Little Sugar Addicts: End the Mood Swings, Meltdowns, Tantrums, and Low Self-Esteem in Your Child Today
- ISBN13: 9781400051649
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Sugar Is Not Love
Do you have a smart, creative, loving child who is also cranky, inattentive, and sometimes downright obnoxious? If you’ve written off this negative behavior as “typical” for your child’s age—whether toddler or teen—stop and think: Does your child have a taste for soda, sugary breakfast cereals, and treats like candy and cookies? Does she eat regularly scheduled meals or skip them? What, exactly, does he drink and snack on throughout the day?
Your child’s behavior may be linked to diet—specifically to the sugar in obvious sources like sweets and soda and to hidden sugars that lurk in many foods, fruit-based drinks, and “healthy” snacks like granola bars. And if your son or daughter is sugar sensitive, misbehavior and moodiness can be aggravated by missed or late meals and junk foods.
Now, bestselling author Kathleen DesMaisons offers you a workable solution for getting back your child by changing his diet—without creating a sense of deprivation, without setting unrealistic goals, and without turning sugar into “forbidden fruit.” This book offers:
• A step-by-step program, backed by years of research, for gradually improving the food your child eats—you and your whole family will benefit!
• Tips for navigating the sugar-laden world of birthday parties, holidays, and school cafeterias
• Ways to incorporate healthy snacking and regular mealtimes into your child’s day, including suggestions for meals and snacks, plus recipes
Little Sugar Addicts isn’t about strange foods, dramatic lifestyle changes, or complicated menus—just support, guidance, and real-life suggestions from other parents that work. It will help you make the connection between the addictive qualities of sugar and negative behavior and offer a healthy solution you and your whole family can live with.
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Kathleen DesMaisons first book, Potatoes Not Prozac, changed my life. I went from a completely depressed person well on my way to taking anti-depressants, to a happy, confident person who loves life–all because I changed the way I ate! Since healing my own body and mind I have changed my children’s diets with miraculous results.
Before Kathleen’s program my kids would whine, scream, hit, be totally out of control, throw tantrums and in general, I didn’t like them very much a lot of the time. I couldn’t understand what I was doing wrong?!? How could I feel this way about my kids and what could I do about it? No amount of parenting advice or classes could change what was going on with them. Well, after getting myself steady on Kathleen’s program I started to look at my kids diet. It took a little time and adjustment, but now by feeding them differently and at consistant times they are mostly fun, loving, compassionate, focused, easy to talk to and the joys I always knew they were. Food was the answer, pure and simple!
Get this book if you’ve ever had those feelings of helplessness with your kids. It will change your life and your families life!
Rating: 5 / 5
Little Sugar Addicts: End the Mood Swings, Meltdowns, Tantrums, and Low Self-Esteem in Your Child Today
This book is an excellent collection and celebration of years of experience helping families clean up their food and being delighted by the rewards: a cheerful, funny, smart, affectionate and connected family.
I am the ‘Connie’ quoted in the book who says you get your easy kids back. I’ve been ‘doing the food’ myself for about 3 years and as the mom, I cook and shop per this program. I have a 17 yo daughter still at home (3d of 3) who has come along this food journey with mom; as a teen she still chooses sugary junk food sometimes, but by gum she is completely knowledgable about its effects!
DD much prefers her cheerful, calm mom. She remembers the old days of moodiness, gloom, cranky. Our house is a place of affection, laughs, and consideration where before it was too often drama, crisis, silence and slammed doors. (Turns out that mom’s ‘pizza coma’ kind of scared her but she never said so at the time!)
It’s quite unbelievable until you experience it, how big an effect regular, sugar-and-whites free meals can have. Little by little, step by step, recipe by recipe we have moved to fresh whole foods and family meals.
The reviewer of the book sounds kinda spooked herself at changes like this, LOL. But EVERY change we have made, we made because we like the new way BETTER and feel better. None of this grim stuff for us. Really, it is fun and funny to see what we are ready to change and what we aren’t, sometimes.
