Persuading dad to eat

[user1494670108]

My dad has frontal lobe dementia, he's living at home on his own (82) and generally coping ok for now with lots of support from family (daily visits/ phone calls, banking, shopping etc).
The main problem is he's barely eating. He eats breakfast ok but then only has one meal either prepared by us or a ready meal plus snacks of cake and biscuits.
Increasingly there are days where he's not even eating that, my sil just called to say he's very confused and dizzy today but it looks like he's not eaten at all over the weekend.
He has an alarm box for tablets which works well, are there any tips to help get him to eat?
He won't eat with me when I visit so that doesn't work.

No solutions, just sympathy. I suspect it is part of the long slow decline. My mother lives in very sheltered housing and is signed up for the lunch. Till recently she would get the sandwich her carer had bought from the fridge when she felt hungry in the evening, and make herself a coffee in the microwave. Then a few weeks back she started complaining of feeling sick and dizzy in the morning and the carer found the sandwich was uneaten.

The carer has another client nearby so she now pops in for an additional call after that and has a "social" coffee with my mum and leaves the sandwich out. Its working, until the next bit of capacity goes. It has felt like a plateau, but looking back the past four years has been a steady decline with new solutions needed every so often. The costs are mounting, but I think we are still two years away from 24 hour care, which will be really expensive.

I don't think there really is a solution. My Nan was like this. We used to give her yoghurts and similar to get calorie into her and build up drinks. We found it best to give her a small plate of food as anything too much used to put her off eating anything as she only wanted small amounts. Ultimately I think it is pretty normal for people as they get older.

It is normal and a lot of the dizziness maybe caused by taking the tablets on an empty stomach. I used to leave biscuits out for my mum. Not ideal but it seemed to be the only thing she would eat. The other problem, is fluids and I found that eating the biscuits prompted her to make a tea or coffee. Usually she forgot to put boil the kettle and occassionally the tea and coffee went into the same cup.

The other things I tried leaving out was plates of cubed cheese, mini sausages and cubes of pineapple. If she saw them she would pick at them.