The art of convincing your child to eat properly is all too often a delicate balancing act of finding foods a fussy eater likes while also keeping their long-term health in mind. After all, the foundation for good eating habits begins earlier than we might think and carrying forward a bad habit is far easier than learning good ones.
The importance of healthy eating and finding foods that naturally pique your child’s interest in a variety of foods while supporting a healthy metabolism might require a bit of imagination and outside help.
Thankfully, there are plenty of foods that exist with metabolism-boosting properties across a wide variety of tastes, textures and scents to ensure there’s something for every child who insists on a diet of nothing but sugary snacks and the occasional can of pre-prepared ravioli. Make sure to keep your child away from junk food and slowly get him used to consuming only healthy food. Here are five examples of healthy food that might help your child develop a more positive relationship with the food they eat!
1.Celery
While its status as a negative calorie food may not be entirely truthful, there’s plenty of merit to why celery is a solid addition to any young child’s diet, including the stimulation of digestion without the intake of a large amount of calorie-intensive food. The only problem that may arise is getting your child to enjoy celery without slathering it in peanut butter.
Add celery to a fruit smoothie along with other foods! You may be able to camoflauge the taste for your picky eater.
2.Fruit
Fresh fruit takes a special place in developing healthy eating habits by providing an easy source of nutrients as well as offering a sweet foodstuff that can replace unhealthy deserts with tons of sugar.
Breakfast is one of the best times to include fruit into a daily diet to act as something to look forward to during a difficult time of day while also incorporating the metabolism boost that comes with eating early in the morning.
For ease of digestion and speed of consumption, making smoothies cuts down significantly on breakfast prep time while being very difficult for any sugar-loving kid to resist. While a blender might serve your needs, finding the best smoothie maker for your family’s size and preferred fruits may be a worthwhile investment towards removing early morning headaches.
3.Lean Meat
The obvious benefits of incorporating healthy amounts of protein into a developing child’s diet are obvious enough, especially when their muscular growth as they age is brought into consideration, but there are other factors to consider.
Lean meats such as chicken are a strong source of iron without adding extra fat into a child’s diet. The importance of iron can be linked directly to metabolism speed and suffering through an iron deficiency might leave your young one feeling sluggish or worse. In fact, it’s a known fact that meeting the iron levels required for a developing body is a difficult task at best.
If meat isn’t a part of your diet plans for the immediate future, you can also find good sources of iron in leafy greens, tofu, legumes and dried fruits.
4.Green Tea
Having seen medicinal use for centuries, green tea’s benefits range from antioxidant properties to improved brain function with additional reasons to partake only stacking up as the years go by.
For children, these properties can shine in green tea’s ability to invoke additional fat-burning and metabolic boosts that may also be found in oolong teas. Effects may vary from person to person, but your child might be lucky enough to have a physiology that promotes additional fat burning for energy through the consumption of teas.
5.Yogurt
While the fruit often present in yogurt offers its own health benefits, yogurt itself and its healthy bacterial cultures aid in digestion through the introduction of probiotics. These bacteria are an essential part of healthy digestive tract function and they already exist within your stomach, but additional help from foods like yogurt and sauerkraut promotes digestion, fat-burning and even improved skin.
Unfortunately, teaching a child about the boons of sauerkraut doesn’t make them any less likely to spit it back out as soon as they taste it, making yogurt a much easier delivery method. You can even mix in iron supplements to ensure your offspring avoids deficiencies without having to work pills into their routine.
Experiment with These Foods
Experiment with the foods your child likes and see what you can get away with. After all, healthy eating isn’t often a habit that is learned on one’s own, but rather a lifelong practice that requires being taught what foods are ideal and what foods should be eaten in moderation.
Working towards improving your child’s metabolism is just one small step in ensuring they grow up big and strong without gaining too much weight in the process.
By Amanda Wilks
