Teen eating SO much

[GlitteryFarts]

I'm at my wits end with my 14yo ds.
I have 4 boys, ages 6, 8, 12 and 14. The 14 year old is an actual bottomless pit.

For example, on Monday I spent £50 stocking the freezer with a variety.of ice lollies to tide them over the summer holidays. I've just looked and there are about 8 left.

Yesterday we went to the beach and I bought the most humongous watermelon ever before hand for the picnic. I cubed it and we shared a quarter of it between the 5 of us (it really was that big) along with other bits. This morning he ate the other quater to himself and I've just caught him in his room with the remaining half.

Every time I stock up on things to last us the week, the wrappers are in his bedroom and cupboards are empty within a couple of days.

I know the usual consensus is to simply stop buying things but its so unfair that his younger siblings should miss out because he is so greedy. He can't say its hunger because ice lollies and watermelons aren't filling! Its just that its there and he wants it.

The biscuit jar will be empty within 2 days of it being filled and the younger ones may have had 1 or 2 each, they get sweets for their birthdays from family and they go missing and nobody knows where until I search his room and find the empty wrappers. He will sneak down countless times of a night to get toast, crisps, cereal, anything.

Ive bought microwave popcorn at 25p a bag, healthier and fills a large bowl, he was over it in 3 days and back to normal taking everything else. Ive bought rice crackers - he ate the whole pack in a night. I bought pot noodles as a carb fix - he ate 3 in a night.

His portion sizes are huge, I try to fill him at mealtimes with lots of protein, veg and carbs to avoid this but he just inhales his food within 30 seconds and is on the mooch for more an hour later.

He is 6ft tall and as thin as a string of spaghetti, he doesn't have worms as I deworm us all regularly due to letters from school. I don't think he has any kind of illness unless sheer greed is an illness and I'm at my absolute wits end. He is costing me a fortune and it isn't sinking in! I've explained how much I spend, how selfish it is etc, he just stares at me and either agrees or says he's hungry when he isn't!

What can I do except put a lock on my kitchen door which I absolutely won't as its our home! I hate the thought of not buying as much over the holidays and the younger ones missing out on treats because he can't bare to eat only his fair share.

Any advice please?

Potatoes are one of the most satiating foods and cheap
Add them to meals to bulk them out, mash, jacket, whatever plus cheap veg like carrots
Big bags of cheap oats

Then a talk about hungry is ok but you can't take more than your fair share of treat food, here is what you can/can't eat
He might be better having 4 meals a day - for the calories you can inhale in a chocolate bar, bag of crisps and whatever else as you're not full, he could have a big portion of tuna pasta! (Maybe talk about that too?)

Agree with too good to go, you could send him to collect if it's local enough. The Greggs ones aren't the healthiest but good value and Aldi are usually good
The carvery ones are brilliant and he can get a full meal for £3

Yep 14 year old boys need a lot of fuel!

I try not to buy too much unhealthy stuff like cakes and instead have healthier, more filling stuff for him to help himself to like

Eggs so he can make scrambled and omelettes
Toast, pitta, wraps. Hummus
Cheese, cold meat
Pizza
Leftovers to heat up - I often make an extra port of dinner do he can heat it up for a snack the next day.
Cold meats
Fruit
Noodles
I make flapjacks and muffins - cheaper and more healthy than shop bought
Pasta and sauce

Watermelon, sweets and biscuits won't fill him up!

Not once have I called my son a pig

I'm aware that my job is to provide nutritious filling foods and if you read my comments you can see that. I do. He has a very well balanced diet and there is plenty of food in this house, ice lollies are not "all there was". I said it was to tide 4 kids over the summer holidays.

My post was to ask advice not criticism for keeping treats in my cupboards for my children over half term.

Thankyou to everyone who understands where I am coming from and for those who can relate offering their advice! I'll show him how to make a few pasta dishes this week to keep in the fridge when he needs something more inbetween meals. And to good to go is a good shout!

Bulk buy Ramen noodles in different flavours or Pot Noodles, tell him he can eat as many as he likes but leave off taking more than his share of all the other food.

If he likes savoury rice salad cook off a big pot using brown rice, onion, peas, kidney beans etc that can be refrigerated and eaten cold.

Or unlimited wholegrain bread and peanut butter or jam/honey.

This.

Teen boys eat a LOT.

He is 6ft tall and as thin as a string of spaghetti,

That's why he needs the extra food. He's got to keep up with the growth spurt.

I'd be delighted if my thin son was eating! I know I'll get flamed for this but why have 4 kids if you don't want to feed them?! He's obviously going through a growth spurt and is hungry!

I'd get four lockable snack lockers and issue rations. Maybe give them slightly larger rations as each shoots up in turn.

Frozen stuff you'll have to do little and often.

But make snack protein and fruit freely available.

