Healthy Snacks Your Kids Will Love

June 27, 2009

Getting your kids to eat healthy foods can be a challenge sometimes, but one that you must overcome to protect child health over the long term.  So how can you encourage your kids to eat healthily?  Kids want to have fun, they need stimulation in things that they do so that you can capture their attention.  Food that they eat need to be presented in a way so that even meal time can be play time for them as well.  They don’t care about vitamins and minerals and carbohydrates, what they want food they can relate to.

To introduce food to a child, you need to think like a child.  A little imagination in this case would go a long way.  If you want your child to eat fruit, don’t just slice and dice away and put them in a bowl.  A little creativity and imagination might entice your little one to eat more heartily with lesser encouragement.  Instead of offering a simple bowl of fruit, ask your child if he wants The Happy Face Snack.  You cut up some bananas, oranges, pineapple, strawberry and apples, the colourful the offering, the better.  You can arrange the fruit in a plate to look like a happy face.

You can take this further as he becomes familiar with the different shapes and flavours by asking them to make their own Happy Face Snack themselves, or you can ask them to make one according to their own interest, be it sports, outer space, nature, you and your child’s imagination is the limit.

Healthy Snacking for Improved Energy & Vitality

June 21, 2009

How would you define a healthy snack?  It would be one with whole grain cereals that are low in fat and sugar or one that is high in nutritional value, one that is packed with vitamins and minerals.  Common food choices would include low-fat, lightly salted crackers, fruits, or energy bars.  Taking a healthy snack in-between meals can help you keep your energy up as it fuels you to last a busy day.

As you incorporate snacks in your day, it would be beneficial to plan even your snacks as you would your three square meals a day.  This will help you prevent making unhealthy choices.  Planning your snacks will help you avoid reaching for a calorie packed burger and fries at the nearest burger stand or reaching for the next candy bar you see.  If you would include snacks in your meal planning, bringing along an extra serving of fruit in the office or in school will help you avoid making those unhealthy food choices.

Snacks will also help you eat smaller portions during meals as you can help stave off hunger especially if you include fiber-rich foods in your snacks.

Eating more often could mean less if you know how to control your portions, feeling less hungry at meal times can help you reduce the amount of food you take in during meals.  So what are you waiting for?  Make snacking a part of your day.

Teach Your Kids to Avoid Swine Flu

June 16, 2009

School is a place of learning and fun for your children, but the current times has made it a melting pot of diseases.  With swine flu practically in everybody’s doorstep, we should take extra vigilance in keeping our child’s health a priority.  This highly communicable disease is spread person-to-person and can easily infect a large population such as our children that go to school.

Although some schools has taken the initiative to announce the suspension of classes in the event of an infection.   The responsibility still lies with the parents to safeguard their children’s health.  Teaching your kids good personal hygiene practices is one way to prevent infection.  Couple this with instructions on etiquette and you may just win the battle yet against swine flu or with any communicable disease for that matter.  Children should be taught how to properly wash their hands with soap and water and if possible, also, how to use an alcohol based sanitizer.

Prevention is truly better than cure, and arming our children with practical knowledge that they will be using for their whole lives is one way to help safeguard their health.

Giving It A Good Shot

June 7, 2009

People suffering from anxiety or have suffered from anxiety may find it difficult to deal with setbacks in their lives.  Having to fall down again can leave the person with anxiety feel vulnerable again, helpless even.  Once you feel bad about the setback, the anxiety will have the opportunity to sink in again making you think of the why’s and how’s of the setback.

Setbacks happen, no question about it.  For a person suffering from anxiety, setbacks can be a very trying time.  With remedies or not, you will end up having setbacks no matter how prepared you are with the challenges you take at hand.  A part of the healing is accepting that defeats are part of life and that everyone goes through them,  what is more important is that you pick yourself up each and every time you fall, no matter how many times, no matter how hard you fall.  Accept them and get past them, enrich yourself with the experience and find something to look forward to again.

Your setbacks may hold you for a while but having to deal with them is part of the healing process.  When you finally get beyond the anxiety, your protective side, your whole personhood should be prepared to moving on from the ordeal.  With each setback, with each failure, comes a learning experience and from these experiences should you find the knowledge and the strength to be better, to be better prepared for the next time.

Guarding your health

June 4, 2009

Staying healthy can be a luxury for some, there are people who have gotten sick because they have taken their health for granted and would give anything to gain some of their health back.  Working too hard or not getting enough rest can put tremendous toll on the body.    Coupled with poor food choices and a compromised living environment, these factors can really put someone on a sick bed when things are left unchecked.

Falling sick may not be the effect of an unhealthy way of life.  Everyone wants to stay young and healthy, but the natural progression of things will eventually catch up with our bodies making the effects of aging obvious.  Wouldn’t you wish you bottled some of the youth you had a few years back and open them up for you to use now?

As your health is your greatest wealth we should be on the constant vigilance to stay healthy.  They say that an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.  I say, why not even out the playing field and just as enthusiastic as staying fit and healthy to avoid sickness in the first place?