Making healthy meal plans has less to do with buying expensive groceries and more to do with balancing food groups and portion control. With your everyday groceries of choice, you can creatively generate healthy meal plans to sustain your kid’s health long term.
When looking for the best food for children in Calgary, you have to account for the balance. Meal plans are only healthy if there is a proper balance of food groups so that your child is getting all the necessary nutrients for a healthy body. The major food groups you should account for are proteins, starch, and vegetables. In serving portions, you need to have a higher portion for vegetables than the other food groups. In a plate, divide four portions, where one goes to proteins, the other to starch, and the remaining two to vegetables. You can also choose to add vegetables and fruits to the last two portions.
There are three major periods to eat food, accounting for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Technically, breakfast should be taken at about 7 am. Your family should get started on breakfast about 30 minutes after waking up. Anything served later than 10 am is not considered breakfast.
After about 4 hours, you should be ready for your next serving, that is, lunch. It should be about 1 pm when you serve lunch, not extending beyond 4 pm. Your next meal should be ready at about 6 or 7 pm, that is, dinner. Do not delay your dinner past 10 pm, since you need about 3 hours between your meal and your bedtime.
However, those are not all the times that your child should be eating. It is a good idea to have a healthy snack between meals. After breakfast, kids can have a snack at around 9:30 or 10 am. After lunch, they can have another snack at 3 or 4 pm.
As you begin planning out healthy meals, you will need help from a food caterer in Calgary, majorly to help you with portioning your meals. Meal portions for children cannot be the same as those for adults. Further, the age of your child will impact the amount of food they have. Besides, when the food is too good, children tend to overeat. Some tips to help with proper portion control for your child are:
Planning meals for your kids may not seem like it pays off at the moment, but it does. For one, you have an easier time determining what the next meal will be, so you can concentrate on other things about your child other than the next steps for preparing food.
Besides, children easily stray from healthy food choices. If it were up to your child to choose what they want for lunch or dinner, it would almost always certainly be sugary foods or drinks. With healthy meal plans, you narrow down the choices for your child to select. Eventually, they will have favorite food groups among the healthy meal plans you have.
Planning healthy meal plans also helps sustain consistency in your household, where you are sure that all your meals are healthy and wholesome for your family’s well-being.