Healthy Lunchbox Snacks
We all want to feed our children the best food possible but often we are really short on time and this means we have to be able to grab and make things quickly. It is my mission to make it easy for you to feed your kids healthy nutritious food.
How do I get my child to eat more salad?
How to make healthy homemade yoghurt?
Ten days of lunches
Healthier treats for kids lunchbox
First of all the lunchbox you use can make a difference. We always use a bento lunchbox because it tends to speed up the process of preparing lunches. It has five food compartments and one for a treat or for sauce. You can buy it here
With compartments this means we can easily add a mixture of
Carbs - Protein - Dairy - Vegetables - Fruit - Salad - Healthy Fats (and maybe a treat)
Even if your child is not yet in preschool, kinder or school bento boxes can be a really easy way of preparing food in advance for the whole day, and a really convenient way to serve it without having loads of washing up. For toddlers we designed a compartmentalised biodegradable bamboo meal set - which basically works the same way.
Bento boxes allow you to keep a regular routine with the food you provide your child and give you the opportunity to slowly add new things in. What do I mean?
It's the same way you wean kids off sweet store bought yoghurt.. slowly! You give them the one they like (in your bento or Little Mashies pouches), and every 2 days you take out one spoon of the sugary brand and substitute it for the plain yoghurt brand or your home-made yoghurt. It gets them used to the taste slowly without them noticing. If they complain you add one spoon of the sugary one back in for a few more days and then take out half a spoonful next time. Here are some awesome yoghurt recipes you can try. I know it sounds dramatic and like hard work but I promise you it really is very easy and it is a strategy that works for all kinds of things!
We have used this strategy many times. Here are some examples:
- Introducing salad to the dinner plate and to the lunchbox
- Changing over from dairy milk to non dairy milks
- Adding chia seeds into yoghurt, porridge, smoothies and cereals
- Moving from predominantly sweet vegetables to a greater variety
- Adding spinach to smoothies
- Adding probiotics (kefir) to yoghurt
It's really easy to make changes in your children's diet if you do it slowly little by little. No kid is going to be happy with losing their sugary yoghurt or smoothie and being offered something plain instead. Sugar is like a drug, we all love it! That's why you have to do it very slowly so they don't even notice.