Picky eating online courses

[F03t]

Has anyone got any experience / reviews / stories of the 'picky eating' online courses, widely advertised on instagram from heavily followed instgram accounts such as nutrition for littles, kids eat in colour, etc?

My 18mo eats around 15 foods, regularly skips meals and eats the same few foods on repeat. GP/HV no help. Wondering if these online courses actually help and change things?

15 foods on the face of it isn't concerning. It depends what they are. What are the 15 foods?

My son is 2 and eats the following:

Fish fingers
Sausages
Haggis
Black pudding
Chicken soup
Tomato soup
Tuna pasta
Peanut butter sandwiches
Yoghurts
Cheese
Strawberries
Blueberries
Bananas
Yoghurt
Porridge
Eggs
Rice cakes and humous

(And of course he'll eat cake and biscuits if he's given them!)

At the moment that's not a particularly long menu of items, only a couple more than what your son eats. But it's fairly balanced and could be worse. I get vegetables in him in his soup and I do things like grate carrot in his porridge and he has it with cinnamon. Chia seeds and flax seeds get added to a lot of things. He likes to drink smoothies so I add spinach to strawberry and banana smoothies.

I just keep offering food and don't pressure him. Sometimes new foods come and go for a while.

So 15 foods can be plenty for a balanced diet, depending on what those things are, and you can get clever by boosting the nutritional value of a meal. If he eats porridge stir chia seeds in and some peanut butter. If he likes smoothies, add some veg in and sweeten with a little honey. Keep up his multivitamin ever day.

I wouldn't spend money over complicating it when there are fab resources on Instagram and so on like the kids eat in colour page.

Thanks thats really helpful. DS wont touch meat, veggies, smoothies. The foodlist is basically: cereal (a few types), plain rice and bread, yogurt, bananas, satsumas, cream cheese, croissants. Sometimes things get added e.g. an apple or a fish finger - about once a month. Also will happily eat digestive biscuits! I'm so worried about the lack of food and variety.

That sounds quite restricted, but you've only listed 8 things, is there anything else he eats?

You might be able to build on some things by just putting something he likes on his plate with something new. So toast cut into little squares, some with cream cheese, some with peanut butter, some with humous.

Does he like things like pancakes and cakes? You can make them without sugar and add all sorts of good things to them.

I also have no shame in putting sprinkles on top of my son's porridge. I mash a banana in to his porridge as well as mixing in a spoonful of chia seeds and one egg yolk. He eats it all because he gets to put chocolate sprinkles on top and thinks he's absolutely winning at life 😂 it's a fair trade off to me. You could give him a teaspoon of Nutella to try and then let him see you stir it into a bowl of porridge. Half a teaspoon of Nutella in his porridge is enough for my son to scoff the lot and it can have carrots and apples etc grated in it.

Keep eating together and give him some of what everyone is having, alongside some things he likes. He will likely expand his tastes and willingness to try things in time. The key is definitely to take any emotions out of it. Be blasé. No positive, no negative. Just serve food and eat together with all pressure off. The only things I say to my son are "here you go" and "are you all done". We talk about everything and anything else! As he improves I've started being more descriptive and talking about food, but for a while I had to fake nonchalance about it all even though it was really stressing me out.