A healthier summer

With the school holidays starting on Friday its time to knuckle down and try and get the whole family's diets a lot healthier! This half term we seem to have done a lot of rushing around and we have all eaten far too much rubbish. I need to get us all to eat a more balanced and nutritional diet without dieting. Also if I am going to be a student in September we need to all enjoy simple and inexpensive home cooked meals. 

My son is the fussiest eater of the two and is reluctant to eat his food groups mixed together. This has made it hard to serve up stews and casseroles. So one challenge is to try and get him to branch out more and be adventurous. Not an easy one as he is pretty stubborn and would rather go hungry than eat something he doesn't like! Hopefully as he gets older this will peter out...

My daughter will eat a wider variety of foods but will suddenly announce one day that she no longer eats something she used to love. The most recent one of these is chicken! I think if she had her way she would eat bolognaise, lasagne and cheesy pasta in rotation... 

I would love for them to eat more vegetables than they have been doing. In the summer salads are so quick and easy but only one child eats cucumber and no other salad vegetables are liked. For myself I rustled up a 3 colour salad today but my children would never eat it:

With my daughter being naturally skinny and officially underweight she is used to being able to eat lots without it showing. Just recently at the age of nearly 11 her body is changing and she keeps saying she is fat due to a mini pot belly. I keep reassuring her that her body needs to put on some weight to create womanly curves shortly. However she does need to make sure that she is putting the right foods in her body to assist the changes without dieting.

All of us have been eating too many treats and naughty snacks with picnics and days out. I have already told the children that I won't be buying anything except for the odd treat. It seems that multi packets of crisps have been vanishing at far too fast a rate to be healthy! We should all be munching on other things and trying to stick to plain water as much as possible. Apple juice has been relied upon as a way of getting some of the 5 a day into my son but its now shown to be unhealthy... great!

I am experimenting with the Hairy Dieters recipes as they are healthy whilst still being real food. Just wish I could convince my kids to eat things like this yummy Moroccan Chicken with couscous:

Watch this space to see how I manage! Any tips and tricks to get fussy kids to branch out with their food choices in a healthier manner would be welcome...