Food portion sizes… what I need to know?

Food portion sizes… what I need to know?
How to manage the food serving sizes of yours kids could really mean a headache. Figure out how much to serve on them according to their age group and make a healthy lifestyle easy as it should be!

Toddler portion sizes how much and how many?

Toddlers are among the pickiest eaters on the age group, many of them wouldn’t eat as much as they would eat and that leads to unhealthy lifestyle. Most toddlers would love to run and hide than eating their meals. Many of them would eat fad foods and not healthy meals alone. If we would not give them the proper food portion sizes, most likely they would end up unhealthy and prone to sickness as well as diseases.

The proper way to know their food portion sizes is the rule that toddlers should equal about a quarter of an adult portion size. Example of their serving sizes are as follows:

¼ cup to ½ slice of bread
¼ cup of dry cereal
1 – 2 tbsp of cooked vegetables
½ piece of fresh fruit
1/3 up of yogurt
½ egg
1 tbsp peanut butter on bread or crackers
1 ounce of meat

Following the said guideline would prevent your child on being malnourished and unhealthy.

What about school age portion sizes?

With this particular age group obesity and overeating is not a major problem, but they are facing difficulties letting go with junk foods. So we must try to engage them on eating healthy foods and not just fad junk foods which of course is bad to the health. Here’s the suggested healthy eating food portion size for their age group.

½ slice of bread
½ cup dry cereal
½ cup cooked vegetables
½ piece of fresh fruit
½ cup yogurt
½ cup low fat milk
1 egg
1 ounce of meat

Then we have the older children portion sizes…

This is the stage where most grown up kids would have difficulty controlling what they are eating. Overeating issues usually begins with this phase in life, they cannot control the amount of food they are eating thus practicing an unhealthy lifestyle of being overweight. With this phase we should teach them what’s the proper portion of food that they should only eat. We also have to emphasize that anything on excess would be very harmful and dangerous to their health. Here’s the suggested food serving according to their age.

1 slice of bread
1 cup of dry cereal
½ cup cooked vegetables
1 piece fresh fruit
1 cup of yogurt
1 cup of low fat milk
1-2 eggs
2-3 ounces of meat

To further address their potential to overdo food servings we should always keep an eye on them and make single servings rather than the whole pack. Controlling food eating while still young may contribute a lot most especially when they grow up.

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