Part of my work as a health coach is asking my clients questions about their childhood, what meals were served at home and what their parents’ health looks like today, if they are still around. Sometimes people seem surprised by these questions, but I have come to believe that understanding our health begins with understanding where we come from.
I grew up in a very ordinary Icelandic family home. I was the youngest of four children. When I was two years old, my grandmother suffered a stroke. My mother had not yet returned to work after having me and suddenly found herself balancing the needs of her children with the needs of her own mother. My grandmother’s care often depended on whether external help arrived as planned, and when it did not, my mother stepped in.
At the time, none of this seemed unusual to me. I was simply a happy child who adored her mother and wanted to be wherever she was. I always accompanied her on visits to my grandmother in the years before I started school at 6 years old, although I was too young to understand the responsibilities she was carrying for little me and my grandmother. It is only now, many years later, that I can see how much of herself my mother gave to others.
She had grown up without a father and spent much of her childhood alone after school or with her mother at work, to support her three children and five stepchildren. My mother wanted us to come home to someone waiting for us, so when I came home from school, she was always there. There were usually home baked goods, cakes, pastries, Icelandic delicacy kleinur, or something else that she had made. On Saturdays she baked like her own mother had done for her and cleaned the house like her mother. There was usually a cake or two prepared in the freezer in case visitors unexpectedly dropped by for coffee and something to go along with it.
Food was woven into the rhythm of family life. Looking back, I realise that what I remember most vividly is not the nutritional value of what we ate but the feeling that surrounded it. A plate of food was rarely just food. It was hospitality, comfort, tradition, and love.
The meals themselves would be familiar to many Icelanders of my generation. We had lamb at lunch or for dinner on Sundays, fish once or twice a week, meatballs and sausages in between, and pizza on Fridays. Vegetables were not entirely absent, but they certainly did not play the starring role they do in many kitchens today. I remember rice pudding covered with cinnamon sugar and milk, and meatballs served with rhubarb jam and sweetened mashed potatoes. At the time, I thought very little about any of it. It was simply normal.
It wasn’t until adulthood that I began to think about food differently. Through studying health and nutrition, I learned things that my parents never thought of nor had the opportunity to learn. Information that feels commonly available today was not accessible or necessarily a part of everyday conversations thirty or forty years ago. When I look back now, I can see that some of the habits I grew up with may not have served our health particularly well. Yet I find it impossible to look at my childhood through a lens of judgment. My parents cooked the food they believed was good for us. They worked within the financial realities of raising four children with limited funds and within the knowledge available to them at the time. Like most parents, they were doing their best.
Perhaps that is why I have become so interested in the habits we inherit. Not just genetically, but culturally and behaviourally. Long before we make our own decisions about health, we absorb ideas about food, movement, stress, and self-care from our near environment. We learn what is normal. We learn what belongs at the dinner table. We learn how people respond to worry, exhaustion, celebration, and grief. These lessons become so familiar that we often do not recognise them as habits at all.
Recently, my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. The diagnosis has prompted a great deal of reflection, not only about her health but also about my own. It has made me think about the patterns that travel through families and about the complicated relationship between inheritance and choice. There is much we cannot control. We do not choose our genes, and none of us can predict exactly how our health story will unfold. At the same time, it is difficult not to wonder what role our daily habits play over the course of a lifetime.
I find myself noticing the ways in which my own life differs from the one I grew up in. I have had to teach myself to enjoy foods that never appeared on our family table. Avocados and nuts were not offered in my childhood. Many of the habits that now feel natural to me were once unfamiliar. Change did not arrive through a dramatic transformation or a single decision. It happened gradually, through repetition and through a growing understanding that health is shaped by the small things we do day after day.
On this journey it has been very important for me not to blame my parents and realise that changing a habit does not require rejecting them. I realise that they cared, loved, and made sacrifices for us and our grandmother, that shaped my childhood. However, I am consciously choosing a different path for myself and my family, and that is probably what every generation does. We carry some things forward, while leaving other things behind, and then we add something of our own before passing it on.
Perhaps that is why understanding our family history matters. Not because it determines our future, but because it helps us understand ourselves and where we come from. The habits we inherit are powerful, yet they are not permanent. Once we become aware of them, we are free to decide which patterns still serve us and which ones we would like to change. In that sense, understanding where we come from is not about heading backwards. It is about making more conscious choices about where we want to go next.
If this has made you think about your own patterns, I’d love to hear what came up for you. You’re welcome to get in touch, or you can take the free Wellness Score assessment to get a clearer picture of where your health habits stand right now.
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