Child is underweight, but wants to eat junk

mikitta

mikitta

New member
My kids are on the other side of the weight issue. The doctor tells me every year to stuff them full of cake and candy and anything else they will eat if they won't eat anything but junk because they have such a low weight for their age and height. I simply put my foot down and won't indulge the bad habits every single day (I don't ban things outright for ever, but I won't let them eat, say, Mac n Cheese every single day for lunch and dinner, like they would like).

I try to feed my kids a varied and healthy diet. To his credit, my son is more willing to eat it despite his complaints than my daughter is, and his weight is going up as well as his height - he's 10 ... hollow leg syndrome is beginning and I'm having to reign him in on compulsive eating so he doesn't get in the habit of polishing off what ever package he opens, or large bowl of left overs he finds, or what ever he digs out of the cupboard in favor of eating some fruit and veggies and lean protein to take care of his hunger. I feel I do a pretty good job of providing healthy stuff.

My daughter, on the other hand, turns up her nose at most grains, veggies (except for raw carrots) and meat, unless that meat is a burger from either Burger King or McDonalds. She'll eat chips all day long and adores spaghetti, lasagna and macaroni and cheese, cakes, pudding, sugary cereal, soda and cookies. Her food love is ramen noodles and she would eat them 5 times a day if I allowed it. She hates fish, chicken, turkey, lamb, pork and beef that isn't ground (see previous sentence). Yes, I limit her access to the bad stuff and put my foot down on a minimum of good stuff she has to eat at a meal. At least she does like yogurt - thank you God!

I worry about her because her eating patterns, if they continue to adulthood, are going to result in her packing on the pounds like I did. She is such a beautiful child and I want her to learn the good habits so that beauty isn't impeded by bad health. But man, is this ever a battle - she's been ms picky eater since she was a baby (she would not eat ANYthing at all unless it was on my plate - even when she was as little as 8 months old. I had to be eating it for her to take it.

I know this forum is about overweight kids - but do any of you have this problem with your UNDERweight children?

God Bless,
mik
 
you've pretty much described 2 of my nephews... one of which can make himself gag when encouraged to eat meat... His favorite food is processed chicken mcnuggets - with enough salt on it that it looks like it's snowing on his plate... the brat doesn't have an ounce of fat on him but he's also quite short for his age... my sister is short but his father is quite tall so who knows if he picked up the short from my sister.

I have no idea what to do with picky eaters, except that don't force them to eat anything they don't want but also don't cater to their whims - some kids use it as a manipulative tactic... prepare one meal - if they eat it -great - if they don't - oh well -next meal is at xxx...

Don't act like what you're serving is anything special... a colleague of mine has a kid who's the best eater - she will eat what's in front of her as long as people don't make a fuss over it -it's food - nothing special

What's your child's doctor say? are thy malnourished - do they need vitamins or those nutrient rich shakes?
 
I give them a daily multi to fill in any gaps. The doc says that they have no reserves so they need to eat - anything - and has encouraged sugary garbage (it seems endemic here in WV - candy is a whole food group underpinning the USDA pyramid).

I've told the doctor repeatedly that I was VERY small as a child (until I was around 12, people regularly pinned me as much as 4 years younger than I was). I wasn't a picky eater, but I just didn't eat a lot - tiny tummy and all that.

The thing is - the practitioners around here see the highest numbers of obese kids in the country (yes, WV is the worst state when it comes to childhood obesity), so they think my kids are too skinny. Well, yeah, when you put them up against some of the really fat children they see it's reasonable that my kids look undernourished ...

There have been veiled threats of calling CPC if my kids don't gain weight like THEY want them to.

Eh - that's just my rant against the establishment. I've been waging THAT war since my eldest was born at 5Lb 3oz and the people at WIC thought I was purposely starving him to death (the kid nursed well and often). At least his pediatrician at the time (a very small lady herself) thoroughly understood and said his growth was just perfect and he was progressing quite nicely.

Really, my kids are relatively healthy and my biggest concern with my daughter is that she eat a more healthy variety of foods for her future's sake - learning to make the food choices that will help her be healthy all her life. The advice to not make a big deal of meal time is a good one.

God Bless,
mik
 
My dad had a friend whose daughters would eat nothing but pizza and chicken nuggets. Period. That's all.

So what did that family do?

They had pizza and/or chicken nuggets for every meal. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The girls are teenagers now, and I have no idea how they eat now, but I remember being repulsed by them when I was a kid too, because I was raised in a household where adults were king, and you ate whatever they told you to eat, or you ate nothing at all. To watch these two girls have their parents kowtowing to their whims made me a little insecure about the authority of adults in general. Were they all so weak in secret?

