Make a Healthier Meal Plan Your Kids will Eat by Tracking Snacks & Juice

Being a mother makes it hard to say no to the puppy dog eyes and tugs at pant legs, but sometimes it’s best to take a firm stance for the long term health of your children rather than concede and help them develop habits that encourage short term indulgences.

Once your young ones outgrow the jars of mashed fruits and veggies, things get real complicated fast. It’s easy to swing through the McDonald's drive through and get them a happy meal and a ice cream cone to make them happy, but short term happiness is hardly worth developing habits that have long term impacts on health. This is why you should take the time to set up a meal plan to help organize the food each week so that you ensure a well balanced meal plan to ensure your little ones are fed with what they need to grow up healthy.

The first step is to organize a shopping list with all the food for the entire week. Setting out and planning every meal at the start of the week will save you time on multiple shopping plans but will also help aid you in organizing and following a well constructed meal plan to ensure that you and yours are healthy and well fed in the coming days. By shopping once and following a shopping list you avoid impulse buys of junk food and can more easily follow a food plan by just never having unhealthy food enter the household. Of course, strictly following a diet can also slow the metabolism down so it is okay to plan out one day a week where you can break from the diet plan and take the kids out for whatever they want. They’ll enjoy the weekly reward and you’ll enjoy the day to day improvement in lifestyle and development of good healthy habits.

Following that, it helps a lot to research different diet plans to find out what works for your family. And what works for you may not work for growing children, so take the time to find the best compromise. Perhaps if your kids are big into sports you can help them out with protein and vitamin rich diets, and ensure that they have complex carbohydrates like multigrain pasta on the nights before big games or long practices to ensure they have the energy to pursue their interests, and the support that they need to be the best that they can be.

After that then you just need to commit to following a daily planner to help develop and hold to these good lifestyle habits, save money, time, and help your family be the best that they can be.