Guest Blogger
Adria Banihashemi
For the past 15 years, Adria Banihashemi has been finding ways to transcend the unhealthy eating environments of her youth and help others to do the same. She is a mother of two, and writer at EatingForOurFutures.com, a website dedicated to providing relevant advice for people attempting to live a healthy, natural life in the modern world. She is also a nutrition and fitness coach in the San Francisco Bay area (appointments may be scheduled through the website).
From 2002-2009 she worked as a public school teacher for underrepresented children in Oakland and Sacramento and served as a board member for the Washington Neighborhood Center, a non-profit community organization providing artistic, academic, and athletic programming to low-income youth of color. She completed a Master's in Psychology at San Francisco State University in 2010, with research focusing on eating habits and obesity.
Adria's driving philosophy for wellness is to recognize the importance of emotions and psychological experiences in healthy eating and exercise. She is concerned that most nutritionists and trainers try to achieve wellness through physical behavior changes that fail to take the complexity of the human mind-body connection into account. It is her mission to help people 'reprogram' their minds, bodies, and habits to enjoy a lifetime of staying fit.
Being an obese child and overcoming her struggles with weight has been the impetus for her nutrition work. Growing up, she ate mostly processed food and rarely engaged in physical activity or participated in family meal times. After dramatically changing her eating habits as a teenager, she began trying to understand why so many families struggle with raising healthy-weight children. Through personal experience, research, and working with others who have had similar struggles, she has discovered a way to be healthy for life, and wants nothing more than to share her discovery with others.
As a psychologist, teacher, and parent, Adria has helped develop educational programs that help children reach their greatest potential for wellness, achievement, and happiness. She currently home-schools her own preschool-aged children using Montessori methods, and focuses on the development of intrinsic motivation. She believes every child should have access to a responsive, individualized education so that they can find their true passion in life and have the opportunity to pursue it.
If It Ain’t Fun, It Doesn’t Get Done
“Unless you puke, faint, or die, KEEP GOING!” -Jillian Michaels, “The Biggest Loser” Reality TV has presented a harrowing view of the weight-loss process. Researchers have found that people watching such shows tend to see exercise as a torturous activity that they want to avoid, and view obesity as the result of laziness and gluttony. [...]
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The Importance of the Intrinsic – Part Two
A primary goal of developing intrinsic motivation in children is to help them function as responsible adults in the future (as opposed to entitled adults who shy away from the hard work it takes to achieve success). Grown-ups who have learned the rationale behind decisions are typically good decision-makers themselves, and are likely to have [...]
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The Importance of the Intrinsic
Most of us do it, even though we know it’s not the best parenting technique. But is bribing, rewarding, and threatening really all that bad? And if we can’t use rewards to motivate our children, what can we do? Before we understand the pros and cons of bribery, we need to be clear on some [...]
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Embracing the Imperfect Family Meal
One of my biggest “before and after” shifts as a new parent has been in my perception of what family mealtime should look like. Before I actually had children, I held a Rockwell-esque fantasy in mind: our smiling, well-dressed clan, gathered sweetly around a wooden table; our children filling their growing bodies with freshly cooked [...]
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Baby Steps to Lose the Baby Weight
Scanning the internet for relevant advice on losing weight post-baby could anger the most blissfully-content new mother. Such phrases as, “…but if you gained more during pregnancy than your doctor advised, you may struggle to get back to a healthy weight ” have made my blood boil. Apparently my body did not
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