is there something that you would have liked to have talked about today? Is there something you would have liked to said today that we kind of distracted you from or kept you away from? What.

What would you like to end with today? Where would you like to go?

That's very sweet. Yeah. Well, I have a course based on my book if anyone wants to. And I have a free training at Single ingredient diet dot com.

No, the just Single Ingredient diet dot com. And I'd also like to mention my parenting books. My very first book was you can postpone Anything but Love.

And in my I had an appendix about homeschool. And also my the seven secret of secrets of successful parents. I talk about homeschooling.

Excellent. We will get all that information put in the show notes as well. So find that website. Single ingredient. I'm sorry, Single ingredient diet dot com.

There we go. Yeah. And find more out more about Randy. Thank you so much for being with us today.

It was a joy meeting you and talking with you and thank you for sharing all the nuggets of wisdom that you did today.

Oh, I love what you're doing and congratulations. It's so needed today. Thank you.

You're very, very welcome.

Thank you for being here. It was an absolute pleasure.

All right, audience, this is a wrap up for the end of this show, but please find Randy if you want some more information about her her single ingredient diet plan. There we go. And also, don't forget to leave a like and review on your favorite podcast platform for bringing education home.

We need all of those so we can reach more families just like you and help them be happy, healthy. Until next time. Bye for now.

Bye for now.