How to Raise a Healthy Eater: A Q&A with IIN grad Yassmin Dakik

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Motherhood changed everything for Yassmin, including her relationship with food. What began as a personal struggle with nutrition became a professional calling: helping children build a healthy, lifelong relationship with what’s on their plate. In this spotlight, Yassmin shares how IIN’s Health Coach Training Program helped her integrate a holistic philosophy into her child-focused wellness practice — supporting parents through empathy, active listening, and connection, while emphasizing bio-individuality (the concept, pioneered by IIN, that every person has unique needs when it comes to health and nutrition). Today, that work is empowering her to help families develop healthier food dynamics.

Question: How IIN’s Coaching Program Transformed My Approach to Helping Parents & Kids

In my line of work, we tend to give solutions more than we listen, and sometimes all parents want is someone to hear them and validate their feelings. Parents can get frustrated by the vast responsibility they take in raising children, one of which is feeding their kids. They assume that their success as parents is determined by their children eating successfully, and that if their child doesn’t do that, they’ve failed. The pressures can lead to a sense of guilt that isn’t useful to them or their children.

IIN helped me listen and learn how to ask the right questions so that I could understand the frustration of other parents. In doing so, I began to understand how parental attitudes surrounding food can affect their children’s eating habits. Counterproductive feeding can enable eating disorders, aversions, and low appetites.

Through IIN, I found a new way to help kids develop better relationships to food by calming their parents and helping them be more mindful of their own eating habits. The amount children eat can be reframed as their responsibility toward their own bodies, allowing them to acknowledge hunger and satiety cues. "I eat therefore I am full; I don't eat therefore I am hungry."

Question: Can you share a bit about your background and what led you to specialize in pediatric nutrition?

Prior to becoming a mom, I had a terrible connection to food. I was myself a picky eater. I graduated from my first bachelor's degree in clinical laboratory sciences with a specialty in molecular genetics. However, with all my knowledge about the physiology of the body, I was never a healthy eater until I found out I was pregnant. All my fears came knocking at my door when I started looking at my diet as the enemy and I remembered how ill I had been as a child — I was never a good eater, and I gave my mum such a hard time eating. I didn't want to experience that with my daughter, and I didn't want her to be sick constantly or to have to rely on the frequent use of antibiotics.

I received my second bachelor's degree in food science and nutrition while my daughter was 4 months old with two months remaining until we started solids. While studying at university, I started taking online courses about Pediatric Nutrition to make sure we started on the right path. The nutrition degree was just not enough, and I needed to learn more. From one course to another, one program to another, one degree to another, I became who I am today; a Pediatric nutritionist. Today, my daughter is eight years old and has only needed antibiotics once, after an operation. Getting sick is normal, but eating nutritious foods can speed up the recovery process.

Question: What initially drew you to IIN’s Health Coach Training Program (HCTP)?

The Health Training Program was just what I needed to understand the bio-individuality of children’s stomach sizes and preferences. For example, one child may prefer eating a large meal at once, while the other feels satisfied with smaller, more frequent meals. I still wasn't paying enough attention to the dynamic between parents and children when it came to eating. I started seeing a lot of parents with picky children. I was talking but not listening or understanding.

The Health Coach Training Program really dives deep into understanding your clients, rather than only instructing them. It elevates your coaching skills beyond just solving or teaching, but helping the client learn to lead their own way and aiding them in developing a sense of advocacy. This revelation was an eye opener and pushed me to better my work. That IIN email about the Health Coach Training Program I received one day was exactly what I needed at that place and time in my life.

Question: Why did you decide to take IIN’s Coaching Intensive Practicum, and how did it support your professional growth in Zambia?

Learning is a hobby kind of for me. When I learned about board certification and the opportunity to deepen my health coaching skills, it blew my mind. In Zambia, knowledge about healthy eating isn’t central to our culture. Though we live mostly by what nature offers, people also now rely on big supermarket chains and processed food. Going out and having a delicious meal without questioning what ingredients are being added is common here.

