Remember the Canada Food Guide’s “plate principle”?

Yes, 50% of our meal should be vegetables and fruits — the bulk of the meal, really. And yes, good luck explaining that to your kids. Or maybe just my kids.

If my kids had a choice, they would eat pizza or mac and cheese every day. And I can’t blame them, carbs are delicious and irresistible. But I do need to get a variety of foods into them, particularly a variety of vegetables and fruits. So here are my two tricks:

1. Veggies First

At the very start of the meal, when they are still hungry, I first give them a plate with some veggies on it.

I’d learned that if I instead give a full plate of veggies, protein, and carbs, my kids go straight for the carbs. The carbs quickly fill them up and then they don’t want to eat the veggies or the protein (one of my kids at least, the other never says no to meat). So now we always start with the veggie “appetizer”, which the kids are less likely to refuse at the beginning when they’re the hungriest.

This trick I developed from my own observation but I must say I’m not a dietitian. I personally have benefited from reading Jennifer Anderson’s, MSPH, RDN blog Kids Eat in Color, if you’d like to learn more about children’s nutrition in an accessible, non-judgmental way. Lots of science-backed advice there!

2. Apple Before Breakfast

Even before having children, my partner and I had developed a habit of splitting an apple first thing in the morning. We do it with our kids now, giving them apple slices while they are waiting for us to prepare breakfast.

It still works as that veggie/fruit appetizer before the main meal, with the added benefit of a consistent habit. Always an apple, always while waiting for breakfast. The beauty of developing a habit is that eventually you don’t think about, you just do it.

(You don’t think about it until you’ve run out of apples that is, then you PANIC because you’re so used to starting your day with an apple!)

I understand developing healthy habits is not easy. There is a science to it though. Kurzgesagt has a neat 11-minute video on how to develop healthy habits if you’d like to check it out:

I hope that these tricks were useful for you and that you may incorporate them into your routines, if you don’t do it already. What other tricks do you use to eat more veggies and fruits? Let me know in the comments below.