On July 4th, a Fussy Foodie seminar was held at Nature’s Emporium by Andrew Muto (chef extraordinaire) and Nanny Robino (who used to star on The Mom’s Show and now works for Slice Television).  I will endeavour to summarize the numerous, excellent ideas that were shared at the seminar.  Here are 4 important tips for picky eaters:

1.  When parents make an issue out of food, food becomes an issue for their child.  If a child knows that their parent wants them to eat a certain food or more of a food, more times than not, that child will refuse to cooperate; this is simply one area of their lives where they have control – let’s face it, there aren’t many.  Therefore, it is paramount that parents say nothing when their children refuse a food or refuse more food.

2.  Children often need to taste a food many times in order to determine if they like it.  When a parent offers banana, for example and their child does not appear to like it, they may not be in the mood for banana that day; every food needs to be reintroduced over and over again.

3.  Children need less food than many of us think they do.  A serving size for a child is the size of their palm.  Children know when they have had enough food.  When they are shaking their head that they have had enough, we need to respect their needs, as opposed to asking them to eat one more spoonful of food.  If we don’t respect their needs, their ability to know when they have had enough food will disappear, as it has for most of us adults.

4.  If one of our children refuses a meal, without saying a word, we need to take it away from them but still leave it in sight and ensure that we or our other children eat the same foods that were rejected.  My belief is that rather than letting our child go without eating, we provide them with a simple, HEALTHY meal that involves little work, such as hummus and crackers.

Andrew shared numerous, simple and healthy meal ideas with us.  Everything was absolutely delicious.  Here are the directions for making just a few of the meals or drinks we sampled:

1. Mix sunflower butter with coconut manna, and add banana slices in a wrap
2. Blend baked haddock and boiled potatoes with salt and pepper, form into balls and bake for a few minutes in the oven
3. Blend cooked chickpeas and brown rice with onion, garlic, nutritional yeast and any vegetables, form into patties and bake for a few minutes in the oven
4. Blend 2 apples, 1 lemon and 1 beet to make a healthy lemonade

There are many more ideas for helping picky eaters – please let me know if you need any help!

Do you have a picky eater in your house? I would love to hear from you. And feel free to leave a link back to your own blog too if you have one via the commentluv feature here on the site.

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Until next time,

Meredith