How do you meal plan your healthy meals if you have fussy dc's?

[Honey1975]

I'm really keen to address my diet as I've got into some bad habits and am gradually putting on weight.
I've sat down this afternoon and made a list of meals that are on the healthier side but I just know that my dc's will not like alot of them or parts of them.

I really don't want to be cooking 2 or more different meals every day. Ideally I'd like to do what my mum did and make one meal that we all sit down together and eat.

I am actually fed up of trying to please my dc's as whatever I give them one or both moan about some part of it. I don't know whether they really are that fussy and genuinely don't like most food I serve up or whether they're just being difficult!

I no longer want to not eat certain things just because they don't like it as I am not looking after my own needs properly.

How do other people do it? Separate meals? At separate times? Or just one meal, like it or lump it?!

[Brakebackcyclebot]

One meal, like it or lump it here. 😁

[Ricekrispie22]

I agree with brakeback, I cook just one meal and if they don't like it, tough! My kids can leave what they don't want on the side of their plate and sit at the table until everyone else finishes. I insist that they try three bites before leaving anything though.

[Ohyesiam]

Like it or lump it. Nothing wrong with not liking certain parts of a meal.
I’ve also banned the moaning too.

[90sBrows]

I do meal components. So mostly a meal for me and DH and just taking things aside for the DC before spice or mixing happens.

So a zoodle bolognese - I cook pasta for the kids and scoop out their serve of sauce before I add all of the mushrooms to our sauce. Hardly any extra work to cook zucchini!

We are having chicken soup tonight (it is cold in Oz) so the kids will have raw chopped vege that was set aside earlier (carrot, yellow capsicum, cauliflower for the good water). They'll get a bowl of plain broth with poached chicken and pasta. DH and I will have lots of veges, poached chicken and tomato paste in ours.

[TefalTester123]

I have adapted our normal family meals so I eat a bit better, and used MFP to count calories.

E.g. Thai curry. Use lower fat coconut milk, less chicken and add lots of veg to simmer in as I cook it. Then I have half the rice I had before and loads of veg. Became large curry surrounding small amount of rice rather than small curry on large rice.

Chicken & chorizo pasta: made with minimum of chorizo, single cream, added smoked paprika for flavour. Then I use Penne and counted the no of pieces in my portion and make up half my plate with a salad.

Salad. I looked carefully at calories in veg and learnt that a decent mix of carrot, pepper, tomato, cucumber etc gives me 80 calories for a big bowl, so I just log that in MFP and use it to accompany say a turkey burger with no bun plus a few wedges. Kids get burger, bun and more wedges.

Basically I took all the things we normally eat and tweaked the recipes then tweaked my portions. I try hard not to cook different meals. That is also why I think calorie counting works best not excluding food groups or cooking weird diet foods.