How Can You Help Your Senior to Develop Good Eating Habits?

Less than healthy eating habits can cover a lot of ground for your senior. She might tell you outright that eating is an issue for her, or you might notice that things aren’t going well when her weight fluctuates or when her health issues become more challenging.

Educate Yourself about How She’s Eating Now

Before you can help your senior make different choices with her eating habits, it helps to know what her current habits are. Talk to your senior about what she’s eating and why. It’s also a good idea to talk to her about other aspects of choosing healthy eating habits, like what it feels like when she’s grocery shopping and cooking. If she dreads those tasks and hates being involved in them, she’s probably more likely to choose easy ways out.

Eating Alone Can Be a Huge Hindrance to Healthier Eating

Another factor that’s easy to overlook about healthy eating is that so many people do not enjoy eating alone. Your senior may have never really had to eat alone and maybe that’s dramatically different for her right now. Are there meals you can share with her a few times a week? Having something like that to look forward to can be more inspiring for her.

Figure out What Inspires Your Senior to Choose Healthier Foods

What else inspires your elderly family member to eat healthier foods or to be more consistent with meals? She might experience feeling better when she’s eating well, for instance. Or she might see the results in the numbers she gets back from her doctor’s office. Higher energy levels could be another motivating factor. Whatever it is that your senior sees as a benefit of eating better is important for you to know.

Focus Solutions on the Big Problem

Once you have a full picture of what is going on, you can start to put solutions in place for what’s really presenting an issue. Your elderly family member may need more help with meal preparation, even grocery shopping, or she may need more assistance with other areas so that she still has the energy to cook. That might mean bringing in elderly care providers, for example, or swapping out cooking duties with other family members. For the best results, you want to tailor the solution to the actual problem.

Putting a plan in place is the tough part. From there, you’re going to be able to help your senior to find the right way to implement and to adjust that plan to ensure that it keeps working for her.

If you or an aging loved one is considering hiring senior care in Mesa, AZ, please call the caring staff at Golden Heart Senior Care of Scottsdale at (480) 284-7360. We are here to help!