Structuring A Meal For Ultimate Peace of Mind when dealing with picky eating

Determining Your Child’s Preferred Foods

I work with lots of wonderful families who are experiencing picky eating. Many come to me under the impression that their little one has a really small number of preferred foods – a big red flag in our picky eaters. For some families, this is absolutely the case, however, for many, once we work together, they are surprised to learn that the number of foods is far greater (YAY!!).

So, how do we figure out our little ones preferred foods. A food is differentiated by sensory property:

• Taste – adding herbs and spices, different flavour yoghurt, different flavour Weetbix balls, different flavoured milks etc.

• Texture – puree, dried, fresh/raw, cooked, toasted

• Appearance – shape, cooking method

Some examples of this include:

• Toast —> Bread —> Roll —> English Muffin

• Raw apple —> Stewed apple —> Apple slices —> Apple puree —> Dried apple —> Freeze dried apple

• Strawberry yoghurt —> Banana yoghurt —> Plain yoghurt

• Banana Weetbix balls —> Apple Weetbix balls

Once you have this list of preferred foods, you can then use these to structure a meal for you little one

Structuring A Meal

Food wastage and feelings of defeat around mealtimes is very normal and incredibly common when you are a parent of a picky eater. So too is parents being short order cooks and returning to the kitchen to prepare a second and third meal when those prior have been refused. Offering back up meals is a very understandable (we all want our babes to eat something!), but it will wreak havoc in the future, and likely already has. Essentially, this creates a heavy reliance on preferred foods, it inadvertently tells your child that these preferred foods are better, and it can result in burnout of these preferred foods.

The best way to tackle every meal with your child is to be guided by the following principles:

• The goal of a meal is to FILL YOUR CHILD’S BELLY UP – this means that we want at least half of the plate to consist of preferred foods.

• The second component to a meal is EXPOSURE of less preferred foods – this will come in a few forms

o   First: for the majority of meals it is simply offering less preferred foods in small portions (2 spinach leaves, 1 piece of broccoli)

o   Second: once a day, or a few times a week, offering less preferred foods and seeing if you can encourage your little one to engage with these foods – please take a look at the steps to eating resource

When offering less preferred foods, I want you to use your family foods. Of course, variety is important, but the ultimate goal of feeding your child is to have them eating the same food as you – there is no point exposing your child to eggplant if you don’t ever eat eggplant. This will also help to limit waste and enable consistent exposure to less preferred foods.

Avoiding Burnout of Preferred Foods

Burnout is common for all humans, including us adults – have you ever eaten the same breakfast over and over, only to get sick of it one day? Same!! Burnout happens relatively slowly for adults, but fast for toddlers and even faster for picky children (woe!). When we are managing picky eating our goal is to INCREASE the number of foods your child eats, not have that number DECREASE.

The best way to avoid burnout of foods is to rotate through these foods regularly. In order to do this, you will need to use the preferred foods list you created using the above strategies. Then, do the following, depending on the number of foods on this list:

• Split into breakfast, lunch and dinner foods

• Split into carbohydrate, protein and fat (particularly helpful if you are experiencing grazing)

• Don’t split at all if too few foods

Once you have this second list, pop it on your fridge and use it to create meals for your little one. Ideally, you would avoid serving a preferred food two days in a row. However, if your list is small, this will be hard. If this is the case, try to avoid serving in consecutive meals and try to mix up the meal you serve it at to avoid the connotation that a food is only a breakfast food.

It is essential to have regular rotation of preferred foods to ensure you do not reduce the number off foods your little one will eat. What this strategy also achieves is that it subtly gets your little one use to variety, albeit through rotation of their preferred foods – they become use to seeing different food on the plate!