Michelle Obama’s Nutrition Tips for Moms

Ok every body, get up, get moving and get excited! Put your hands together for the woman you've all been waiting for. She's the Mom in Chief, First Lady Michelle Obama!

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For us at the White House, no matter what is going on at 6:30, we stop everything. We have dinner together. When the president travels, his goal is to get home in time for dinner, and that's really the time that we get to connect with our girls and I find that my girls aren't as focused on gobbling their food down if they're engaged in a conversation, you know. They're really focused on tasting their food and taking their time and cutting their food, and then we use that time to talk about manners. How to hold a fork, and sitting up, and take your elbows off the table, little things like that. So the family meal is much more critical than we ever imagined and we experience that every day at our home.

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You've got to eat your vegetables, period, you know? You want dessert, you've got to eat your vegetables. Our motto is, if you're full, then finish your vegetables and you can be done, but you can't ask for anything else. And if you're walking away, you definitely can't come back later and ask for cookies or chips or whatever. If you're full, you're full. I don't want to see you in the kitchen after that. And pretty soon, they're going to be hungry. So there's that. You know, you've just got to do it sometimes.

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What I tell my kids is that dessert is that sometimes treat, so we don't have desserts every day of the week. Desserts are reserved for the weekends, and that's true even if we're traveling. And then then we make sure that we have snacks that are healthy, so they're not just cookies and chips, but we've got lots of fruit around, nuts, you know, trail mix, things like that, and, you know, popcorn, air popped popcorn is good. So we just try to keep it simple.