Healthy Dieting

Bring out chopsticks one day; blindfold them for a ‘guess what’s for supper’ food-tasting test another time; make them eat the different foods on their plate in alphabetical order — there are all kinds of games you can play to encourage your child to eat and to deflect attention from battles over whether they like a food or not.

Tiny titbits

Cut up food into small, bite-sized chunks, or even smaller, to make meals seem more manageable.

Bribery and corruption

Heap lots of praise and encouragement on your child when they eat healthy foods, and use incentives such as stickers, star charts or points. Make sure that you don’t undo all your good work by making the treat one of the unhealthy items you have been weaning your child off; a treat doesn’t have to be forbidden food or drink, but can be an extra- long bedtime story, a toy or a trip somewhere exciting. These reward schemes work particularly well when you have more than one child taking part; it’s amazing what you can get children to do once you introduce a bit of healthy competition. If your child doesn’t have any brothers or sisters, either get their friends’ parents on board or speak to their teacher to introduce a ‘Healthy Start Star Chart’ at school.

Go shopping

Make food shopping fun, and get your child involved in more than just the sweet selection, by getting them to help you choose healthy foods. For example, get them to choose a new fruit, or select the greenest apple, or choose vegetables for a stir-fry.

Get cooking

At the Food for the Brain schools we saw so many children who claimed to hate all vegetables, but when we got them making Big Baked Beans, which features tomatoes and onions, they wolfed them down. Likewise, most children will be happy to eat a stir-fry that they have helped to make.

Smart snacking

Snacks in between meals are a good idea to help keep blood sugar balanced so that your child’s energy, concentration levels and mood remain stable, but you don’t want your child to be so full of snacks that they don’t eat at mealtimes. A mid-morning and midafternoon snack will keep most children filled up between meals, although very big or active children can have more, and if your child is used to constantly grazing, you can give them several ‘mini meals‘ throughout the day, instead of three main meals and only a couple of snacks. The quantity of snacks is not as important as quality, however. Make sure that between-meal nibbles are nutritious, and low in sugar.

Watch out for drinks, too — most juice drinks, squashes, fizzy drinks and flavoured milks contain as much sugar as many confectionery items, and milk is a protein and fat-rich food that will fill them up quickly so that they don’t want meals.

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