Reply to 6th grader has started asking about the calories in everything

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP here.  She did recently learn about this in school so when the first pp said this it resonated with me.  Maybe counting calories isn't the correct expression, but she likes to know how many calories are in something before she eats it. She reads the food labels and will comment that she doesn't want to eat something because it has "too many calories." I don't think she is only trying to limit herself to eat a certain number of calories. It caught attention when I made pasta with chicken and broccoli and she didn't want to eat the chicken, which is unusual for her.  I didn't point out that the pasta with parmesan was less healthy than the grilled chicken, but that's what I was thinking.

The relationship between food and girls can be so complicated and I don't want to have something that I do or do not do contribute to any issues. [b] She's a comp soccer player and she's growing[/b] so I tell her these things will make her hungrier.  I also tell her to eat some kind of fruit or vegetable with every meal and I talk about the vitamins in foods, too.  [/quote]

You need to talk with her about protein.  If she is an athlete then she will need to be sure she is eating enough protein as part of the total caloric intake.  That also speaks to her issue with the chicken.  She needs the chicken because it had the most protein, the most bang for the buck in terms of benefit to her body, rather than the pasta with the sauce.

You may want to ask the PE/Health teacher to talk a little bit about protein and what the daily requirements are for growing tweens and teens, and then also for athletes.

To give perspective to my post, our older college kids are all D1 athletes and they watch their protein count more closely than anything else.  In fact at the Christmas dinner table one kid pulled up the nutritional analysis and had a long discussion with a sibling about the protein value of a variety of foods that we had on the buffet.  Our elementary and middle school kids had lots of questions.  They hadn't really thought about protein.  But when our college kids talk to their trainers at school, protein is the focus of the discussion, not calories.[/quote]

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