Almost 3 year old barely eating

[Onedaytherewasapear]

DD2 has generally always had a good appetite. She does however get ill fairly often and the first thing to go is her appetite but it always comes back within a couple of days and any weight she has lost is quickly put back on. Fortunately she still has a bottle of milk usually in the mornings and evenings (before we brush her teeth) and that usually increases when she isnt well and goes down after so she is still getting some nutrition into her.

This most recent episode has been going on for about 3-4 weeks now though. She hasnt been visibly unwell in that time but she is barely eating anything at all. We are talking a couple of spoons of cereal and a couple.of yoghurts spaced through the day. Have tried her with her favourite foods, let her choose, told her what to eat but not getting anywhere. She just says no, screams and gets upset which I dont want to push. Unlike other times she isnt drinking loads of milk in the meantime either. She has visibly lost weight too.

Ive taken her to see the GP who has weighed her and said to come back in a couple of weeks to see how she is. All well and good but it feels really stressful (even though I am now doing my best blase attitude at mealtimes and saying its fine not to eat and not offering treats). They checked her over and nothing visibly wrong either.

Any advice, words of wisdom or magic wands to wave?? Anyone had similar? What worked? How did you break the cycle?

Of she's visibly lost weight you need to go back to the GP and kick up a proper fucking fuss. What tests did they do?

They checked oxygen levels, chest, her back, her tonsils and weighed her. GP spoke to the paediatric consultant at hospital and that was the advice. I think because shes still a good size- 75th percentile he said- they werent hugely concerned...

Im keeping a food diary of what it is she is actually eating so when I go back I have more concrete evidence of what she has had.

Has she had chicken pox yet? My 3.5 year old had that back in May and before the spots appeared she was really not herself for like 3 weeks. When the spots appeared I almost celebrated because at least it gave me some kind of answer as to what had been wrong. She got a bit gaunt afterwards having lost some weight, but it soon came back on again after resuming normal appetite.

They need to run blood tests. An otherwise healthy child should never be losing weight.

2yo dd caught the cough/cold off my oldest, as did we all. Her mutated in the out of hours Drs words and it FLOORED her. She never ate a damn thing for a week. Think 1 piece of pasta in an entire day, she was limp, had no energy to move, sleeping 4 hours at a time. It was awful. I could see her wasting away. No one was sleeping either due to her up all night coughing and being sick because of it. Every one was knackered. No doctor took me seriously and one even said on a telephone appointment 'we're too used to seeing fat kids and find ribs showing scary' but had said she was 50th centile last month in the same breath, shes not over weight in any way. We did get her eating again but its taken some time to build her back up and i used some high calorie milkshake powder too from Amazon.

Forgot to add, ive found the more you make a 'thing' out of something and stress, the worse it makes them. We had a similar thing with Ds gagging on food and keeping it in his mouth. The second we caught ourselves and stopped paying attention to it, he stopped.

Maybe cut down on the milk, if she hasn't got a big appetite the milk will probably be filling her up so she doesn't need to eat much. X