Healthy Living
for the whole family
Healthy Living Tip of the Day
Research shows that relaxing in an Epsom salt bath for just 15 minutes, three times a week, will increase your blood levels of magnesium by 35%. Magnesium helps to reduce your blood pressure. So take a few minutes for yourself and do your body good.
Tips To Make Your Children Eat Healthier
Anyone who has young children knows how difficult it is to make them eat their vegetables. My daughter used to love eating raw tomatoes and onions when she was just a little over 12 months old. As she grew older and got introduced to cookies, chocolate and other snacks, vegetables became her least favorite type of food.
Recently, I have been working on trying to get her to eat healthier and I have successfully gotten her to regularly eat all her veggies and cut down on junk food. Below, I share some of my tips.
- When I go out grocery shopping I don’t buy any unhealthy snacks. I leave out the chips, sweets, cookies and chocolates. Instead I buy lots of fresh or canned fruits, vegetables and sugar free juices.
- My daughter eats rice or couscous as her main dish. I cut up raw vegetables like tomatoes, carrots and cabbage into very tiny pieces and mix it up with the rice or couscous. The carrot and the cabbage can be grated and mixed with your child’s food. As long as it is not too much your child might not notice.
- Because my daughter loves olives, I put more of it in her food than other vegetables. You can find out which particular vegetable your child loves and add more of that to their food.
- I usually season up the meat, fish or chicken that would be served with the rice, then either grill or boil it. I avoid frying her food as much as I can.
- I put some canned pineapple in a bowl and put it in the lower shelves of the fridge along with other fresh fruit. Anytime my daughter needs a snack and opens the fridge, all she finds is healthy fruits to choose from.
To make my daughter enjoy eating her food, I make up stories about how a particular vegetable makes her hair look longer and shinier. When she eats the first bite of her food, I exclaim, and tell her how her hair looks longer and more beautiful now. Because she loves to look beautiful she gets excited and begins to eat more and ask me whether her hair is looking more beautiful… she is just 3.
As she gets more and more used to eating vegetables, there would be no need to tell her the stories. You can do what works for your child to get them to eat healthier. Just stay away from rewarding them with a particular junk food for eating their veggies.
Recent Articles
Keeping a Food Diary
Keeping a food diary can help you in trying to lose more weight. The diary keeps track of what you eat and how many minutes of exercise you have been doing. This helps in easily analyzing your eating habits and realizing where the extra calories are coming from. Monitoring what you eat also lets you know whether you have a healthy eating habit or not.
The best time to write down your food intake and calories is right after you have finished eating your meal. It is easier than having to reconstructing what you have eaten throughout the day all at once. Writing down your intake each time you eat something might actually make you eat less because you become more conscious of what you eat.
You can use out online weight loss tracker to keep track of your daily food intake and weight loss.
Role of Parents in Childhood Obesity
Children of obese parents have a high risk of becoming obese themselves. Parents play a major role in making food choices for their children. If parents are not making smart food choices for themselves and don't have a healthy eating habit, it is likely that they are not selecting healthy meals for their children as well.
Overweight children have a high risk of getting diabetes, high blood pressure and other health problems commonly found in adults. They are also likely to grow up as overweight adults.
