Why Aren’t We Making Health Part of Education?

Nobody cares about health education anymore, whether it's homeschool, whether it's in schools, like it's this throwaway class P.E. I'll just check off the box. Nobody cares about it. So you have 30 years of that and you have generations that are not because nobody taught them. Why should they know? And then you have a marketing industry and a food industry that has sugar. That's so addicting. It's more addicting the most drug. And so that's what you get. Welcome to our life homeschooling. My name is Sherry Christian wife to my high school, sweetheart, Nelson and thankful mom to 10 incredible kids. I'm the author of the blog and YouTube channel our life homeschooling where I share homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I believe that motherhood is ministry and homeschooling is simply an extension of parenting. My passion is to cheer on other moms who are at home doing the most important work of all. Raising the next generation for the glory of God. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the our life homeschooling podcast. You're listening to episode number 67. Today's guest is Ashton Tate from Glory to Glory Fitness, and he's going to be sharing with us the form curriculum, which is a health and PE curriculum from a biblical worldview. I am really excited about this conversation because it's something that is personally very important to me and my husband if you watch my YouTube channel, we raise a lot of the food that we eat here on our property. We like to stay healthy. My husband twice a week takes the kids to the garage and while he's working out there working out beside him and we just slowly tried to adjust to new habits that will help our kids and our family become healthier. And what I love about the form curriculum is that it helps parents do this intentionally a lot of the conversations we've had with our kids about health. They've just been conversations as we've been learning and growing but this is something that will come alongside homeschool parents and help them to intentionally teach their kids about nutrition fitness and just maintaining a healthy lifestyle. So let's go ahead and jump right into this interview. Hi Ashton. Thank you so much for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me on excited to excited to talk with you. Yeah, I am excited to hear more about Glory to Glory Fitness and your program form curriculum. This is something that my husband and I it's interesting to both of us because the longer we've been married the more we've had kids what we eat is really important to us and it's just amazing with kids how much sugar is offered to kids constantly everywhere you turn like you go to a parade and it's just like this sugar fest and it just seems like you have to be really intentional to avoid it or to give your kids a healthy lifestyle. So we've grown our own food and my husband works out with the kids in the garage about twice a week. So but I've never seen anything very intentional in the homeschool world like your program. So I just think this is going to be very beneficial for so many people. So I'm going to let you go ahead and introduce yourself. I think people would be really curious to hear especially your personal story. Yeah, no, it's God is really good and faithful. And so he really has blessed us and kind of brought us to where we're at today where we get to help a lot of people. So it's really fun. So yeah, so my name is Ashton. I live just a little bit south of Nashville in Franklin, Tennessee. My wife and I have been married for eight years and she is a nurse practitioner at Vanderbilt in the trauma ICU. And so she deals with some craziness there. And so I always you know, I try to keep people out of her care and she takes care of him when she gets there. Well, she used to be in the medical ICU and now she's more trauma. So it's a little different but but she's awesome. She's amazing. We've married for eight years and and so yeah, a little bit of my story and background of kind of how we got into what we're doing. So when I was in high middle middle school high school, really I was actually about 300 pounds. And so, you know, I think a lot of fitness guru guys that you see out there today. It's like yeah, you've always been jacked or you've always been fit or you've all and I'm it's not me. So, you know, I was about 300 pounds going into kind of sophomore year. So in high school and throughout, you know throughout middle school as well. And yeah, just really struggled with self-confidence struggled with just yeah, an addiction to sugar and eating and video games and and all of that. And so, you know, when when I really started walking with the Lord and kind of towards the end of my junior year kind of in the senior year and beyond I really started getting with leaders more and I started getting in the word more and I started just growing and maturing a lot and one of the things that came out of that was an understanding that hey, like this isn't my body like I don't get to dictate and tell the Lord and tell myself that I get to do whatever I want with that. I don't get to eat whatever I want to wear whatever I feel like I don't get to sit and play video games for six hours eight hours a day. Like I just that's not up to me. The Lord has given me this body and entrusted it to me. And so I get to ask him what he has planned and how I need to steward the body that he's entrusted to me. And again, I didn't get there immediately and wake up, you know, as a junior or a senior one one age like the Lord has given me like it wasn't like this sudden change, but the Lord really yeah, it was a lot of slow growth and a lot of that change honestly at first when I was in when I was a junior a lot of that change came out of man. I don't want to be made fun of anymore. I don't want to be I don't want to be the fat kid anymore. I don't want to be you know, I wanted to impress girl, you know, it's like it started there, you know with some of it, but as I grew and mature it was like, okay. Hey, I feel so much better about myself. I have so much more energy. I have a lot more confidence. I'm able to to communicate and connect with people better. I'm able like