How to Get Kids to Eat Healthy

Many parents that learn about how to eat healthy and want their kids to join them on this journey find a ton of opposition in this area. Some kids just naturally enjoy good food and make the transition easily, but others really like certain comfort foods and just don’t want to give them up.

Tips on Getting Kids to Eat Healthy

1. Slowly buy less and less of the unhealthy food. Sometimes it’s good to just get rid of everything unhealthy in the house, but with kids you sometimes have to take things a little slower. When you run out of an unhealthy food that you don’t want your children to have, don’t buy it again for a month. Just be very slow with replenishing the unhealthy options and have plenty of healthy options around for when your kids want a meal or snack.
2. Provide water, water flavored with essential oils, and tea (sweetened with stevia) to drink – Drinking our calories is a huge detriment to the american diet. Even though that sugary drink tastes so yummy, couldn’t we be just as satisfied with a nice cold glass of lemon water or tea sweetened with stevia? If you find your children are starting to show signs of being overweight or being hyper or tired all the time, making this one little switch in their drinks can make a huge difference. Even if your children are not overweight, hyper, or tired, drinking pure water or tea 99% of the time, can give them greater health benefits in the near and far future.
3. Puree vegetables if kids won’t eat raw or cooked vegetables. Raw vegetables are a great healthy and crunchy snack. Provide these before your kids as often as possible. There are lots of good tasting cooked vegetables that can be served at every meal. Sometimes I serve 2 cooked vegetables along with a salad. If your children are totally against vegetables or eat very little vegetables, then I suggest cooking them and pureeing them to put into your foods. Foods that work well with pureed vegetables like cauliflower, sweet potatoes, carrots, and all types of squash include chili, soups, spaghetti sauce, mashed potatoes, casseroles, burritos and more. I find it’s easiest to cook a bunch of vegetables, puree them, and put them into zippered sandwich bags in a thin layer and frozen. Then it’s easy to break off a piece of pureed vegetables and put into any dish. I have put up to 1/2 c pureed cauliflower into mashed potatoes and no one noticed. Most of the time I find that my family comments on how good the dishes taste when I have included some pureed vegetables.

I hope this post has been helpful to you in learning how to eat healthy. Let me know if you have any questions about any of this.