Fat Loss 4 Idiots Secret

Saturday, July 25, 2009

How To Encourage Your Child To Accept Healthy Eating

By James Zane Johnson

Healthy eating is something that is talked about widely today. However, despite the general recognition of the importance of a healthy diet, many people still do not appreciate what is involved to ensure that they and their families constantly enjoy healthy eating.

Embracing a healthy lifestyle is best done from early childhood. The habits a child adopts with regard to their eating can often stay with them for life. Training your child to eat healthily can begin as early as the breast feeding stage. Many foods consumed by the mother pass into the mother's breast milk. It has been shown for example, that children whose mothers eat a lot of spicy foods more readily accept spicy foods as they get older than children whose mothers did not.

Likewise, if a mother consumes a diet that is high in salt or refined sugars her breast fed child will lean toward preference for salty or sugary foods also. You can start to gear your child toward healthy eating from this early stage of development by ensuring that you eat sensibly while breast feeding.

Breast feeding is important but it is once a child embarks on a diet of solid food that lifelong habits begin to form. Children can be trained to practice healthy living if they live in a family that practices a healthy lifestyle. From the beginning it is important to introduce your child to a diet that has a high content of fresh fruit and salads. Also if you have a diet that is rich in whole grains and oily fish, your child is likely to continue eating these things into adulthood.

If a child lives in a situation where the diet is full of unnecessary fats and sugars, laden with salt and over represented in red meats such as burgers and steaks, they are liable to continue eating this way when they are independent and making their own food choices. You can help your child by setting a good example by eating properly yourself.

Many parents make the terrible mistake of eating fairly healthily themselves but providing their children with a diet that they think children like. Worse still, some parents end up adopting a diet that they have geared toward their children's perceived preferences. It is very common to find a mother overdosing on pizza and fries, packet breakfast cereals and sugary deserts just because these are the things she has loaded in her grocery trolley for the children.

Parents should understand that children will grow up to enjoy healthy food if that is what they are fed from the outset. They will also grow up to enjoy the types of meals their parents eat. The trick is to eat healthily and feed your children what you are eating.

Healthy eating must become a way of life if it is to have the desired impact on general health and well being. Some people think it is sufficient to eat a healthy meal once in a while to derive the necessary benefits. This is completely false. Healthy eating must be regular, consistent and long lasting before true benefits will be felt. Adopting a healthy lifestyle is not difficult. You will find that you enjoy healthy food equally or even more than junk food once you have become used to it. - 17274

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