And I say, never, never, never underestimate what kids will ‘get.’ My DD has not read one word of any of DesMaisons’ books, and thinks the full ‘no whites’ deal is just for middle-aged me who obviously screwed up earlier (I am dealing with overweight)… but even so, here is what she has spontaneously shared with me:
- she thinks her clear skin and luscious figure is from good food available at home
- she always has breakfast and lunch; no starve/binge
- she notices her high school friends - no breakfast, no lunch, and then kaboom, regrettable choices
- she knows about low serotonin and its relation to diet (they studied it in health!)
- she knows about beta-endorphin and its role in craving / addiction
- she knows it is inherited and biochemical
- one time reading a book for English class about an addicted teen, she said, Mom, she was sugar sensitive before she ever started ‘using’
- she knows buying junk is out of her own allowance
You can totally arm your kids with understanding & information. they will LIKE it and their feeling of control!
How I wish I had this when my kids were little!
Rating: 5 / 5
Little Sugar Addicts: End the Mood Swings, Meltdowns, Tantrums, and Low Self-Esteem in Your Child Today
My experience is much like the previous reviewer’s, only I was a bit older when I found Dr. DesMaison’s
work, and started following her food program. Her books explained my whole life….depression, mood
swings, meltdowns, temper tantrums, low self-esteem etc. “Doing the food” changed all of this. I’ve just
finished reading “Little Sugar Addicts”, and I think how wonderful that families today have this
available to them, and what a difference it would have made in my family’s lives. What is so different
about this is it is not the parent/s *telling* the children what to do, but inviting the whole family to
participate in what and how changes will be made. Lots of quotes from real people that are doing this plan.
It works. I recommend this book to all parents, grandparents, aunt, uncles, friends with children.
What a difference it will make.
Rating: 5 / 5
Little Sugar Addicts: End the Mood Swings, Meltdowns, Tantrums, and Low Self-Esteem in Your Child Today
If my mother had had this book when I was a child, my whole life would have been different. Doing the food program would have spared both of us a lot of pain. I didn’t find out until I was nearly 40 and Dr. DesMaisons wrote her first book that it was the food I was eating that had made me so depressed for most of my life. Doing her food program changed my life.
I don’t have children of my own, but reading this book makes me almost wish I did. DesMaisons explains that limiting sugar in your house isn’t enough - the process she outlines will help your children see the effect that sugar has on them, and buy into the whole process of eating healthy food and avoiding sugar.
One of the most interesting pieces of information, in my opinion, is that the majority of tantrums are caused by blood sugar crashes. Once a child is in biochemical meltdown, punishment doesn’t work, but a cheese stick will. And by making sure your child eats some protein every three hours, you can prevent meltdowns.
I grew up feeling bad because I was a very difficult child. Reading this book gave me compassion for myself as a child. I wasn’t difficult on purpose - I had a biochemical imbalance. With the right food, things would have been very different.
Rating: 5 / 5
Little Sugar Addicts: End the Mood Swings, Meltdowns, Tantrums, and Low Self-Esteem in Your Child Today
Dr. Kathleen DesMaisons has outdone herself this time. Her latest book, Little Sugar Addicts, offers compassionate, funny, and practical guidance for parents and caregivers to help children become their best and brightest selves by healing their biochemistry through nutrition. It turns out that the meltdowns, tantrums, and general behavior issues many children have are due to what they have been eating, and when they have been eating it. DesMaisons describes with great understanding and authority how to enlist kids in the process of figuring out how they can change the way they eat so they will feel better. The book also includes many kid-friendly recipes and realistic suggestions to get started.
On the more personal side, I found as I read Little Sugar Addicts I was able to start reassembling many pieces of my own childhood in a different way. There were incidents and events that hadn’t made sense, until I put them together with the explanation of biochemistry. When seen in the context of biochemical imbalance, some of my memories suddenly fell into a place of healing.
Even if you don’t have children, or you no longer have children at home, or you don’t work with children, you will love reading this book. If you do have children in your life in any context, then this book is a must read!!!
Rating: 5 / 5
Little Sugar Addicts: End the Mood Swings, Meltdowns, Tantrums, and Low Self-Esteem in Your Child Today