As a functional medicine practitioner, health coach, and wellness speaker one of my favorite groups to sit down and talk health with is teens.
Over the summer I got to sit down with a bunch of high school kids at summer camp and answer all their burning health questions…
- What should I eat for clear skin?
- What foods make your hair shiny?
- What foods make your eyelashes grow?
- What should I eat for protein being a vegetarian other than eggs?
- What are good foods to build your immune system?
- What’s the most important meal in your opinion?
- What foods make you bloat?
- How can I avoid fluid retention?
- Is it OK to ignore lactose intolerance?
- How much water should I drink in a day?
- Do eggs actually give you cellulite?
- Myth or real: bee pollen makes your boobs grow?
Such great questions, right?!
So open. So honest. So genuinely curious and interested in how food affects how they feel.
There were three main takeaways I wanted this group of teens to walk away from our wellness talk with and – really – these apply to all of us so I want to share them with you here too…
Wellness Speaker: 3 Key Takeaways for Teens at Camp
1. The body runs on nutrients and we get those nutrients from our food.
We can’t detox without nutrients. We can’t grow hair (including eyelashes) without nutrients. The immune system – you guessed it – can’t work without nutrients.
Nutrients are the Lego pieces to the complex set that is our body.
If you’re missing some pieces, it’s just not going to work right…
This is why you’re always hearing things like “processed food is bad for you.”
Not because the fun police wants to suck all the joy out of life deeming everything delicious “bad for you.”
All that refining (flour, sugar), processing (nuggets, cereal) and chemicalizing (preservatives, colors) sucks, zaps, drains all the nutrients right out of the food.
The closer you eat to nature (whole, fresh, fruits, vegetables, protein, whole grains, beans, nuts, seeds, spices), the more nutrients (a.k.a. lego pieces) you stack up and the more efficient your body runs.
Specific to the clear skin, shiny hair, and eyelashes we also talked about the importance of omega-3-fatty acids you get from fatty fish like salmon, walnuts, and dark leafy greens.
And antioxidants that you get from dark pigmented foods like berries, beets and to a degree all fruits and veggies.
2. Camp life is the healthiest life.
After that tangent on fruits and veg, I remembered where we were: Camp…
Where there’s something called “The Sugar Shack.”
So I taught them about balancing glucose (sugar) intake with activity (utilization).
And about how being away from stress, in the fresh air and sun and water and with friends – how all these things are like nutrients too.
Get this, when I asked these kids what their favorite thing about camp was… you know what more than few of them said? not having their phone.
They said they feel free.
Hearing that – I felt happy and sad at the same time.
I told them I think I need camp… we all need camp. Geez, if we could bottle up camp and sell it as a vitamin, everyone would be healthier (and we’d be gajillionaires)!
3. You, your body, you’re one of a kind. And no one knows your body better than you do.
This one I feel so strongly about today. Today in the age of Instagram, and influencers, and juice cleanses, and everything turned up to 11…
There is health information evvvvvverywhere — it even makes my head spin and I’ve been studying this stuff for going on 15 years.
It would be so much easier, I know – but there’s no one “right way” of eating, no one perfect supplement, no dialed in plan to follow.
If there was we’d all be doing it and that would be that. I’d be out of a job.
The reality is: what works for one person may be a disaster for someone else.
So the answer is… You have to figure out what works for YOU.
No wellness speaker can tell you that.
It can only come from within.
By listening to your body. Learning its language… the signs (some maybe not so pleasant) it sends you… what it likes… what it doesn’t.
What makes that hard is these days life is loud, and busy, and every time you open your phone someone else is telling you something else…
There are so many things that keep us disconnected. And that makes it hard to trust ourselves.
It works like a muscle though, the more we use it – the more you tune in and listen to what your body is trying to tell you, the stronger the connection gets.
There’s so much more I’ve thought of since that I want to tell these kids…
These kids that have never heard of Snack Wells…
That part made me feel old.
Looking for a Wellness Speaker for Your School, Company, Camp, Organization?
BTW, if you’re thinking this would be great to have at our school, camp, company, reach out and let’s talk. These are so much fun to do – I’d love to talk real health and answer all your burning questions too.
P.S. Looking for a speaker for your company, school, camp, organization who can help put the wacky world of wellness in perspective, make change feel do-able, and get you and your people on your way to making it happen? Reach out and let’s make it happen.
Megan Adams Brown, CHC, is a certified health coach based in Austin, Texas. Megan helps people take charge of their health and make “healthy” not feel so high maintenance. The content in this post is for educational and informational purposes only and is not medical advice.
