Instead of “what I desire, what I feel like eating”, I’ll give him a choice of what to eat, but they’re all choices within his eating frame. What I’ll do is eat that same meal with him, along with the family so it’s something fun to do and it doesn’t limit him. It’s not like, “Oh, peanut butter again” or “Oh, a sandwich.” We do have a variety of things and we include his brother by also giving him the choices of something that Thomas could actually have and we let him pick to get him involved with it.

 

Father

 

Switching things up
She’s a picky eater and she also has high cholesterol, so we have to work with both of them at the same time. Little by little, we try to get different things into her diet. She’s not a big vegetable and fruit eater, which she needs to be. When we go to the grocery store, we give her the option to pick out one fruit she wants to try, pick out a vegetable that she wants to try. Here and there, we’ll swap it up. If she doesn’t like it the first time, we’ll go to something else. We’ll go back to that one again some other time.

Mother

 

Learning to like vegetables
One of the things we did was we let him pick a good salad dressing. He went through a lot of different bottles of dressing and he tasted it until he found one. If he liked the dressing and if I put out a plate of vegetables, he could dunk the vegetables in the dressing. So he started eating vegetables and iceberg lettuce. Then as he liked the iceberg, I put the dressing on the green leaf and the red leaf lettuce and we just branched out from there. The one key thing was getting something that he could dunk the vegetables in that he liked.
Mother

 

A gradual transition to healthy eating
What we did is when we went to whole wheat, we went to only Wonder whole wheat–just a difference in dye, but there’s no difference in taste. Then we went to oat bread. And with the oat bread and then I would turn it into either a grilled cheese or french toast so that he couldn’t even tell. Finally, now he eats Ezekiel bread that is sprouted grain. When a child eats a white bread it spikes your blood sugar far faster then the insulin can get on board, but with a whole grain or a sprouted bread, it absorbs so slowly that the insulin can catch up.
Mother