Continuing with Sean’s post from yesterday, I’ll also dedicate my post today for the kiddos. When it comes to proper nutrition, today’s kids have the cards stacked against them. With sugary drinks disguised as sports drinks, desserts pretending to be breakfast, and processed foods riddling the aisles of most grocery stores, it’s no wonder more and more kids have health issues.

I’ve heard people say it’s difficult to feed kids healthy meals and snacks when schedules are hectic and you’re always on the go. However, I’ve heard that excuse from almost everyone when it comes to nutrition. Eating healthy is not hard. It takes planning, discipline, creativity, and planning (yes, I said it twice). Feeding kids nutritious food is no different.

CrossFit Kids describes kids’ nutrition:

Our goal with kids [is to] get them to think and make good choices about what they eat. Our goal is to teach them very basic concepts, sugar is bad, protein is good and you need to eat some in every meal. Nuts and seeds are good fats. Eat them, don’t avoid them. Pasta, white bread, and white rice are not that good for you, stuff that’s red, yellow, green and found in the fruit and vegetable aisle is good for you. Eat a lot of it.

Look at your plate, make a fist, eat that much meat every meal; turn your hand over and fill it with nuts and seeds, eat that much good fat, fill the rest of your plate with stuff you found in the fruit and vegetable aisle. Fill your plate this way at every meal, don’t eat more.

Here are some amazing resources for lunches and snacks that are kid friendly:

Nom Nom Paleo is one of my go-to’s for amazing recipes and she recently did a 5-Day collection of posts dedicated to Paleo School Lunches.

Paleo Parents is a fantastic blog and posts recipes all the time. They have a great lunchbox post (scroll down for pics), and offer healthy alternatives to the usual lunch fare.  Their story is also an amazing one and discusses how nutrition can affect children way more than people think.

Everyday Paleo‘s Sarah Fragoso also posted about school lunches and added some ideas here.

For snacking, Cade is a fan of frozen green grapes, bananas dipped in whipped coconut cream (spoon the cream off a chilled coconut milk can and whip), Tiny Fruits (freeze dried fruit in tiny pieces), and Barnanas (dehydrated bananas).    He’s also a fanatic about Primal Pac jerky, which he doesn’t get often, but when he does it’s a sight to see.  It’s still a learning process for us, but so far careful planning, baby-led weaning, and the fact Cade loves meat like his daddy has made it a bump-free journey.

Post your kid friendly lunch and snack ideas to comments!

WOD 07.02.13

Power Clean 3×3

3 Rounds
20 Kettlebell Snatches
15 Toes to Bar
Run 400m