how to help my overweight child

[nightingale452]

DD1, who is 7.5, is slightly overweight - not enormously, but I'm worried that if I ignore it she'll have a worse problem later on. The reason I'm posting on here for advice is I genuinely have no idea why she is so large. She was a chubby baby and toddler and everyone said she'd slim down as she got older, but she just never did. She's a very picky eater, but I try to make sure she has at least some fruit and veg each day, and she's good at trying new things, just doesn't often like them.

I cook from scratch every day, she has no junk food (except the occasional party) and her appetite is on the whole tiny. I was watching a programme on TV the other night about overweight children in the hope it would give me some ideas, but the portions the children were eating were 4-5 times as big as what I would serve my daughter (and she often leaves a lot). She eats far less than I did at her age (and I've always been fairly skinny - in fact the rest of the family is slim).

She's not sporty, but she does love dancing, and currently does 3 hours on a Saturday and an hour and a half on a Monday, as well as a half hour swimming on Wednesday and Brownies, which is fairly active as they play a lot of games. Although she would rather do art and craft than run about when she's at home, they do PE at school and to me her organised activity schedule seems pretty full.

Has anyone got any ideas for what we could change? Does this seem a reasonable level of activity to you out there? It's hard to tell when you don't know what everyone else does.

I feel really sad when I see her skinny friends living on sweets and DD1 so solid - what I'm doing wrong? I feel that I'm failing her.

to me, it sounds like you are doing everything right some children are just chubbier than others and it is (from my own experience) these children that end up being healthy and happy as they have grown up with a good diet, whilst the skinny kids eating loads of sweets etc end up with a weight problem they cant control later in life. i was the skinny child my best friend in school was the chubbier one, she is now slim and healthy while i struggle to lose any weight and gain it easily

my DD sounds similar to yours (she is 4 though) and has a good healthy diet with very little in the way of junk-type food. she is chubby but healthy, happy and very active so i am not worried.

I guess what you need to do is to note down (in a way that your DD won't notice or see as you really don't want her to get food issues) everything she eats over a few days to see where any excess calories are coming from.

I know a common culprit for children is fruit juice - loads of calories, and can be glugged back no problem, and not on your food radar

Keep a food diary for a couple of weeks of everything she eats and see if there is a pattern in it.

Do you give her wholemeal bread, pasta etc. Try to encourage water and milk as opposed to cordials (full of sugar).

She may have an underactive thyroid and a slow metabolism. if you feel she is eating moderately and still overweight a vitit to the GP may be worthwhile - as long as your GP wont make matters worse.

Sufficient iodine will regulate an over/underactive thyroid. A simple thing to do is go to the chemist (you may have to visit a few) a buy a bottle of medical iodine. Paint some on her stomach, just a stripe every day, if she is deficient it will disappear into her skin, if not it wont. Keep painting till it stops absorbing (this could take up to three months). There is no fear of overdosing as you would do the same for an overactive thyroid.

Are the rest of the family big?

Good luck.

Thanks for this advice - she does drink almost exclusively fruit juice and cordials - she refused water pretty early on and rarely drinks milk (except on cereal). I try to water down her juice as much as possible but unfortunately she's now of an age to notice and won't always let me!

Unfortunately she does have another problem - chronic constipation - which means I'm encouraging her to drink as much as possible. She's been on medication for this for over 3 years but we've seen little improvement. That's why I introduced cordial to her diet, to get her to drink more.

I'll try writing down what she's eating, it might shed some light on things. I'm thinking of speaking to the GP but I don't really want her to know as I don't want her worrying about her weight. She doesn't look particularly fat in normal clothing, just kind of solid, it's when you see her, for example, in a swimming costume you can see how much bigger she is than the other children her age. She's also pretty tall for her age actually - her height is 132cm and her weight is 33.3kg which I think gives her a BMI of just over 19, which I believe is higher than it should be for a child her age (can anyone confirm this?)

What makes this even more difficult to cope with is that DD2 is tiny and skinny (bordering on underweight). It's really hard to feed up one child while limiting the other. DH and I are slim too, so it's not a problem we were expecting to have.

Interesting idea with the iodine, I'll have to see if I can find some.

I think the fruit juice/cordial will be making a big difference than if she were just drinking water or skimmed milk. Also you say 'some' fruit and veg every day...I think what might be really useful is to get a 'five a day' chart and stick it on the fridge. We've done this and it has helped us to see that we weren't havng nearly as many portions a day as we thought we were. Ds was having 5 a day some days, 4 on others and 2 on the odd weekend day! He now loves the challenge of reaching his 5 a day.

Have to say, I would also check with GP about thyroid - it's got to be worth just asking the question. I do know that in adults, one of the symptoms of underactive thyroid (apart from weight gain) is constipation.

If you're skinny yourself are you sure that she really is overweight? Here's a Body Mass Index calculator specially for children that will tell you www.shape-up.org/weightcon/childbmi.html

And here's the bmi chart reading for your DD.

We're probably nowhere near the 5 a day I'm afraid. She gets raw carrots every day because up until a few months ago, this was the only vegetable she'd eat. Now she'll eat raw broccoli and raw red pepper as well, so that's improved the variety in her diet a little!

She's not particularly keen on fruit either - if I give her a whole piece of fruit in her lunch box it generally comes back uneaten so I often give her chopped up melon or pineapple which she'll usually eat. This is why I encouraged the fruit juice in the first place actually.

I do try with the fruit and veg - she always gets offered whatever we're all eating, but short of force-feeding her I can't make her eat it.

That's an interesting article on thyroid problems - I think I might have a conversation with our GP about all this.

Fruit juices and cordial are also giving her sugar hits but without any of the fibre that the actual fruit would provide. So whatever way you can get fruit into her is the way to go.

Ideally if you are giving her fruit juice you should have 1/4 juice, 3/4 water.

You should try to get her to eat as much fibre as you can.

The thing with chronic constipation is that the feaces that is there is compacted so probably v hard to shift and so everything is getting backed up behind it.

it sounds like, while she is having fluids, lots of it is sugary and so the body will try to absorb as much water from this as it can, leaving her stool even more compact and difficult to pass.