A Gentle Approach to Eating – PROJECT MUNCH #5 The Pyramid
Nutritional Therapist Sophie Tyner, from Grow Nutrition is passionate about empowering parents to raise happy, healthy and resilient kids supported by their food choices. She applies a gentle approach, sharing experiences and engaging all of a child’s senses when exploring accessible, affordable, REAL foods that will give them a head start in life.
In our day to day lives most of us take eating for granted. This is until we have a child who is limited with their diet and resistant to trying and eating new foods, this is when the challenge begins. If you have been following the steps in my past blogs you will have found there are many ways that we can support our children to enjoy a variety of foods in a non-conventional ‘sit there and eat it’ approach which doesn’t provide a healthy association with eating in later life.
This topic considers all of the steps we need to embrace to reach our goal of eating with Grow Nutrition’s ‘The Eating Pyramid’.
Each step needs to be fulfilled to be able to reach the final step of eating. This is where Project Munch’s #1 Play comes into action.
When you explore foods together using all of your senses without the pressure of having to eat them the fear reduces and they become more open to trying them. So keep on providing opportunities to experience fresh foods together away from the dinner table.
If for example your child initially doesn’t like the appearance of a food, then you can be certain they aren’t going to try it in a dish you have made. Together dissect it, use tweezers, chopsticks or toothpicks to move it around if they don’t like the feel of it. Play games with it making it into fruit or vegetable characters, see if it will sink or float, see if you can grate it into tiny pieces, or play measuring games pretending you are serving up food for their dolls/teddies.
Be creative!
Exposure at each stage of the pyramid is key before they can move up the pyramid to reach the goal of eating it.
Project Munch is here to inspire families to eat well together
