13 month old weight gain issues

[Eanceoil]

Hi. Hoping someone else can help ease my worries.
My little girl is 13.5 months and hasn’t really gained any weight since she was 10 months old. She peaked at 19lbs when she was 10 months or so and is now 18lbs 6oz. As a result she’s dropped from 45th to 20th centile.

For context, she is now breastfed 4 times a day and has three meals along with snacks.

Around the 10.5 month mark I tried to stop her morning breastfeed to replace with milk in a cup to ready her for nursery. She didn’t take to a cup so I gave her water and a snack instead.
She started crawling A LOT and pulling to stand around the 10 month mark.
Around her birthday she had a period of 3 weeks just constantly getting bugs from nursery.
As a family we follow a vegan diet and she has a multivitamin. I try to ensure she gets a good balance of different foods.

At her one year check up (happened a couple of weeks before her birthday) she was on the 25th centile but the HV wasn’t concerned because she was active and healthy. I went to get her weighed again last week because I was concerned she wasn’t gaining weight still. She had dropped to 20th centile and lost 0.5 oz. Because of this, they said to get the GP to see her. She is having some blood tests next week to rule some things out.
Ive reintroduced the regular breastfeeds now to try and get some weight on her.

I’m massively stressing about this now. She is taller so she seems skinny to me. Is this just her finding her natural build or the drop in milk/ her being more active?

Anyone else experienced similar?

How vegan in your daughter? You mention milk. Was that a plant milk at 10 months?

I would be concerned about the amount of fats your daughter was getting, given her weight.
But equally, their weight gain does slow down around this age, and added to her moving more and her illnesses it could just be a combination of things not related to diet.

Increasing the breastmilk, and seeing what the GP comes back with, along with a careful evaluation of her diet considering her age seems like a good start. Then monitor her weight, and check it is increasing again.

She is fully vegan and the milk was a high fat fortified oat milk (Alpro growing up milk).

The HV did mention about the fats and it’s a fair point because DD loves fruit and vegetables and often leaves everything else. I’ve been trying to give her cheese as a snack and stirring cream into things. I’m going to up that this week.

The only thing I did wonder is if she might be celiac because her bowl movements have been really up and down as well.

It does feel like everything kind of coincided with her moving more, the milk being dropped and her illness but she’s not gained it back yet!

Is she getting enough protein, which obviously is essential for growth.

She's not getting enough protein or fat. Both of which need to be massively increased when they start moving more.

Vegan foods do not have the same bioavailability as animal products and it means she's never getting a complete protein - full spectrum of the 9 essential amino acids.

Would you at least consider adding in eggs and dairy?

Actually losing weight is a lot more concerning than dropping centiles. Was she weighed at the same time if day on the same scales?

You could try adding olive oil to foods as this has good fats.

The weight centile is pretty meaningless without the height centile. You say she's tall. Is she following her height centile?

As another poster mentioned it is important that you check that her diet does include all the essential amino acids (protein building blocks) as this is far more difficult with a vegan diet.
TBH a totally vegan diet is not appropriate for a growing child unless all nutrients are very carefully calculated.