all of those things did come but it came out of the mindset of okay. How do I take care of what God's given me? And so yeah, it lost about a hundred and twenty or so pounds in kind of towards the end of high school. I had everything kind of fully off by then and and so when I went into college people just started asking me for help. They were like, hey, you didn't care about this stuff. You were the guy that just ate whatever you wanted and had fun and play video games and do it. How are you so different and not only how are you so different, but how are you actually maintaining these things? How are you actually continuing this because that's the hardest thing about health is not doing a one-year thing or a six-month thing or three-month thing. It's how do we over years and years, you know, how do we maintain things? And so that people start asking me for help and I ended up building out a full like clientele of people that I would coach and train some in person some online to be able to help them apply biblical principles to their health and just make healthy living really really simple for them. And so did that graduated college with a degree in health and a minor in business and all those things and just kept that going. So I had a gym a lot of my clients were in person and I did some online coaching and we would help with movement and programming and nutrition and just general how to think rightly about these things and we would coach and help keep people accountable all those things. So yeah, we did that until 2020 and then covid covid kind of messed all that up. And so we ended up going fully online kind of with covid with all of our clients and kind of had a rough weird couple years with that and and throughout that just felt like all the signs that we did have just God kept bringing it up. Everybody just kept telling us like man. I wish somebody would have taught me these simple principles that you're teaching me for health when I was young. Nobody ever taught me this stuff. I went to school. I went to health class. I did sports. I did all that stuff like nobody ever taught me this stuff. And so so we just kept hearing that over and over again and I was like and the Lord just kept speaking to us about the way that the health of our nation is going and the way that you know, just the statistics of how bad our health is in America in particular And then I read a statistic on the CDC's website that said that by the year 2030, so this was 10 years from back then now, it's only four years. It said that by the year 2030 86.3% of adults will either be overweight or obese on a BMI scale just based on like plot graphs like on a on a graph over the last I think it was like 30 years years something like that and so telling right there it reminded me of the movie Wally before he goes up on the ship and everybody's floating around on the and I'm like man, that's like insanity. How is that? And so yeah, we just felt like the Lord spoke to us and and said the way to fix the health of our nation is to equip and empower the next generation. And so what you have in a lot of the reasons why that's the case is nobody cares about health education anymore, whether it's homeschool, whether it's in schools, like it's this throwaway class PE. I'll just check off the box. Nobody cares about it. So you have 30 years of that and you have generations that are not because nobody taught them. Why should they know and then you have a marketing industry and a food industry that has sugar. That's so addicting. It's more addicting the most drug and so that's what you get. So yeah, we ended up one of the pastors at my church writes a lot of curriculum for Lifeway and Thomas Nelson a lot of other pieces and so I was like, hey, I have all the health knowledge and he loves health too. And I was like, could you help me script this out and create a curriculum for kids that we could my church has a like a homeschool co-op kind of hybrid school that they run and so it's okay. Like we could just teach it to some of the kids there and and it could be a really cool offer to help their kids and stuff like that. And so we started small and so yeah, we built out a whole whole platform. Just teaching kids simple foundations around how to take care of the body that God's given them and making it really really simple. And so fast forward now we yeah, we work with thousands of homeschool families all over the United States and all over the world really and then we work with hundreds and hundreds of schools as well all over the country whether it's a Christian school or co-op that uses it in their classes and teaches their kids too. So it's been a really fun fun time. So yeah. Yeah. So you have this available even for homeschool co-ops. I didn't realize that. That's probably our primary. It's probably primarily who we work. I mean a lot of schools a lot of co-ops and then homeschool families can go on our website and just purchase it and stuff too. But yeah, that's that's a lot of who we work with. So yeah, wow, that's a great option, especially if you have a co-op where they're looking for classes that is kind of like open and go that it's done for you that they don't have to create everything themselves. That's such a great resource for moms. I mean, I've been we've been in a co-op. We were part of starting our co-op sometimes. That's just the challenge is to have moms and then to find programs that they can use that they feel equipped to do it. Yeah. One of the things that stood out to me the most about your curriculum is that it comes from a biblical worldview and health has become more and more important to me and my husband as our kids have gotten older, but we just haven't seen anything that's kind of all put together for you. We had to we pretty much have just been like it's through conversations through talk through changing our habits changing our eating and it is really challenging when you go to the grocery store and everything is vying for your kids attention. Everything that's exciting and cool and fun is stuff that we don't want them to eat. So it makes it challenging and you know, we we believe that health and PE is a part of their education not just academics. So why why do you believe that's important