Michelle Obama Talks Getting Healthy for Her Daughters

First Lady Michelle Obama just celebrated the second anniversary of her legacy platform Let’s Move, an initiative to fight obesity by encouraging healthy eating and exercise for families and children. But that doesn’t mean obsessing over your weight. In fact, she thinks women should avoid scales and measuring their waist all together. She doesn’t exercise to whittle her waistline, rather to show her daughters the importance of putting yourself on your priority list.

Never shy to voice her opinion and offer advice, Mrs. Obama spoke to Prevention about raising healthy kids and why women need to put themselves higher on their own priority lists.

On fighting double standards about women and weight:

“I would tell women: Forget about weight. Don’t get on a scale. Stop measuring your waist … I look at it as setting an example. When I get up and work out, I’m working out just as much for my girls as I am for me, because I want them to see a mother who loves them dearly, who invests in them, but who also invests in herself. It’s just as much about letting them know as young women that it is okay to put yourself a little higher on your priority list. It doesn’t make you a selfish person. Men already feel just fine with an extra investment in themselves. And we encourage that. But we have to turn that around for ourselves and show our young girls.”

On getting her girls to love vegetables:

“Sasha always claimed not to like tomatoes, which is such a shame because we grow beautiful tomatoes out in our garden. But then she took a cooking class at school where they made sandwiches with tomatoes, and all of a sudden she’s coming home saying how much she loves tomatoes. She insisted that the tomatoes she had at school were different from the ones we have at home. But the real difference is that she had put time into making that sandwich, so she was invested in it. And I think that’s why involving kids in the cooking process is so important—they become invested, and they’re willing to try new things, and they might discover that they actually like them.”

Share:

PCM Lifestyle