I recently found myself at the park talking to the other moms all about how I sneak healthy foods into my kids snacks without them knowing. I realized this is pretty good mom-ing info, so now I'm sharing my tips and tricks with you.
My kids are only borderline picky, so it's not a huge stretch to get good foods in them usually. However, there are always times where they only want to eat a handful of foods and then I have to get creative. So, where do we start?
What will your kids eat? Can you sneak anything healthy into it?
My go to is smoothies. You can pack all kinds of healthy foods in there and usually it will go undetected. They love it, and life is awesome
Then all of a sudden your kids HATE smoothies (yes, even the ones they LOVED yesterday) so, now what?
I have one word for you... popsicle.
Yup, you pour that smoothie that they 'can't possibly drink because it's so disgusting' into a popsicle mold and they will be begging you to make more! It's magic!
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Another fun one I've had great success with lately is Hot Cocoa. I know what you're thinking, 'chocolate and sugar?! she's lost it', but hear me out.
Lets actually start this one with a little color theory, I did go to school for design after all...
Hot cocoa = brown. You can combine just about anything together and get some shade of brown out of it. Why am I telling you this?
Because if you take Pink beet powder and Green super greens and blend them up, you get brown! Nice chocolate looking brown.
Add in coconut milk, monk fruit sweetener (no sugar), raw cacao and a splash of vanilla (and Hot water of course) you've got a vitamin and mineral rich, sugar free 'treat' they will love.
I like to blend it all together in the Vitamix before I blend my coffee, so it's not adding any extra mess.
This combo also works great in Nice-cream! If you aren't familiar with nice-cream yet, it's frozen bananas + coconut milk blended in the Vitamix. Easy peasy. I almost always add cacao, because, chocolate!
Another way to get healthy foods in is to find ways to add them into the foods they already love.
This may take a bit of digging around for recipes (thank you Pinterest!) or it could be as simple as adding finely grated carrots into their grilled cheese (I heard this somewhere and thought it was brilliant) or into your pasta sauce, zucchini works great for this too!
Aside from sneaking in healthy foods, a great way to get kids to try new foods is to get them to help in the preparation.
Have them help you shop for the ingredients, stir them together, make a sauce (btw, sauces are another great place to hide veggies!) cut the veggies. If they feel invested, they are more likely to give it a try.
You can take it to a whole other level if you help them grow some veggies themselves. The daily action of taking care of the plants will really cause some excitement.
I hope this got your gears turning, and you can find a new way to get more healthful foods into those little bellies! If you found this helpful I'd love for you to add this to your Pinterest and share it with your friends.
