Healthy Weight

It is very important that children have a healthy diet and maintain physical activity. Here are some of the ways in which you can encourage this within your family.

Healthy diet

Fruit and vegetables

To increase your child’s interest and appetite for vegetables, it is a great idea to involve them in the recipe searching and shopping stages. By doing this together your child will become aware of everything that is available and can choose a preference in terms of recipe. Your child will enjoy having a say in what your family eats, and you can make a challenge out of trying new types of food.

A similar approach can be used for fruit: take time to explore the supermarkets and –talk to your child about all the different types of fruit that exist. Make it a challenge to try as many fruits as possible and listen to what your child says about each one. When they tell you what they like, you could start a game in which you could include fruit in different forms like cereal, fruit bowls or make your own ice-lolly.  

Recipes

Start 4 Life can provide you lots of interesting, inexpensive and simple recipes for your baby or toddler. Change 4 Life provides the same quality recipes but for children 1 years and older.  

Food shopping

We can understand that it is not possible for many parents, but try and use any opportunity to involve your children in the food shop, as this will could give them an idea of where their meals are coming from and it can also spark an interest in a particular food item that they like the look of. The supermarket will open their eyes to many new products, encouraging them to try more, whilst having a hand in the decision making. Sometime fresh fruit and vegetables can be expensive, frozen fruit and vegetable have the same healthy effect and can cost less.

Cooking

For fast meal menus and recipes why not visit the Change 4 Life recipe section, where you'll find a lot of suggestions to try out as a family. It's worth cooking in bulk too because this means you will have home-made ready meals available for super quick healthy dinners. There are many stages to cooking a meal and you can get the whole family involved by dividing the cooking into different parts.

Mealtimes

It is important to maintain regular meal times so that your child becomes used to eating at certain times around the day. There are many options for healthy snacks inbetween main meals including carrot sticks, nuts and fruit.

Anything about diet well-being?

Fussy eating (not just for toddlers). We already a page which covers fussy eating - link to this or copy the info over?

School meals can be a great start for a nutritional diet