About food

Note- I'm an engineer.  I'm not a dietician, nor do I have any medical training.  I'm just a mom trying to do the right thing for my kids and sharing this is anyone else is out there trying to figure out how to make it work for their family.

My blog is sort of a mix of food, scrapping and life.  I hope that isn't too weird.  Oh well if it is.

I also don't often talk about our family aside from what you glean from my scrapping pages.  But I figured I share this because a few moms I was talking with seemed to have a similar issue with their young boys.

They are too busy to eat.  And they don't remind us that they're too busy to eat.  So, since we're busy too (and I don't know about you, but I don't need a real snack every 2 hours), we forget to offer them foods.

At my son's last check up, he was in the 6th percentile for weight.  I'd been suspecting something was going on- he really hadn't grown much, maybe changed 1/2-1 shoe size in the past 9-12 months.  The frustrating thing was the ped wasn't concerned until he would hit the 5th percentile.  This is probably the biggest issue I have with being a military family- no continuity of medical care.  Sure, you can transfer records, but I guarantee the PA that saw my son for the first 3 years of his life would have had a different reaction to this.  A much different one.

So, I am blessed by this military life that I have a dear friend on the west coast.  A dedicated, vegan mom who has children ranging in ages and understands that I've been trying the "easy" stuff to fix this issue.  I also can't drastically change everything in our family for many reasons but primary there is that the kids won't eat new stuff.  There's also some other issues going on and that research was leading me to believe that cutting all articial dyes and preservatives from our diets really couldn't hurt the situation at all. 

So, the dilemma is this:  How do I add weight to my active child in a healthy way and without creating negative body issues or eating habits?

If you Google it, there's not much.  Google the reverse and you'll find information about how to help encourage obese kids to lose the weight, but this?  Not really a societal problem at large.

I started by tracking his foods for about 2-3 days and emailing my friend the info.  I also weighed him, first thing in the morning in his underwear.  He now has a weekly weigh in so I can see where we are making progress.

My friend gave some awesome ideas.  I'll say these are the ones that have worked for me and his body is responding to- adding 1.4 pounds in about 3 weeks:

• Reverting to whole milk and whole milk products.
• Adding ground flax meal to his morning oatmeal (combined with making with 1/2 whole milk and 1/2 coconut milk which contains a lot of very healthy, good fats and good stuff)
• Constantly asking him to take more bites of his food.  Even feeding him the last few bites myself so I know he eats them.
• Setting a timer on my phone to go off at 10am & 3pm reminding me to offer a healthy snack.
• Offering a high protein/non-sweet bedtime snack (full fat yogurt, peanut butter, etc)
• Removing juice/lemonade from our house and offering V8 Splash instead (they call it fruit punch now) esp with breakfast.
• Spending some time thinking about what food I'm offering and what the sugar content could be doing in terms of highs and lows.
• Adding an extra slice of cheese to a sandwich & buttering both sides of the bread when its grilled/toasted.
• Removing fruit snacks from our house and offering Clif's Fruit Twists instead.
• Offering smooth soups with whole milk or full fat sour cream added to them.
• Giving fruit as a smoothie, esp the berries so that I can add whole milk or full fat yogurt to them.  You can also add in the ground flax meal here too.
• Getting him on board, understanding that the food I'm giving him will help him grow and that means his weight will go up on the scale or that if it doesn't, we can talk to the dr to help us find out why.
• He is rewarded for working with me.  Trying a food, eating all his snack/meals.  Those rewards he picked are activity based, not food based. And he's rewarded for trying, not for what the scale says since if there's an underlying medical condition, that's out of his (and my) control without more medical intervention.
• Getting him involved in the food process, particularly the shopping.  That's why I've changed our shopping location and primarily go to Trader Joe's because almost anything he picks there will be fine for him to eat.
• I keep a snack bag (#3000 from Thirty-One Gifts) at all times filled with good snack choices for when we're out- fruit bars, fruit leather, applesauce in to-go packs, etc.

Obviously, what works for one kid or family won't work for another.  I haven't become radical about things, but I'm trying for the easy changes.  And so far, those are working :)  Of course, I'm open to more ideas... I am just favorable to the easy changes right now as opposed to the ones that require me to spend 4 hours in the kitchen or make food art (as my friend would say).

Have a great week!