My eldest daughter turns five next month and has been, for the past few weeks, a bottomless pit when it comes to food. She is never satisfied, is always begging for more more snacks, and can’t seem to get her mind off of food. She had stayed at the same weight (41 lbs) for the past year but has recently jumped to 44 lbs so I am thinking she’s in the midst of a growth spurt and will soon be sprouting up another couple inches.
I am just wondering how to handle her incessant requests for food. I don’t want her to eat out of boredom, or purely for pleasure. I want her to listen to her body and not feed it past its point of fullness. But I don’t want to deny her food if she is truly hungry.
She adores fruit and vegetables and most of the snacks she consumes are very healthy, but I am not a treat Nazi, so she does have the occasional cookie or ice cream cone. She has a very well-rounded diet and I am so thankful for that. My only concern is that since I was an overweight child and teen, I am scared it might be lurking in her genes. I want to do all I can to help her have a strong, healthy body, but I don’t want to pass any of my food issues on to her, either.
We talk about how important it is to eat healthy foods, to get exercise, to not eat too many treats, to listen to our body, and how it takes a bit of time for the food we eat to get to our tummies and tell us we’re full. I guess that’s all I can do, right?
How do you handle growth spurts? Do you try to keep the food consumed within reason or just let your kids go wild, knowing it’s a phase and will pass?
As long as you’re giving her healthy options of things to eat, and plenty of opportunity to exercise (swimming all summer long!)…then I wouldn’t worry about how much she is eating. We are starting to go through massive amounts of food (hello, three boys)…and it does worry me that sometimes they wolf it down before they’ve even let it hit the bottom. I’m trying to offer smaller portions more often so they don’t eat so much at one meal (like I tend to do)….just solely out of habit. Snacks are good….and yes, only one bowl of dry cereal/crackers, then it’s time for fruit or veggies. (That’s my line these days!)
my MIL wrote the book “Naturally Thin Kids” it’s amazing! http://www.amazon.com/Naturally-Thin-Kids-Protect-Disorders/dp/0962535192
My mother and sister struggle with obesity, and I struggled with anorexia into my early twenties, so I’m uneasy about passing our food issues onto my daughter. But she just turned five, just shot up about an inch, just skipped a shoe size, just gained four pounds, and just lost her first tooth. She’s eating like a lumberjack, and needs afternoon naps again for the first time in two years. I serve a healthy snack or meal every two to three hours, and let her eat as much as she wants. If she’s starving in between those times, I offer her a glass a milk. We save the junkiest snacks or treats for after supper.
We only pull out the bathroom scale when the kids have obviously grown in height. We don’t diet around here, but when my daughter asks about dieting we talk about how it’s something some grownups do to help them learn about being healthy. When she sees me workout, or head out for a run or a swim, it’s NEVER about weight loss and always about how much I enjoy it or how I’m getting ready for a race. So far, these have been brief, sort of in-passing conversations, and far less interesting to her than most other things. I hope we can keep it that way for a long time.
I let my girls eat as much as they want, as long as their choices are healthy and it isn’t getting to close to meal time. If they sit down to a big plate of veggies and dip or are emptying out the fruit bowl – fine by me!
Josie asks for snacks NON-STOP and so I eventually end up telling her to wait for the next meal but this isn’t a phase – I think it’s just Josie. 😉
Abby often eats more than i do … especially if I make something like pancakes.
I’d let her eat as much as she wants. If she says she is hungry, give her food. What i think you could do, is maintain a standard time frame between snacks/meals. To allow that signal from the stomach to the brain to have enough time to actually work.
ie. give her what she wants. and then make her wait 20 min(or whatever) to decide if she is still hungry. If she is, she’ll tell you, if she’s not, she’ll probably move on to something else and forget she was asking for food.
this is my suggestion!
Grace is six and eats as much as the adults at each meal. Adora is eight and eats more than anyone in our home at each meal, and I can’t keep her full in between either. They’re both skinny as rails.
I was doing a little budgeting a few weeks ago and realized we are spending $260 a week!!! on groceries alone.
Gah!
We go through this with our son all the time -we always know when the growth spurts are coming! I guess we’re lucky that both our kids are big fruit eaters and that’s often their biggest “treat”. We keep a bowl of fruit on the table, nuts in the cupboard and our kids outside. That seems to work for us.