Cooking for kids and husband.

Is your goal to lose weight?

You can do that eating anything, just eat at a deficit. If you find that eating smaller portions of the foods you're cooking for your family leaves you hungry or isn't meeting your nutritional needs, you can bulk your meals up with larger portions of foods that have fewer calories.

I have a handful of basics I cook, then measure out my portions and add me veggies for me.
- Lean beef tacos
- Roast, carrots, potatoes in crockpot
- Cajun stuffed chicken and roasted veggies
- Simple jared pasta sauce and noodles (add a side of steamed broccoli)
- Breakfast casserole with eggs, milk, spinach, cheese and toast or English muffin with it

I used to cut veg v finely or blitzed and put in lasagna sauce etc. Have managed to get them onto bigger chunks now but they still refuse whole veg out of choice!

My family eats whatever I cook whether they want healthy or not. If they don't want to, then they are free to cook (and pay) for their own food. If your husband doesn't want to eat the same food you eat, then he's welcome to fend for himself. That said, you don't have to eat 'clean' to lose weight. You can eat totally normal foods and still lose, just stick with portions that keep you within your limits.

Your kids are a different story. Depending on how old they are, sometimes you just have to exercise your mom-card and force them to get with the program. Worked for me when I was a kid.

If they're younger, then just disguise the veggies in something they like. Zucchini noodles in tomato sauce, broccoli in cheese sauce (you can steam the broccoli and pull your portion aside before mixing with the cheese), creamed spinach (ditto about separating your portion before mixing with the sauce), etc.

In fact, the same trick that would work for your kids will work for your husband. Cook dishes that are based on plain items and pull aside your portion before mixing with the sauce or more calorie dense ingredients.

My mom used to make me sit at the table until I ate my veggies. I remember sitting there for hours one night. as an adult tho I'm super grateful she did that, will totally be doing it to my kiddos one day.

But for food ideas:
Meat Loaf - blitz up mushrooms, onions, and cauliflower and mix it in there!
stir fry - with broccoli and green beans - usually more kid friendly veg
chili - cook in bell peppers, beans, and broccoli

honestly anything you can make in a croc pot, add veggies. slow cooked veggies soak up lots of flavors and taste better than steamed or baked options.

put cheese on top! i'm keto so i love adding cheese to everything.

I have a child who was hugely picky (in part likely due to some mental difficulties that were not discovered until she was an adult, sadly), to the point that there was no 'you'll eat this or you can make your own or go hungry.' Because she just wouldn't eat. At all. Even if she got hungry - she just wouldn't eat.

As an example of the will power of this child, once when she was sick, age 14, she decided she was so miserable that she could just not go to sleep until her nose wasn't stuffy anymore. She stayed up for for 72 hours or so before she finally actually passed out. She'd just lay in her bed refusing to go to sleep - and miserable while doing so.

The kid makes determination into an art form sometimes, seriously.

As a result, my own perspective on getting kids to eat veggies involved a lot of research just to try and get veggies in, LOL.

What helped me was learning a few interesting things.
1. Whenever we have a new flavor, almost NO ONE likes it. We need exposure to that taste for a while before our brain will even START to consider if it's good or not. Now, if it's connected to something we like, like sweet, then we're more likely to be positive and willing to try it again. But the brain actually doesn't make a full decision on this until after quite a few tastes.
2. Whenever taste buds are triggered, a part of the brain associated with memory actually triggers as well. So any good associations that happen with eating a food, or bad ones, will affect how much someone likes the food any time they eat it later.
3. People have very strong positive and negative associations with how food looks.

So first, it can help to very slowly add in a veggie you eventually want them to eat. A little bit grated into foods they already eat, slowly increasing the amount each time they have it (yellow squash, grated fine, works great with hamburgers, carrots can sometimes work with melted cheese, if cooked, mashes, and added, and grated red bell pepper - flesh, not skin - works great in tomato sauce). If you slowly increase the amount, they are less likely to notice it, but at the same time, their bodies are slowly adjusting to the taste so that it's not too 'weird.'

Mixing the veggies with flavors they love can help - so lots of cheese, something sweet, and so on. This is NOT a forever thing, just so that they have a real positive association with the food in the initial introduction, you know? It can sometimes be a hard transition to foods that do not have cheese and such, but it's doable.

Make it fun, or silly, or cute/gross/whatever they like. I got these tiny little bowls, maybe 2 inches across, to make miniature salads and soups, that I would cut things super, super tiny for. They were really cute, and my daughter thought they were so adorable she'd eat them more. I've seen people do the same with gross food - 'brains' or guts' for their kids who are excited by the Halloween kind of stuff, you know?

Bento boxes are GREAT for adding in neat looking things, especially if they help make them or pick out the theme - like these guys -http://mentalfloss.com/article/66472/11-delightful-bento-artists-and-their-creations

I've seen people do 'theme' nights for dinner (maybe a few nights a week, or once a week), where the only foods there started with the letter 'o,' or were all blue (even if they had to be dyed), or had little figurines holding food as weapons and everyone got to fight each other with the food and you could avoid being attacked if you ate the weapon (like asparagus spears), or you had a bunch of mashed root veggies and had to make a sculpture of them before you heated it up, or, I dunno, people have to try and eat with the wrong hand, or heck, have to wash their feet and eat with their toes, whatever.

Basically, just making it FUN, where the nights they have more veggies, they get to relax about something else, like normal eating rules or food rules, so they have real positive memories with the veggies, if that makes sense?

Admittedly, a lot of the above is more work, but it can end up with kids who like veggies a lot more, too. :-)

I had more problems with this when I was “dieting” instead of just counting calories. Now I am cooking healthier but it is just lighter versions of things we enjoy instead of the crazy diet food I was coming up with. I serve my kids what I prepare for dinner but if I know they probably won’t care for it I give them an additional side I know they will eat. By not going crazy with the diet food my husband is happy with what we eat. I usually take a smaller portion and maybe add a spinach side salad. We all get the same main items I just modify things a bit to suite everyone. Has made this go around much more successful.