One Easy System at Nourish Your Kids

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Please check with a health care provider who has nutrition training when changing your family's diet.

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Using the One Easy System:

A Shortage of Recipes?

By Angelle Batten, M.A., H.H.C.

Moms are always asking me for recipes. "I don’t know what to feed my kids. I need some recipes," is what I hear all the time. So often, I do give out tried-and-true recipes. I’ve even been known to hand out actual ingredients for some of them to my clients. Do you know what I often hear the next time I see those moms? "I don’t know what to feed my kids. I need some recipes." The funny thing is I understand. I have no shortage of cookbooks and recipes. And, of course, there’s a zillion healthy recipes available to me online. There’s no shortage of recipes. Yet, sometimes I’m the mom who is thinking, ‘I don’t know what to feed the kids this week. I need some good recipes.’ You see, what I have come to learn is that a lack of good, healthy recipes is not the issue with most moms, including myself. What I’ve learned over the last few years of working with moms is that the issue is really about planning. Yep, that’s it. It’s about carving out some time every week to plan out the meals and the grocery list. It’s about planning out some healthier alternatives to current meals and snacks. We are all so busy running here and there and playing catch-up around the house, bringing work home, doing homework (which I thought was supposed to be more for the kids than for me), taking the dog to the vet, the van to the shop and everything else we do, that planning out a week’s worth of healthy meals and snacks is usually not top on the list of our things to do, if you even have a list.

I wish I had some amazing idea about how you could make sure your kids are eating healthy meals and snacks without much effort on your part, but I have yet to figure one out, and believe me I’ve tried. For me, when it comes to nutritious meals and snacks, planning is 90% of the whole thing. When I get in a crunch and rush to the grocery store without having taken 45 minutes to plan out meals and snacks, I come home, put my bags of groceries away and then when the next meal time comes around I’m standing in front of the open fridge and cupboards wondering what the heck I could actually put together to make a good meal. After a few days of doing that, I feel a bit defeated and by the end of the week, I’ve run out of many of the things I need to make a whole meal. I’ll put some kind of a hodge-podge of foods on a plate for everyone and set it on the table. My kids then look at me to determine whether it’s a day they should ask questions about the meal or just eat it and say, "Thanks for making this for us, Mom." My husband knows it’s in his best interest to smile and say "Thanks, Hon. Looks great." He goes by my dad’s advice that, ‘Every meal is a good meal if I didn’t have to make it.’

I hate it when it feels like that much effort to make a meal or pack lunches, so most of the time I make myself sit down and come up with a weekly plan. Nothing fancy. No gourmet meals. Definitely some repeats throughout the week, but I make sure those are the favorites.

I’ve trained myself to think in terms of including a good quality protein, good fats, and complex carbs in the form of vegetables at each meal and for most snacks. Kids especially need to have enough protein, spread throughout the day, in order to do their best learning, be on their best behavior (not always a guarantee as I was reminded when two of my kids got into a pushing episode out in public the other day), and to have the best foundation for long-term health and development.

I’ve included a simple weekly shopping guide form that will help you to be thinking in terms of these components. If it seems too simple, give it a try for a month and see how it affects your thinking, planning and shopping.

Before you can plan for shopping though, you’ll need to take some time to plan out the meals and snacks. What works for a lot of people is to write out a menu of meals and snacks. Then, each day, you can choose from the menu, or ask your kids to pick one of the meals or snacks listed when it’s time to prepare the food. You know you’ll have the ingredients to pull it all together, because after planning the menu, you will have quickly jotted down everything you need to buy on the Shopping List form.

I know this isn’t rocket science and maybe the forms seem too simple, but the bottom line is that if you want to feed your kids nutritiously and be more in charge of their health, there is absolutely no way around taking time to plan (or having someone do it for you) and to shop one to two times each week for ‘Real Food’.