What’s on your Little Person’s Plate?

The eating habits of children can be quite a fascinating topic. From children who’ll eat anything placed in front of them to fussy eaters, sometimes it can be hard to make sure your child is getting the right nutrients.

Our twins are four and a half years old. Like many kids, they’ve gone through various phases with their food. When they were little they used to eat banana porridge for breakfast every day. Now, however, the sight of porridge will see them pulling a look of disgust!

Breakfast, for us, has evolved from porridge and now varies from croissants or toast, to Weetabix or Cookie Crisp! You just never know what they’ll ask for! They even like to have a cup of tea with their breakfast! No sugar in it though!

Snack wise, I think it’s fair to say that M’s favourite thing to eat is chocolate. She has a definite sweet tooth! R, on the other hand, also likes chocolate, but she tends to eat more fruit. She loves bananas and oranges, whereas M will eat blueberries like sweets!

When it comes to vegetables, R, loves broccoli, but not much else, whereas M will eat peas, carrots and swede, sweetcorn etc! M is definitely more adventurous when it comes to trying to new things!

The thing is though, like most parents I often wonder whether their getting enough exercise or drinking enough fluids. Don’t get me wrong they love PE in school and quite often like to come for a ‘run’ with me, but getting them to drink water or squash can be a bit of a battle times!

That’s where the Tot It Up Food tracker can help. I’ve been using it for the past seven days, and I’ve learnt so much from it! It’s a really handy tool that lets you compare real life food and activity with current recommendations, and it gives a guide to how your’e doing. I think it’s a really valuable tool for supporting parents to make small changes to maintain the right balance.

It’s really easy to use as well. Simply click here and click the orange ‘Register now’ button to create your free account. You’ll be asked to enter your child’s first name, as well as their gender, along with the month and year that they were born. If you have more than one child, like me, you can click ‘add another toddler’ to add another child.

Once you’ve created your account you can get started straight away. The first step is to enter all of your toddlers food and drink for the day that you want to track. You can either do this all at once or after each meal. I find it easier to do it all at once when the kids are in bed!

The second step is to move onto the ‘activities’ tab and enter the amount of time that your toddler has been physically active each day. This is split into categories such as activity, musical or craft session, dancing, skipping, jumping and hopping, playing inside with toys or puzzles, walking and running, and there are a few more options too.

The last step is to move to the ‘summary’ tab to find out how closely your toddler’s food intake and activity levels meet the recommendations.

There are handy hints such as; Has your child had their vitamin d supplement? Your toddler is not guaranteed to get enough vitamin D from foods and sunshine alone, so give them a vitamin supplement containing vitamins A and D every day. This is something I didn’t know, so I’m looking into it!

Some of the things that I found staggering when looking at the infographic above is the pictures of the portion sizes. The picture of the spaghetti bolognese really surprised me! Although our girls have smaller plates than my husband and I, I was surprised to see that the recommend portion size is just 3-5 tablespoons. I think I’m guilty of putting more than that on their plate, as are a lot of other parents. That’s not to say that the girls eat it all though! Although the other day M had a bowl of cheesy pasta, and then asked for seconds, meaning she had two small bowls of pasta!

Try the Tot It Up Challenge to be in with a chance of winning a £50 shopping voucher

Do the results above surprise you as much as they surprised me? I’d love to know! If so, why don’t you try the Tot It Up Challenge too?

By taking part the information can be used to help build a big picture of toddler eating habits and activity nationwide. Understanding habits will help shape future advice to support families.

The Challenge will be run as a competition format – 10 names out of the hat at random will win a love2shop.co.uk £50 shopping voucher.

Entrants should register here, and complete at least one day’s food intake, drink and activity (that is at least one day’s breakfast, mid-day meal, evening meal, snacks, drinks and activity).  The opening date for the competition is the today (7^th November 2016), and it closes on the 21^st November 2016.