as well? Yeah. I mean, you know if if we as parents don't teach these principles to our kids, they're going to learn it from somewhere and they're going to take it and they're going to take it from our culture. They're going to take it from social media influencers. They're going to take it from the market like they're going to learn something. They're going to have a view on health and their body you have to have a view on it. And so they're either going to have a view that our culture teaches them and that the the marketing companies that spend billions of dollars try to market it like they're either going to have that view and it's either going to be very complicated, right? If you go on Google right now and you search how to be healthy last time I checked it was like nine point something billion results pop up. It's like like what are we supposed to do with that? And so, you know, I think the biggest thing that I'm thinking about is like, okay, they're going to have an understanding of their body and health and it's either going to be a healthy and a good view of that that partners with how God's created their body and helps them to think rightly about it. Or if we're passive and if we if we aren't intentional with that, then then they're going to grow up and they're going to have a lot of unhealthy ways of thinking about their body and food and and how to steward and so and again, like it's tough for parents to because you and your husband are doing an awesome job. But honestly for a lot of parents, they don't feel like they had the authority to do that or they don't feel like they do a very good job themselves. So they're like, okay. Well, how am I supposed to teach it to my yeah because nobody taught them and so now they don't know and then they have to teach it to their kids and like well, I don't know what I'm supposed to teach them and I'm not even doing a good job or they feel like they don't even if they are doing a decent job. They don't feel like they are and so part of what we've really tried to do is make everything insanely simple and just easy to teach and things that align with our values so that we we can really combat and come against what the culture is teaching because it just doesn't work, you know, it's not helpful and it just doesn't work. So yeah, that's what's kind of happened to us is it's just slowly been something that we've made a lot of small changes over time, but it would have been and it would be so helpful to have something that is put together and would make it easy for us to just go through that with our kids and emphasize those things with our kids. And of course lifestyle is important so that your kids are modeling after you but that's what I loved about your program. I haven't seen anything that is this intentional in the homeschool world that is just focusing specifically on this need and it really I agree with you. It really is a need in our culture and when you just make some small changes to your health and your diet you feel so much better. You sleep so much better. Your kids are more alert and able to focus. I mean kids just cannot focus when they're constantly fed a diet of a lot of sugar very little water and they're, you know, constantly in front of a screen. How can we expect them to you know to be able to focus on anything. So your diet is a part of it and I was wondering if you could go through the acronym for F. What does each letter stand for so we can just have a little bit better idea of what's included in the program. Yeah. So form the form curriculum is really just an acronym for the four simple areas that we break down health into and so a lot of times you have, you know, it's especially for like health curriculum. You have these 300 page books that it covers all of the stuff but it's just a bunch of like random chapters that are in random order and kids are like, okay, like I kind of like understand the topic. But what do I literally do with this, you know, and so form is really just an acronym to make that very simple. So when we cover all the topics that you possibly need for health, but we break it into those four pillars so that it's easy for students to understand and comprehend and actually apply. And so and remember, yeah, it helps them remember it's again. It's how do we make it simple? We do not live in an age where we are struggling to find information. We live in an information age. And so the more information that there is the less application and less understanding. There is it just becomes so complicated and like they don't know what to do with it. And so yeah, we just we've created these four simple pillars. So F stands for functional fitness. So it's all about movement and how movement is going to help every different system in our body function and how every system in our body works together and how God's, you know, design that and so we talk about how our body is made to move and how God has designed our body to move and so we want to partner with that design. And so yeah, we go through movement and then the second pillar is optimal nourishment. So it's all about nutrition. So we talk about food as fuel and food is fun. And how do we balance those two things? And again, how do we balance those things correctly? Because that food is one of the most miss hot and represented things. I think in the health industry in Germany have supplements and you have these diets and every diet and there's always a new fad thing. And yeah, it's it's so confusing. And so part of what we do is we teach it very simply to kids and we teach it especially for young ladies to that middle school age. There's just a lot of lot of harmful stuff that can come out there if it's not taught right and if they're learning it from our culture and from influencers, it's just it's you know what I mean? And so and so, you know, we really want to teach this from a foundational that biblical understanding of hey food is fuel God's created our body and we need to fuel it. Right? And so most of the time we want to partner with that design just like a car needs gas to go right? We need to feel our body so we can function and do what we're called to do. But also we see all throughout the Bible times where there is feasting and enjoying