Healthy Eating This Summer

As summer holidays are approaching there is lot to look forward to and there will be lot and lots of yummy food to eat both at home and outside at restaurants. It’s easy to let healthy eating habits slide, but holidays can still be healthy.

Here are some tips to help you and your family stay on track with good eating habits.

For kids, so how do you make sure that your are eating healthy foods this summer? Here are few suggestions to make eating as healthy as possible.

• Nibble on health snacks like whole grain crackers, fruit, or raw vegetables before the big feast. You’ll eat less.
• When you are at a party or having a holiday meal, choose healthier foods like veggies or fruits.
• It takes your brain some time to signal you are full. Wait 10-15 minutes before eating seconds. It’ll keep you from overeating!
• It’s not rude to say no to food. Don’t be pressured to eat, if you aren’t hungry.
• Eating holiday goodies like fudge, peanut brittle, cookies, and other baked goods is fine, but eat them in small pieces.
• You can help make healthy holiday food with your parents. Look for low-fat recipes that substitute butter and oil with non-fat ingredients like applesauce or pumpkin.

For parents – how you can help your kid to eat healthy during holidays?

1) Make Fruit Visible: During summer holidays many fruits are available. Take kids for fruits picking – strawberry, cherry, apple, guava, mulberry, blueberry etc. Place pears, apples, bananas and citrus bowls on the table – living room and dining room.  Try mandarin oranges or Clementine, which kids love, because they’re easy to peel. Prepare a fruit salad or fruit popsicle and ask your kids suggestion too. If you make it attractive and creative kids will eat twice as much.

2) Varieties of colors: All fruits colors has something good in it. Encourage kids to snack on colorful fruits and veggies. Kids can snack on Clementine, sugar snap peas, antioxidant rich red peppers or any other colorful fruit or vegetable in lieu of a holiday cookie or chocolate truffle.  Give cracker with cucumber, sweet pepper, strawberry with little whipped cream or cheese. Kids always love cream and cheese.

3) Organic foods: Introduce children to organic food. Grow your own vegetable garden. Assign small portion of garden to your child to take care. When the vegetable grows encourage and get suggestion from them to prepare a dish from home grown veggies like veggie pizza, pasta with vegetables or rice with vegetables. They are more likely to take at least a little bite of broccoli or carrots if they’ve helped to plant and pick them.

4) Drinking water: Get attractive juice bottles and prepare fresh fruit juice at home. Encourage them to drink plenty of water.  Don’t provide soda and other artificial drinks. Instead introduce them to natural waters like coconut water and prepare juice out of exotic fruits – mango, pomegranate, papaya etc.

5) Lightly spiced cereal mixtures as snacks: Prepare mild spicy cereal mixture at home. Add dry coconut, almonds, cashew, raisins and other nuts for which your kid is not allergic to and store in an air tight container. Instead of giving them French fries or heavy burgers as snack items give them cereal mixture with fruit desserts.

6) Try to keep your cupboards stocked with healthier snacks such as fruit, air-popped popcorn, unsalted nuts and unsweetened yogurt.

Enjoy summer with your kids!!

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Reference: www.werindia.com

Image credit: Image by RitaE from Pixabay (Free for commercial use)