Food to help DD gain weight

[TillyTurve]

I am looking for high calorie ideas for my 11 year old who is struggling to gain weight. She is on the 1st centile on BMI calculator and is self conscious about her weight. She is a fussy earlier, hardly any meat, no fish and has a mainly beige diet and not much appetite.

I was exactly the same all through my teens and was also so self conscious about it. I was teased and people assumed I had an eating disorder. I even took myself off to the GP at about 14 and was brushed off, and bought myself some sort of powder from Boots but it didn’t work!

So I really understand and want to help. She has multi-vitamins and iron and does eat plenty of fruit. My focus right now is calories rather than anything else.

She eats pain au chocolate for snacks which are quite high calorie I suppose. Peanut butter and banana on toast, pepperoni pizza and lots and lots of Weetabix!

We don’t eat high calorie meals really as a family (and she rarely joins in anyway, she sits with plain pasta and cheese or pizza).

Any ideas? I hope that the more she eats the hungrier she will get. An online calculator says that she will need over 1800 calories a day to gain 1lb a week. That seems a lot!

You need to get her to eat more protein.

Ideas:
Peanut and other nut butters, and sunflower seed butter on whole wheat bread/toast.
Almonds.
Chia seeds - make a chia pudding with milk and nutella; soak seeds overnight.
Mix hemp seeds into her weetabix.
Eggs.
Beans and whole grain combo (brown rice, whole wheat bread, whole wheat pasta, etc) Black beans are especially good.
Chick Peas- hummus, roasted chick peas.
Greek yogurt.
Lentils.
Peas.
Tofu.
Edamame.
Soy milk.
Quinoa. You can make breakfast muffins from cooked quinoa with ham, egg, and cheese added. Warm in the microwave.

If you are trying to get high calorie with low volume try adding ground nuts to things. You can add to both sweet and savoury dishes, most nuts work but need to be ground to dust, we have a mini blender which is great but an old fashioned pestle and mortar would do the same job.

Flapjacks are great for weight gain, you can add chopped nuts (or ground nuts), dried fruit but we also make savoury ones adding grated carrot, cheese, seeds etc.

It also worth reading the packets on everything. The calories difference can be massive between two similar products, bread is a prime example. On the subject of bread, toasties can be really useful, butter inside and outside of bread, and double up on the filling cheese and anything.

You need to watch that you’re not just pumping her full of “empty calories” in the form of white carbs and sugar. Google what body builders eat to bulk up - bear in mind she won’t need as much as weight lifting man but the type of foods they eat should be what you’re aiming for. Lean protein, oily fish, eggs, avocado, full fat dairy, nuts, dried fruit, whole meal carbs and oats etc.

I’m an ex anorexic (most of the time) so a bit of a weight gain expert. As a teen my “gain” diet was-
cereal, 2 toast (often with beans/spaghetti/egg/cheese- don’t recommend that part) and fruit juice
milk and 2 biscuits
cooked dinner and pudding
half round sandwiches and milk
snack meal and pudding
bedtime snack if we wanted.
Gaining weight as a teenager is surprisingly hard work. I could eat all that and still fail to gain weight!

basically, frequent meals of normal food. Avoid massive portions.

And I’d add that high fat/protein actually slows the emptying of the stomach so keeps you full for a long time, so normal food is definitely more suited to frequent meals.

When my gran needed the extra calories she was given fortisip drinks

You can make chocolate mousse with it too!

My ds is on the 0.2 centile. I add a few spoons of olive oil, butter or cheese to all his food.

You can also try pediasure. Its's like chocolate milk.

I'm not sure if your DD still drinks.milk but if she does jersey mill is higher in fat and calories. If she likes.yogurt, there's collective which is more than 5% fat and high in protein as well.

Frappe style creamy drinks from Costa/Starbucks/macdonalds got alot of calories into my dd when she was needing to gain weight.
Maybe hot chocolate with cream and full fat milk if she prefers hot drinks.

I've been following this as my 11yo DS is light as a feather too, 31.6kg as at last night. I literally cannot understand it, he has 2 Ensure shakes a day, there is cream and butter in everything, full fat yoghurt etc. I cannot jam in more calories at either end of the day (he has lunch and supper at school). His treating psychiatrist (for ADHD) is concerned about him not gaining more, but I have no idea what else to try!

Ignore all the advice on here re protein, nuts, seeds, eggs etc. She's already picky (completely normal for her age) you are unlikely to get her eating chia seed smoothies soon. Also she has low appetite which sounds normal for her build but the only way to increase her calorie intake is to tempt the appetite she has. I have had to gain weight after cancer twice and it is Hard! If people haven't experienced low or no appetite they don't know what it's like. Start where she's at. If she likes pain au Chocolat can she manage 1 and a half? Two? Can she cope with cheesier pizza, mayo on chips, cream on her hot chocolate, full fat milk on weetabix, butter plus peanut butter on toast etc etc. You can easily add in 2-300 calories a day this way. Fruit juice is great if she drinks it. As and when she gains weight she may want to increase the range of foods she eats and her protein intake. But increasing appetite has to happen first.

I'm watching this thread with great interest as I had my DS11's height and weight letter from the school nurse just before Christmas. He's on the 1st centile and therefore underweight, and they advised me to contact my GP. He's always been skinny, like me, and doesn't look as 'well' as other kids, in that he can look pale sometimes. He's very active and we have recently been climbing a few hills in the Lakes, so he's not lacking in strength or fitness, he's just thin and fairly fussy with food.

I hadn't mentioned the letter to him as I don't want to make an issue of it, and just want to use a few of the ideas here (peanut butter, croissants, full fat milk) to get him to gradually gain a bit of weight without him really noticing. However, his dad blurted out the other day him, "this is ridiculous how massively underweight you are! You should be at least 7 stones! You're way too thin!" I felt like pointing out that he is ridiculous for being massively overweight, amongst lots of other ridiculous things, but I bit my toungue...

He's 4 stone 6, which is clearly low, but I don't want him to worry about his weight and feel as if he's 'wrong' in some way. Equally, I want to encourage him all I can to put weight on and be healthy, and not just let it drift. So my question is, how do you talk to your child about being underweight? What works and what doesn't? Any feedback would be very much appreciated.

I don't know as it's not a situation I have been in. But maybe it's like when a child is overweight, you don't need to say anything if you are offering the right sort of food. Obviously if you take him to the GP he will know this is an issue. But he's not going to feel hungrier because you raise it at home. Keep mealtimes relaxed whether a child is over or underweight is generally good advice. Hopefully he's just healthy and due a big grow, all mine went through long skinny phases and then hungry caterpillar phases.

Oh and if he looks pale anaemia can cause poor weight gain in which case too much calcium in milk etc is a bad idea. I wd definitely get the Dr appointment first before changing his diet at all.

Have your Healthy Families Team not given suggestions?