My DD is 7, nearly 8. She's 127cm and 33kg. This puts her on about the 95% percentile for her BMI, verging on obese.
I struggle to find the best way to approach this with her and to balance ensuring she eats healthily and exercises with not driving her crazy and making this into an 'issue'. I always think 'Will she thank me for this when she's older?'. Obviously she won't thank me for not trying to control her weight gain but similarly she won't thank me if I make her miserable about this!
We eat healthily at home and we're relatively active. The differences I see between her and her peers and her normal weight sibling is that:
a) She loves to eat, she doesn't seem to have an 'off' button and stop when she is naturally full, she will always notice if a meal is late, she'll talk about food a lot and she hardly ever refuses food
b) She's not naturally very physically active. She's just not that kid who runs around and it's a struggle to get her to be physical. She's not the kid racing around the playground playing footie at breaktime.
I think she really gained weight around one when she was just not moving. She only crawled at about 15 months and walked at about 18 months. Since then she's kind of tracked the same BMI percentile. I thought it might even out but it clearly hasn't and I'm increasingly worried. i did take her to the GP once when she was about 4 who just laughed basically and said she looks fine!!
My strategy with her is:
a) Fill her up with veggies and restrict carbs. I try to give her appropriate kid-sized meals and if she wants more, she has to have finsihed the protein and veggies and then only a little more of the carbs. Thankfully she's not fussy and more or less eats where we give her. I have sometimes told her no, that she's had enough. i don't know if this is right or wrong in terms of strategy. Should I be restricting more? Would that backfire? I don't want to be controlling, it doesn't feel right, but am I letting DD down by not doing more?
b) Restricting junk food at home. Is this right? Will this just make it mroe attractive elsewhere? Sometimes if we want something junky, i'll make it at home where i can control sugar, fats and portion size e.g. homemade healhier cakes, homemade popcorn for movie night, frozen banana icecream (whizzed up frozen bananas - she loves it and thinks it's a real treat like real icecream). But is even that too much if she's still obese? And what to do when we're out or with friends? Like today we were out at soft play with a friend, I bring water, an apple and a cheese stick for a snack for both of them. But then friend's mum arrives and allows friend to buy a pack of cookies. Friend of course offers my DD and they share. In this case, stepping in and not allowing would be far more harmful to DD (I think) but at the same time not helping DD's weight.
c) Fun physical activity as much as possible. We do try to get this in. I know she'd probabyl prefer to do activities that were not physically active (drama, art, robotics) or to just hang out at home but we do push her a bit to get out. She does Taekwondo 3 times a week and she does come out quite hot and sweaty so she works hard - thankfully we've found something she enjoys there as I think she likes the structure and having to think quite a bit as she's quite smart and has a good memory. She also does basketball once a week as an activity at school (which she enjoys because her friends do it too) and swimming once a week (enjoys less but swimming is an important skill). Then she has PE twice a week at school. At home, we try to get her out for at least an hour playing ping pong, badminton, cycling, walking the dog or roller blading. Again, she won't take herself out to play - she prefers to be at home playing with lego or reading a book - so we have to initiate and encourage it. I think she already does quite a lot of formal activities so probably not much more to do. But how much to force this if she doesn't want to be active? If she'd prefer to be inside? We aren't at the point of tears but definitely a lot of cajoling and encouragement is needed!
I will say that she doesn't stand out as a fat kid (but completely aware that's because the population overall has grown fatter compared with the reference population) and she does have decent physcial fitness. But I know her BMI and that she is very close to being obese, not just a little overweight, and I see her compared with her friends that she does have more of a tummy than they do.
Apologies for the long post but what else can I do to help DD? Where am I going wrong? And how do I address this issue without fucking her up (to put it bluntly)! I feel like I'm in a minefield here and I just want to get it right for her