Tips To Develop Better Eating Habits For Children

There are a number of ways that you can help your children to develop better eating behaviors and habits, while making your life easier - and healthier.
Lets work our way through them, step by step:

• Only bring home food that you want them to eat. This off course means that you won't be buying junk food to bring home anymore. This will immediately reduce their exposure to processed, refined, junk food by at least 50%.
• Focus on adding new, healthy foods to your diet, instead of only eliminating unhealthy choices. This may sound like a contradiction to point no 1 above, but it's not - you are avoiding junk food, but replacing it with better choices, so you are not left with an empty gap, where junk food used to be.
• When you are faced with making a food choice, make your choice verbally, so that your children can hear you walk yourself through your decision making process. For example, when you are faced with purchasing a packet of crisps, you can say to yourself, aloud, "I know these crisps are very tasty, but they are full of bad chemicals and fats that will make me get fat and feel tired - I know that I will feel better if I choose an apple instead...' This works especially well with younger children, as teenagers will simply roll their eyes...
• Get them to help in the kitchen. Don't have the old, bad staples at hand, but have new, interesting, different choices. Also start looking at ways to introduce new meals at weekends, so that you have some new meals to experiment with.
• Freeze peeled bananas and berries, so that your teenager can start making smoothies, with good protein powder, rice, soya or nut milks, with some vanilla and other natural flavorings.
• Try to get them into the habit of snacking on raw products between meals, which will increase their enzyme consumption as well as re-train their processed-food/ junk food tooth.
• Simply use the excuse of having run out of time when dinner arrives, and conveniently only have some raw, crunchy veggies at hand, with some avocado, or hummus for them to munch on while you 'quickly' make the rest of the dinner.
• Stop making separate meals. Sit down and explain your time constraints and your desire to do the best you can for them. Expect some retaliation and knee jerk 'starving myself' responses, but many parents will attest to this procedure working very well, transforming meal times from battlegrounds to pleasant conversations.
• If your child is extremely fussy about what they choose to eat, they could have a zinc deficiency, a mineral that is involved in ensuring taste buds work properly, as well as regulating appetite. Often children who have a zinc deficiency enjoy highly flavoured foods because the additives titillate their poorly performing taste buds, which is why normal, natural foods will taste less than appealing.
• When you eat out, don't lose all control. Let them see you make good food choices, and ask restaurants if they'll prepare smaller portions of adult meals that appeal to your children, rather than simply leaving them to choose off the children's menu. Explain to your children that the kids menu is generally the cheapest, worst food, and that the adult food is tastier and better for them.

Making changes in the way that you feed your children will not be a breeze. You will have days of deep despondency. You may want to give up. Many parents simply give up because it's hard.
If you cave in and let them get away with eating the mass produced, processed, refined rubbish that is fed to kids today, you will live to see their ill health and unhappiness. When you realize that the buck does stop with you, because you push the trolley, you realize how much positive power you do have. Use it for living healthy and family.