and celebrating. And so how do we have food as fuel but also have food as fun sometimes most of the time it's fuel but some of the time it's okay to have it as fun and it's not cheating and I'm falling off the wagon and it's bad and it's like no like I love food like you still like you ask anybody that actually knows me you ask my wife or my friends or my brothers. They all will talk like I love food more than all of them. Like I enjoy it. I like feasting. I like enjoying it, but I don't do that all the time. Most of the time I do it as fuel and then sometimes I enjoy it and I celebrate and so how do we balance those two things? So food is fuel food is fun. And then we talked about all the different macronutrients and micronutrients and and sugar consumption and snacks and all those pieces just to give kids a really helpful understanding of nutrition. So that's the second pillar third pillars rest and recovery. So how do we create preventative helpful routines around resting and recovering versus being tired all the time and burning out and getting injured and stuff like that. So sleep and and how to think about rest correctly and stretching and stress management and all those different pieces there. So rest and recovery and then the fourth pillars maintenance and mental health. And so how do we maintain the other three pillars and also health is not just about our physical body. It's about how we're thinking you can have there's people that are insanely physically healthy and their minds are anxious all the time and they're in their their lives are messed up and they have horrible relationships. It doesn't matter how fit you are. If you have all that you're going to be miserable. But also you can have a really but also you can have a really great mind and not take care of your body and there's also issues there. So it's like how can we do both to where we where we talk about to see how we talk about how to find the right vision of why we need to be healthy and how it's going to help us to do what we're called to do. We talk about fitting things practically into our schedule. We talk about the right community and friendships. We need to have and limiting social media and screen time like there's a lot of different things. So we have all that and then we also have some additional modules to that. They're kind of outside those four pillars that cover the Publicly based sex ed social health conflict and grief substance abuse and addiction and we also cover emotional health as well too. So we have some of those additional pieces that you can use you don't have to yes. We cover a lot of things that needed in the whole point of the pillars is we teach everything you need and then the goal is to teach kids. Hey in every season of life. Let's have a simple routine in each of these four areas. And if you do that if you're faithful to it not perfect, but if you're faithful to it and you're consistent in it, you're going to be set up really well, you know, and I think a lot of the issues that we're seeing in our country of whether it's obesity or heart disease or diabetes or whatever, you know, most of that would not be a thing if everybody had a simple routine of movement, right? Let's move three to four times a week and have some put some good healthy stress on our on our heart and on our body. If everybody had a simple routine of eating good whole quality foods and also enjoying sometimes if everybody slept enough and focused on mental health and rested and didn't overwork and had healthy relationships and had like if you have simple routines in each of those four areas, you're going to be set up really really well and most of the issues that we're seeing you're not really going to have issues with and then things that come up, you know, you can make smaller and more targeted fixes and things like that from there. But yeah, that's really the goal with those four pillars. How do we make it really simple? Yeah, and I love that you include parts in there about biblical view of sexuality and especially we live in a time where there's so much gender confusion and with social media it makes you know with young girls and their image. We have teenagers. We have we have an adult child and four teenagers right now. So these are big issues that we see among our teenagers. And so I love that you have that as a part of your program because it is needed. It is something that they need to be educated about and who better to learn it from than from their parents. So I just love that and I know and a lot of parents feel unqualified to teach their kids health and P a lot of parents feel unqualified to homeschool their kids let alone address some of these issues. So it what does this curriculum do to make that easier for parents? Yeah, there's so much that goes into homeschooling. And health and PE and movement and all those pieces a lot of our parents like to think of it as a fun break from the homeschool grind like that's what we've been told a lot is like, okay, how can we set something up to where it's something fun to open up our day to do a little lesson and do a little movement or to take a break, you know after lunch or before lunch and get some movement in and get their energy up instead of sitting and stuff like that all day. We've been told that a lot but really the goal is to take as much work off of parents as we can, you know, and so everything our platform is really is completely done for them. So all the lessons all the topics and the movement videos and the workout plans and things like that that everything is really meant to just make their life easier and we're constantly adding to it and making it better. And so one of the things we're launching in the fall is we're really kind of rebuilding the platform from the ground up and saying, okay, how can we do even better? And so we're going to have a feature where it'll be like daily homeschool PE and you'll be able to log in and they'll be the little workout and the devotional and the takeaway and everything right there and then you can go deeper. So there's a lot of cool things we're adding to just make the experience even better. And so and how do you have a time frame on how long each of those would be? Yeah, I mean, they'll be