Can your family afford snacking and random grazing?

[TransAdmiralsAreAdmirals]

DC are grumpy because we don't allow random grazing and ask that they let me know when they're planning to prepare food using high-value ingredients or ingredients which may reasonably form a central component of a family meal.

I buy enough packed lunch items to last them both for the week, and much prefer it if I don't have to buy replacements if someone eats extra bags of crisps or snacks on extra packets of raisins or grain bars or similar.

Ditto preparing snacks between mealtimes: making toast, or bowls of pasta or cereal, or making fruit smoothies, or baking cupcakes.
Mine will get bowls of frozen peas or sweetcorn to snack on, so I often open the freezer to find empty bags.

Or unlimited condiments, for that matter -oodles of ketchup, sweet chilli sauce or mayo etc.

Or raiding the fruit bowl; there's enough fruit for everyone to have a couple of pieces per day but not to eat 3 bananas in a day, for instance.

We eat 3 square meals a day; quality home-cooked / prepared food and always have fruit available, so they're not going hungry. DC1 in particular insists that all their friends have free reins in the kitchen and that their cupboards are stuffed to the gunnels with snacky foods to which they help themselves with gay abandon, citing fridge raids of quantities of items I could never sustain in our home on our budget: I literally couldn't afford to stock lots of grazing foods in case someone feels a bit bored or peckish.

Can you, and do you, keep plentiful reserves of snacks which your DC are allowed to help themselves to?

I’m sure this country is grateful for your wisdom; 😂

"You really seem invested in why other people"

By your own admission you're a tall (for the UK), slim woman with grazing control.

Kudos!

It's not recently but there was always plenty of food for my boys to make in-between meal snacks when they were hungry. At one point they were complete hoovers.

We did a top up shop every other day for fruit, cold meat, bread, cheese and biscuits. They were fed 3 decent meals a day too. No wonder DH and I were perpetually broke. We had 2 six foot plus teens, DDs boyfriend was a permanent fixture and DH isn't a small chap either!

Except those countries do snack, or have multiple smaller meals (rather than the three meals a day that the UK seems to follow).

It's not about how often you eat, but what you eat. If you took the contents of three meals a day and spread them out over six meals instead, you wouldn't suddenly pile on the pounds

I know what this thread is about, but I am querying the nonsense about you must eat 3 meals a day only and "French people don't eat snacks" when it's categorically untrue.

Overeating unhealthy food 3 times a day is not a goal or it shouldn't be.

It's telling that when asked for diners ideas here, it's always pasta and potatoes, and the odd pizza. If you want to compare with France, they don't have pasta or potato at every diner. It's also culturally acceptable to serve one type veg at diner, which seems to horrify people on here. 😂 That's why they are healthier, not because they don't eat a snack when they're peckish.

Yes and no.

My issue with DD is that her snacking habits/preferences are expensive. She won’t have cereals, tea, milk or bread, but she’ll happily shove down a packet of Doritos and 3 boxes of strawberries throughout the day (but no apples for example).

I started buying less fruit and less pop because it didn’t matter what I buy, it would be gone in instants. I don’t know where as she remains tiny and I felt like I didn’t know how to tell her that I just can’t afford the speed that she consumes expensive options as she’ll reject everything else.

Well, no. If you tried to snack on crisps of biscuits you’d get told off and asked to wait for merienda. If you have your merienda late, let’s say at 8, you’d add a glass of milk and some fruit to it and call it merienda-cena. I wouldn’t do that with a packet of crisps.

@PanicPanicc

"My issue with DD is that her snacking habits/preferences are expensive"

Shouldn't happen if you don't have them in the house though?

None of that means that it's not a snack 😂

You also seem to be assuming that snacks must be crisps or biscuits, for some reason.

hence the frozen corn and frozen peas 😂

Toast is really cheap, or cheese and crackers

but that was @TransAdmiralsAreAdmirals complaint (with the empty bags left in the freezer) as the original poster,

not @PanicPanicc 🙂

😂

I think it’s a load of rubbish to say that households with free access to snacks raise kids who become healthy eaters
It may sometimes happen but the most common thing is children carry on with habits learnt in childhood and that tends to be a full snack cupboard that everyone regularly digs into

I don't disagree, @itsthetea, though up to a point it'll depend on what the "snacks" are, but while I don't pretend to speak for everyone I've never known a family of obese people who favour fruit, veg and the rest

Many may claim to, insisting the kids are actually a normal weight when they're clearly nothing of the sort, but it all falls apart a bit when you see the crap that's really shovelled at some of them

I never limited snacks, I always had ans still do a cupboard full. What I did do is teach self moderation and not treat it as a treat, just any other food. The result is I have a young adult daughter who is very slim, can have one chocolate and walk away, as she was never restricted making her want it more, and never taught to view it as a treat any more than an apple was.

You could also tie a nose bag around their necks.

No one needs to be constantly grazing, it's no wonder there are so many obese people out there if everyone really just lets their kids eat snacks whenever they like!

3 decent meals and a couple of pieces of fruit as snacks is plenty.

or maybe there's a heathy middle?
Whatever the definition of "decent meal" might be.

On a practical note, when kids have school lunch at 12pm, even when it's a healthy decent meal (more likely in private school but that's another debate), pretending that it's best not to have anything until their 7pm diner, or whatever time they have diner.. No, sorry, you won't convince anyone that's healthy.

Learning to eat when you are hungry is a life skill, but it goes both ways.

That’s just your daughter though. A sample of 1 person.

The truth is always in the middle, apart from on mumsnet.

In my opinion, YABU to be frustrated if your children are eating things that are meant to be for meals/ lunches etc as a snack. I meal plan for the week and buy what we need, so if someone cooked the pack of sausages meant for tea, I might not have a backup! But in terms of fruit, veg etc, I do think there should always be enough to snack on. Could you buy some dips for crudités, rice cakes, peanut butter etc so it’s more filling and nutritious than a bag of crisps, but doesn’t result in them tucking into food that’s already planned for meals? Would it also be an option to organise the fridge? Say, bottom shelf is reserved for meal prep items and explain that these are needed so can’t be used for snacks, but the rest is not off limits? I think you’ve definitely got a right to be frustrated and possibly finding some sort of compromise is the way forward.

That’s why I mentioned I had to cut down on what I was buying.

However I don’t drive and it’s quite annoying to not be able to have things stocked up like I wish I could just because DD will scoff them down like No-Face in Spirited Away. I’d much rather that she could have the understanding of pacing herself so that we all have access to the nice snacks.

It’s worth thinking about why we have weight loss injections and why they work. Some people seem to have more of the hungry hormones and less of the ones that feel satiated (or something along those lines). Some children will have the ability to regulate their snack intake simply because they don’t have the food noise other children do and are easily satisfied.

also throw into the mix some children who are very active and therefore need more fuel, we can see it isn’t one size fits all.

Not demonising foods, encouraging eating whole foods and allowing access to all food types in moderation is needed.

The only issues super sporty teens have is if they don’t go on to be super sporty adults and try to continue their consumption levels. I know lots of people from school who were considerably overweight in adulthood as they had big appetites and were over fuelling.

They also smoke a lot.

The heavenly healthy French people is total bingo on these threads.

As part of meals?