Healthy Eating at My House Is Very Sneaky

Sarah Auerswald / Sarah's Blog / 4 Comments

I enjoy eating.

Well, actually, I wish that were true, but it isn’t. Eating, for me, is very often a torturous experience of navigating between the pleasure and the pain of food: the pleasure in eating, the pain in eating too much, the pleasure of a wonderful family meal, the pain of cooking food no one wants to eat. Plus there’s all that clean-up! Ugh.

So I have struggled as a mom to make food and eating a healthy and pleasurable experience for my kids.

Both my kids went through picky eater phases; one just hasn’t come out of his yet – the list of foods he’ll eat is quite ridiculously short. The other son has become quite the gourmet, which is great in theory but does have its downside, as in when he was on a trip with another family and refused to eat at a fast food restaurant they stopped at because “it wasn’t healthy food.” Good grief! Balancing the need to teach your kid healthy eating habits AND politeness at the same time can give one many gray hairs. Take it from me.

So along came Jessica Seinfeld one day on Oprah, with her sneaky cookbook (affiliate link) - and I was hooked. I started by making taco meat in tomato sauce (not very authentic, but oh-so-healthy, packed with pureed sweet potatoes and caulifower), which only one of my sons would eat. And then I moved on to the main breakfast staple in our house: pancakes.

My husband had used Bisquick to make pancakes for years, and everyone loved them. But after a quick read of the list of ingredients – as Michael Pollan suggested we all do – I couldn’t let my family eat them any more. Too many things I couldn’t pronounce.

I started using unbleached flour and making my own “mix”, just as easy as the box version, plus I added pureed sweet potatoes. My kids never noticed the change and they’ve loved them now for almost three years, almost every day.

I realized I could do a lot of other substitutions that they would never get wise to and went to town. My son who lives on peanut butter and jelly now eats natural organic peanut butter mixed in to the Skippy jar, and the sugar-free jelly mixed in to the Full-Sugar jelly. And he’s got no idea.

I replaced the honey-nut Cheerios he loves with Trader Joe’s O’s – a half-n-half mix of regulars and honeys. And the chocolate syrup for his beloved chocolate milk treats? Not Hershey’s any more – the bottle is full of Trader Joe’s organic.

Now, I realize that even with the substitutions, this is not as healthy a diet as one could be serving one’s kids. But I’m working with what I’ve got here.

I wish I’d started out feeding my kids nothing but organic, vegan, clean food. But I hadn’t made that connection. Plus the reality is, once they start school and are around all the other influencers, they may have learned to like junk food by now anyway. Who knows?

Too late for that now. I introduce things as I can, and I do what I can. I’d like to eat healthier myself. I feel like I’m always looking for the tools to make that happen as a busy mom. And when my son said the other day, “Mom, how come foods that are bad for you taste better than foods that are good for you?”, I knew I needed to do a better job.

So I’ll keep sneaking healthy stuff into their diet, just please don’t tell them!

{This post was prompted by the Yahoo! Motherboard, of which I am a proud member.}