like a devotional. So as long as you want to spend on that devotional, it's usually like a passage of scripture and then some type of explanation on that a key takeaway and then some discussion questions. So just really depends on how long you want to take on that and then there'll be a some type of health lesson usually more of like a simple kind of takeaway, maybe five minutes, 10 minutes, something like that and then they can go into the actual health curriculum and go deeper. If you're like wanting to cover a health credit or something like that and then there'll be some type of workout or movement or something like that. Sometimes it'll be a video and then a lot of times it'll just be hey, here's the most of its body weight too. So you're not going to have to like have a full gym or go out and buy a bunch of equipment or anything like that. But so yeah, so that'll that'll be kind of what that looks like because that's something that would be intimidating to a lot of families. Do I need to have a full gym to do this or do I need special equipment? No. Yeah. Yeah, you don't have to worry about any of that. Yeah. So what would you say makes form different for homeschool families? What makes it different from other programs that are available? Yeah, I mean, honestly, there's not a lot out there for health and PE. Yeah, so right there. It really for homeschool health and PE you have the old dated books. You have like a book. Yeah, it's usually, you know got the food pyramid and has the old bunch of old stuff in it that you have to do and then at that point you have to take that you have to teach it to the kids. You have to create your own activities yet and it's boring and it's dated and it's so you have that and then you have like, you know, just general like workout apps that you can get to just have like random workouts. I think really what we've tried to put together something that's specific for homeschooling that has everything you need. So there's the helpless and there's the devotionals there's the intentional movement that helps you to cover the credits that you need and have that PE as a part of your day, but where it is really aligned with your values. It is really easy to use and you don't have to do a bunch of prep and the kids like to do right. We want to be your kids to enjoy what they're doing. And so, you know, some of our lessons are little animated videos. You can take that. You can show that kind of draws everything out for them and it's a five minute little, you know, little video that they can watch. So we really try to make it as interactive as we can and is easy on parents to apply. So yeah, so for parents that are listening today and they want to help their kids develop some healthy habits. What is something where should they start? Yeah by our curriculum. No, I'm just kidding. I would say just just focus on really simple healthy habits, right? And again focus on those four pillars that we teach even if you don't have our curriculum, you can help them to build things in each of those four pillars, right? And a lot of it to you know, for like we know what we need to be doing like we know we need to be doing some movement. We know we need to be eating for the most quality for the most part good quality and clean foods. We know we need to be sleeping enough and I a lot of those things like we kind of know we need to do it. We may not know exactly how or like what that looks like but at the end of the day, okay, cool. Should I have a an apple or should I have a donut helping kids make good choices and helping them break it down into those four pillars of hey kids this week. We need to have some good movement this week. We need to plan and have some really good quality meals and maybe have some self-control and not eat some of those sugary things that we were that we were wanting and helping them understand why hey what God has created and design our bodies this way and these sugary and processed foods like those were altered and they're not the same as the quality foods that God has given us. Is it okay to have those every once in a while? Sure, that's fine. But for the most part we need to and just helping them understand why and helping them break it down into those four pillars is really, you know, it's been really helpful. I think for a lot of families. Yeah. Well, I love to hear how you've designed something that is kind of rare. I think in the homeschool world and it's very intentional. I think it's a very practical tool for parents who want maybe to do better themselves but need some kind of a guide to help them do it. So yeah, thank you so much for sharing with us today. Can you just remind everyone where they can find you? Yeah, if you just go to form education org, so form education org, you can select homeschool on there. If you're a if you're a co-op or like a Christian school, you can go and you can click like Christian education. So you do that to be if you go on our website, it tells a ton more about the platform and then we actually give you a full like trial of it too. So you can actually get a preview of the entire platform go in check it out. I think it's like a 14 day type of thing. You have to put a credit card or anything like that. It just gives you access where you can go in and explore and then a lot of those new updates that I just mentioned will be coming out in the fall of just making things even better, you know for our families. Yeah form education dot org. Okay, and I'll be leaving the links to that in the description box below. So thanks again so much for joining me today. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Well, thank you for joining us today on the our life homeschooling podcast. I hope you will click on the link below and check out the form curriculum, which is a health and PE curriculum from a biblical worldview. I have been so encouraged by everything Ashton had to share with us. It was very informative. I really think this is a cultural issue that should be addressed and we as homeschool parents have the opportunity to share these things with our kids to be their first introduction to these important topics. Thanks for listening today. I'll see you next week on the our life homeschooling podcast.