Meal Planning

As your child gets older, you will begin to get busier with work, school runs, extracurricular activities and social engagements. This will mean planning and cooking your child’s meals could become another chore in your busy schedule. To make mealtimes as simple as possible, organisation and preparation is key!

Together with your child, choose 2 or 3 staple meals and practice them to perfection, so you can start to add more variety to their low protein diet. Spending time in the kitchen with your child and feeling confident about what you are making could mean cooking low protein meals becomes a new shared hobby.

There are plenty of tasty low protein recipes available here, for you to start experimenting with different dishes.

If your child becomes fussy with their meals or perhaps starts to refuse foods they previously enjoyed, see more information on how to deal with this.

If you know in advance what you’re preparing each day or know that you can just defrost something that you have batch-cooked, so there is less chance of you feeling stressed in the kitchen after a busy day. See our hints and tips about batch cooking here.

Make sure that you also have a supply of suitable snacks to hand, so if your child ever gets hungry between meals, you don’t have to worry.

The meal planner can either be stored electronically or you could print it off and stick it to a fridge or notice board in your kitchen.

In the example below we have shown you how to complete one day on the meal planner. This is based on a child aged around 4 years of age, who is on 4 exchanges per day.

Example meal planner based on 4 phe exchanges per day:

Your child may be on a different number of phe exchanges. Your dietitian will advise you on this. Always check the protein content on food labels.