10/21/2026
NTP Graduate Alison Marras, NTP | Functional Gut Health Nutrition had the perfect explanation for her daughter!
“My 7-year-old came home from school last week and asked me, “Mom, what’s a calorie?”
I could tell it wasn’t really about calories. It was about something she overheard… a friend, a lunchbox comment, who knows. So I told her the technical answer (a calorie is just a unit of energy our food gives our body), and then I told her the part that actually matters:
We don’t need to count anything. We just need to listen.
Are you hungry? Are you full? Do you feel energized after you eat, or tired? Does your tummy feel good, or off? Sometimes we’re just too excited to notice we’re hungry at all, and that’s okay too.
When we pick our plate, we think about feeding our superheroes — all the amazing little systems in our body (like our immune system!) that work hard for us every day. We try to get a little bit of everything, mostly from foods nature made, because that’s how we help our superheroes do their job.
I also told her that some of her friends might hear different things about food at home, and that’s okay too…every family has different goals, and none of them are wrong.
And obviously it should be made with love. That’s non-negotiable. 😉
This is the kind of conversation I want to keep having with her, long before diet culture gets the chance to have it first.
I wonder what would’ve been different for us if we paid more attention to how our body interacted with our food before counting anything.”