Personally, I'm of the opinion that kids are just kids and should eat what's put in front of them. I didn't even get a choice in my family's prospective daily menu until I was probably about sixteen or seventeen years old (when I began to learn to cook) and by then I had been well trained to accept a variety of different foods, from squid and venison to apple chips and hummus.

This willingness to eat new and/or healthy foods - which was firmly impressed into me, not innate - made my transition to adulthood much easier, because being a picky eater automatically leaves you at a disadvantage in social settings. Eating habits that can be considered "cute" in a kid are weird and offputting when seen in adults. Picky eaters inadvertently offend hosts when they turn their nose up at the meals of others. They go real hungry in foreign countries. And they miss out on a lot of new experiences.

No matter how skinny your kid is, they're not going to starve themselves past a certain point. When they get hungry enough, they will eat.

The best way to keep junk food away from kids is to not give them access to it. Remove it from the house completely. Cut them off of fast food cold turkey. (And if they ask "Why?" you have the authority to say, "Because I said so.") If you have a problem with your kid eating that terrible junk they serve in school cafes (powdered doughnuts and personal pan pizzas dipped in grease, anyone?) then don't give them lunch money. Force them to make their lunch from home, and give them plenty of healthy options so they can choose what they like.

They don't like it? Let them go hungry. It may seem strict, but it's in their best interest. There's been a few studies that say kids who are raised around healthy foods as children are more likely to choose healthy foods as adults, and eventually lose their taste for rich and sugary foods.

If you set a good example and give them lots of opportunity to make healthy choices, most kids will come around quickly.
 
above all else, remember YOU are the parent. If you give in to them making up rubbish like 'oh i dont like that, im not gonna eat that' etc then they win and bad habits will win.

If you dont feed them junk they wont get used to it. To bulk them up more, give them an assortement of nuts and good fats etc. Let them eat as much as they want, but of good foods not bad. I set the rules down for my very skinny daughter similarly. All my children bar one have been very small slim build children.
I feed them healthy (now) food, with the occasional McDs, i give them the options of what they can have and when it comes to veg and fruit, eat as much as you want. I went through and taught them the basics of what food groups are what (protien, carbs, fats etc) and how much of each they are allowed. Now they tend to count their own diet.

i let them choose what they want and when they want it. I give them fair warning if we are going to have a fatty dinner or more food than usual so they can adjust what they eat the rest of the day to counter it. They make their own breakfast and lunch and choose their own snacks for morning and afternoon tea.
As i do shopping we read the labels together, they choose their own snacks based on the labels, and also they read how many calories etc and what its made up of. Most importantly, they read a serving size (usually 100 calories). ie 1 serving of cookies is usually 2 , not the usual 4 or so :D
Anyway, even the youngest loves this. Their ages are 9, 10 and 11 years old.
 
As long as your kids aren't falling down the weight-to-height curves they've had, you need a new pediatrician. My picky eater has bounced between the 3rd and 25th percentile weight-for-height, and her pediatrician has invariably said "She's meeting all her milestones, she looks healthy - she's doing fine."

She's around 9th percentile now, and you can literally count her ribs - there's not a bit of fat on her. OTOH, while she looks like a short little stick girl next to her chubby, primarily white, classmates, she looks tall and average weight next to the Chinese kids at church. (She's mixed.)

And for my picky eater, she stops eating when she's full. She'll turn down candy if she's not hungry. So feeding her junk would just displace healthy food; she wouldn't consume more calories. Which is just as it should be - I don't want to interfere with her body's natural ability to know how much food it needs.

Everyone in our house pretty much gets their own meal as is, so my kid gets food she'll eat at breakfast and dinner, and a vitamin to make up the difference. At school, they put a protein, two vegetables, a fruit, a starch and milk in front of her, and every day she reports (and her teacher confirms) that she ate her bread, drank her milk, and declined to try anything else. (And there are no seconds on bread, so she just goes hungry.) Every once in awhile, she'll come home and report "They had meat today, in a really delicious sauce, and [my friend] ate all of hers, because it was so yummy!" So I ask if she ate it, and she says "No, it was yucky for me, so I didn't try even a tiny bite." I'm not willing to fight that battle at home, although I don't disagree with fighting it in theory.
 
I used to work in a preschool and the #1 trick I used when I had a picky eater was to let them make it themselves or help out in prep. and or cooking. It works with most kids and gets them to at least try it. One thing I would do to get them to eat veggies is bring in a bunch of different cut up ones like carrots , celery , cucumbers etc and let them make a person by using scoop of cottage cheese as the head and they would add the arms and legs and eyes and stuff like that and most would eat almost all of their "person" . Even something simple like instead of making their turkey sandwich for them , just give them the bread and everything wrapped separately and let them put it together and not make a big deal about until after they eat it.
 