He’s going to be growing for a while yet, even if it’s not height he’ll get wider. It is what it is, he’s not greedy, he’s just hungry. I don’t have any sons but my brother ate like a machine for a few years and there wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. I had literally never seen any human being eat that much before, it was extraordinary, I’m still shocked thinking about it.

Let him eat, have a word about leaving stuff for his siblings but he needs the food.

Oh yes I have one of those too, a 14yo DS very thin and eats like a horse. We encourage him to eat toast, cereal and eggs to fill up. He will make himself plain pasta with a bit of butter and cheese if hungry too. He’s quite health conscious as he’s been teased a lot at school for being really skinny so he’s now going to the gym and weight-training with DH and doing box-exercise and cycling so that will make him even more hungry.

Toastosterone.

You aren’t feeding him enough nutritious food.

Smoothies OP - bananas in the freezer full fat milk, splodge of greek yogurt and a tablespoon of peanut butter, some supermarkets even so the overripe bananas for about 40p a bag, he can chop them up and put them in a freezer bag

DS is five 120cm eats like a horse and thin, I dread to think how much he's going to cost to feed as a teenager

It's normal 🤷‍♀️ teen boys can need an absolute ton of food.

My brother would eat a massive dinner, pudding and then make himself a round of cheese on toast!

If he's hungry let him eat.

Quarter of a watermelon between five of you? I'm not surprised he ate the rest,I could eat half myself no problem and probably the rest later on in the day. He needs food,he's a growing boy, it was like a plague of locusts when ds and his mates were that age.

He needs carbs. Huge quantities of carbs.

Toastosterone is a fantastic description.

We had the Carb Cupboard when my boys were teens. Cereals, bread, crackers, crisps etc.freely available.
They ate huge amounts of rice with meals.
Diet was otherwise varied and nutritious with plenty of all the food groups.
But they just needed the fuel - carbs

They were never overweight and are now 6"+ adults with no weight issues.

Bulk buy cheap carbs for him on a weekly basis. Give him a cupboard of top up foods like ramen noodles and pasta pots, and tell him it gets stocked weekly, when it's gone he's not to steal his siblings snacks. This is to be in addition to the family meals. Buy more food treat feeding him like you're feeding 2 adults each meal.

At this stage I split all snacks treats into boxes per child so that things like ice lollies were shared fairly.
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Then there was a 'free for all' section of fridge and freezer that contained good foods that weren't set aside for meals that they could tuck into as required.
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I thought girls ate less but our eldest would bring her friends around and make frittata or scrambled egg for everyone. We have chickens and had always had loads of eggs before the teen years: we had to get more chickens!

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It's an expensive time OP. I used to make trays of savoury flapjacks (oats, egg, bacon and cheese) for when they needed something to hand: otherwise taught them to cook basic healthy meals (or snacks, as they called them at the time).
You need to always shop with an eye for a bargain: if you know they'll always clear out the fruit bowl, fill it with whatever is in season so it's cheaper (it's nectarines in Tesco this week).
It will get better, but for now you really can't overfeed them, and it's better they eat good food at home than develop a McD's habit!

I also have teenage dustbins.
mine have a pepsi addiction (they would like to have one anyway). If I buy it it goes, so I don’t buy it. They don’t miss out. I’d suggest that buying £50 of ice lollies was for too much temptation for a hungry teenager with a not fully developed frontal cortex.

Break the treats down into more manageable chunks- even a weeks worth can be too much temptation if it’s there, stock up on calorie dense foods for him. You have to adjust to them unfortunately at this stage.

I'm already worrying about this phase as my 10yo can put away an alarming amount of food, and we're a family of big eaters (all skinny). My strategies might be inadequate for a teenager but here they are anyway:

• He has learned to make himself scrambled egg on wholemeal toast
• I keep a pot of lentil soup or minestrone, a good bulky soup, that he can have a bowl of with bread
• Daal with shop bought naan to be popped in the toaster would also be a good thing to have on hand and freezes well
• He can make himself porridge with bananas
• Homemade banana muffins, if bananas ever get the chance to go brown. I have a recipe that uses very little sugar so they aren't bad even if he eats several

All of the above are relatively cheap and are healthy. Watermelons are a fortune and not very filling even though they are delicious.

The popcorn and rice cakes won't fill him up. They're
Bottomless pits at that age. Peanut butter, cheese, cook a gammon and he can have slices of that, ditto a chicken.

I have the same with my youngest (15) but to complicate matters he is coeliac. So a lot of snacks aren't suitable or cost £££ and he currently can't eat oats which make up a lot of gf foods. He is costing me a fortune. We get thru 24 eggs a week minimum and so much tuna/rice etc. I have 2 older boys and they were similar but at least could eat bread/biscuits etc. I feel your pain

This. You need to stop thinking of them needing delicate meals. They're oversized toddlers and need carbs carbs carbs and a lot of protein. Remember the bottomless yoghurts and cheese sticks years? You're reliving them on a larger scale.