I have seen malnourished kids, picky eaters, type 2 diabetes, sudden death in teenagers, high blood pressure — you name it. Changing the mindsets of the people around me so they could change it in the people around them (spreading the ripple effect of health) became my priority. Now that I am a pediatric nutritionist and health coach, I feel that my responsibility to impact my community has grown.

Question: You focus on helping parents of picky eaters—what common struggles do parents face, and how do you support them?

Parents face constant judgement in everything, but somehow people only judge if children are eating more. This judgement has turned into fear, and this fear into a counterproductive response from parents into their children especially when they are eating. This can create tension and a conflicting relationship with food.

When forced to eat when they don't want to, some children will develop "exit strategies" to be dismissed from the dining table, for example, by claiming to have a stomachache. Others require specific conditions to feel comfortable eating; some kids will only eat while watching an iPad, playing, or taking their plate into another room. Without gaining insight into these behaviors, parents and children become frustrated, mealtimes become dragged out, and the meal is not considered successful. The percentage of these struggling kids is on the rise.

Question: How does coaching parents, rather than working directly with kids, lead to better nutritional outcomes?

Parents can explain their observations, and consequently kids may feel like they are in trouble at the sight of a doctor or specialist. It's important to use a sensitive approach when speaking to children younger than ten about their eating habits, as the child may begin to feel guilty and ashamed if they perceive blame. These feelings can result in an increasingly negative relation to food — we don't want that!

Picky eating can stem from a child’s desire to feel in control, which can be mitigated when we help parents understand how to give their children a sense of autonomy so that they don’t have a need to be as resistant. We must make parents and children feel happy and heard for them to be open to new approaches.

Question: How does a child’s nutrition impact their immune system, and what foods do you recommend to support immune health?

Food influences proper organ function, and some foods can suppress the immune system. Children love sugar when it's accessible to them, and studies show that consuming excess sugar (more than 100 grams in one day) can temporarily suppress the immune system. Children can fall ill or experience heightened symptoms when they aren’t provided the optimal support to fight sickness with nutritious and immune-boosting food. Vitamin C, for example, can provide a temporary boost to the immune system for several hours. If we want to boost our children’s immunity, we need to limit disruptions to that system and bolster it with an extra line of defense.

Small additions to a routine like turmeric in food, regular doses of bone both, and elderberry syrup prior to going to school can boost your child’s immunity. A diet rich in iron, zinc and vitamin D (or 10 min sun exposure) can also make a difference. A doctor or nutrition can help ensure that your child is getting vitamins and nutrients in sufficient and appropriate amounts.

Question: How do you balance your scientific background with the holistic approach you learned at IIN?

IIN helped me understand different diets, as well as different approaches to nourishment from primary food to secondary, and their symbiotic relationship. There are many things I learned through IIN that had been missing when I studied for my nutrition degree. When I looked into the science, I was astonished by how evident the science behind the holistic approaches I learned at IIN were. However, holistic teachings were neglected by the curriculum during my time at nutrition school. It’s important to know both worlds, traditional approaches to wellness and holistic.

Question: What’s next for you in your career?

After I finish my board certification, I will infuse my health coaching background into my next chapter as a feeding therapist to help autistic children, as well as children with food intake and sensory disorders like ARFID and SPD.

Question: For those considering IIN, how would you describe the impact it has had on your life and career?

IIN made me evaluate what I had been and am learning, encouraging me to consider bio-Individuality — how we are all different and what works for me may not work with you. The things we have in common within the way we lead our lives and make our choices for our well-being because that will affect our body, but our different health needs also have to be taken into account.

IIN teaches you the connection between food and life, mind and body, because they are connected more than we think. Enrolling in IIN enhanced my university education by adding to my existing knowledge about nutrition to help me connect the dots and strengthen my capacity as a therapist.