Mik, I don't have a lot of advice on how to get them to eat right and whatnot but I will say that I'm the result of a picky child that my parents just let go. I had a few select foods I would eat beginning at that age. I was very thin for my age and relatively healthy yet I had a very unhealthy view of food. My parents did not "make" me eat what the rest of the family was eating and unfortunately encouraged sugary foods and drinks very carefree. As a result I have had subsequent eating disorders and I'm struggling to get off the rest of the weight now that came through this experience.

This is not to mention I am still an unbearably picky eater and it's something I fight with daily. My husband was raised as a child that whatever the parent put on the table the family ate. It was very simple. He has no problem with eating healthy or eating whatever and he's not addicted to sugars or snacking to get what he missed from not eating with his family.

I like the idea of nvme above me - perhaps if they saw exactly what went into a meal or did it themselves they would be more inclined to want to eat it?
 
nvme said:
the #1 trick I used when I had a picky eater was to let them make it themselves or help out in prep. and or cooking.
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Tried it. :) If it's something she thinks right off she'll have no interest in, she won't help make it. And she'll help make some stuff, commenting all the time on how yummy it looks, then explain that "it's yummy for you, Mom - it's yucky for me" and not try it at all. She's the same way at school - if they do a food-related project, she'll either decline to participate or participate but not eat.

She's actually been pretty good about trying things since the first of the year. I've been cooking a lot, in addition to MIL cooking (most of which is too heavily spiced for me, let alone DD), and if I cook, the rule is you can have as much as you want of anything I offer (and I do try to have at least one healthy thing I know she'll eat), but if you want something other than what's offered, you need to eat at least one bite of everything. Most nights, there's at least one thing she's unwilling to eat even a bite of, so she gets no special meal.

For a non-pukey kid, though, she gags on just about everything. Raw carrot, cooked mushrooms, risotto... If she manages to swallow any portion of something new, it's cause for celebration.
 
a child wont starve by not eating for a few days. Put the food out, if they ont eat it put it away. if they complain they are hungry by all meansoffer it to them, if they do the gagging vomiting thing its a ploy for attention, theres nothing wrong with the food or them other than they are walking all over you.

Be a parent, stop pandering to the kids.
 
My kids are all great eaters. One guy was quite fussy when he was younger, and all he wanted to eat were sausages, pasta with pesto sauce, apples and grapes. He always ate loads of fruit, so I didn't worry too much about the nutrients. I don't ban any food in particular, but I stopped buying cookies and keeping them in the house, as I found he just kept eating them instead of dinner, and so did I.

I persisted, though, in putting vegetables on his plate every single day without fail, whether he ate them or not, the same as everyone else at the table. It took about a year, but he did eat them eventually. I kept offering the stuff that kids like best - broccoli, carrots, peas, baby corns, etc. But now he eats every vegetable. I also make what we call 'kids' salad', chopped up gherkins, cherry tomatoes and chopped cucumber, served in tiny bowls. They eat it because it's cute.

Another trick is to juice vegetable yourself - my kids love carrot juice (especially if they get to make it) if it's mixed in with something sweet like apples or pears. Sometimes I even sneak in a little beetroot, if it's not too much they don't taste it and it makes the juice pink, which is extra cool.

Now my youngest is the fussier one (he's 5), and will mostly eat only broccoli, peas and carrots. But I reckon he'll grow out of that too and widen his tastes to the more exotic stuff. They do say that the single biggest influence on a child's diet is what their parents eat. Myself and DH have always (even in the crap food days) eaten a lot of fruit and veg, so I'm positive that helps.
 
wishes said:
if they do the gagging vomiting thing its a ploy for attention
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Nah, I can tell if she's really trying to eat, and it's a physical reaction. Both I as a kid and her bio-dad as a kid had the same problem with certain foods, and neither of us are picky eaters as adults. Heck, I have that problem with some foods as an adult, and I can tell you it's not because I'd like more attention. I just give her a glass of water and tell her to swallow it down, and mostly she does.

As I like to say, I made plenty of mistakes with this kid. Carried her around everywhere, fed her whenever she wanted to be fed, did everything for her. And after 9 months of that, she didn't want me to stop! I won't make those mistakes with another kid - it's going to be making its own dinner and walking on its own feet right from conception, so I don't end up with a spoiled whiner. ;)

Seriously, though - as a parent, you pick your battles. "Eat food you dislike or go hungry" isn't one I choose to pick. It was a battle my parents chose to pick, and I didn't end up with a particularly healthy relationship with food.
 
mikitta said:
The doctor tells me every year to stuff them full of cake and candy and anything else they will eat if they won't eat anything but junk because they have such a low weight for their age and height.
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I just read back over your initial post, mikitta, and that sounds like such daft advice from a doctor. He must be obsessed with measuring them against those charts decorated with drug company logos. Surely being naturally small isn't a problem, as long as they are healthy and well?
 
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