Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is her body size and shape drastically different from everyone in your family? Some people put on weight as adults through lifestyle factors and hormonal changes, but other people are just born into bigger bodies and will always be larger than other people.

The fact that she is also 97% for height implies she has a large frame. Even for heavier kids, isn’t the goal to keep them roughly on their growth curve? If her weight % keeps increasing relative to her height, that would seem more concerning than her height and weight increasing in the same proportion as her prior growth.

Height and weight have both moved higher than the curve recently to 98th and 99th. DH's family has weight and diabetes struggles and she basically looks like him in a wig.

This is your answer. What did he look like as a kid? Does he have sisters? The question is not “how do I turn my child born into a larger than average body into an average size or slim child?” Your question to the Dr or a dietitian should be “how do I help my child grow into a healthy adult who doesn’t yo yo diet or have an eating disorder”

Plus one thousand million

Ditto. I recommend reading Ellyn Satter's book "Your Child's Weight: Helping Without Harming" which directly addresses this.

Thank you. I just requested it from the library.

I think Ellyn Sattler gives out terrible advice for kids who have a tendency to gain weight in families that have obesity.

You have to restrict food if you want your child to be a normal weight and the sooner you do it the better. You can’t leave it up to your child to listen to their hunger cues because it’s messed up. Knowing both my DH and I have obesity on both sides and we both struggle with weight when our kids were little we never allowed extra servings of food. We ordered pizza but as a preschooler you just get one slice. If you are still hungry we had our kids go do something else or took them to walk the dogs.

If your child is obese eating the food you posted then it comes down to portion size. Don’t listen to Sattler, she just believes some kids are going to be fat. That kids can eat unlimited amounts of food you present to them for dinner if they are eating a balanced diet. Every year you prevent your kid from being overweight /obese is a win. I realize at least one of my kids will be overweight/obese eventually but I am trying to do all I can to prevent it.

So serve smaller portions then go do something else. Many kids aren’t even that hungry for breakfast. Start cutting back breakfast proportions. On the weekends we moved back the time we eat breakfast until 10 or 11 am so then we eat an early dinner. That means one meal less and we eat airpopped popcorn while watching a movie or go out for one scoop of ice cream at night. That is way less calories than a whole meal.

Restricting food absolutely leads to binging and ignoring hunger cues and a future of yo-yo dieting and food issues. The key thing with Satter's approach is that you decide what is served for meals and when they happen. The child chooses how much but that doesn't mean it has to be totally unlimited. It's OK that there may be limited amounts of some things, e.g. I only made x amount of macaroni and cheese or one piece of chicken per person and everyone has to share what's available. If you are still hungry there are other things on the table to eat. So if dinner is pizza, it's going to be served with salad and fruit. Still hungry after your slice, you have other things to eat. Nobody should be getting told that going around hungry should be the normal course of life.

When you are obese your hunger cues are already disordered. There is nothing wrong with feeling a little hunger. Up until the last 40 years or so unless you were ultra wealthy there wasn’t an unlimited amount of food at meals. Everyone got one serving and that was it. There wasn’t an endless supply of snacks including fresh fruit and salads. All those extra servings a child -who has a family history of obesity -eats gets their body used to eating a lot of food and then they gain weight and keep gaining weight.

OP’s kid is eating too much during meals of healthy food. That means portion sizes are too big and/or the child is eating multiple portions.

My family is unfortunately fat. My sister is a big proponent of Sattler and her kids eat huge amounts at meals. They are eating healthy things but are never told they can’t have seconds or thirds. So now they are used to eating more than they should. When I visit family members in another country I noticed there weren’t endless servings. You got one serving and that was it. Kids from that side of the family are all normal weight.

I agree with this poster that prior to 40 years ago food was expensive part of a family's budget and it was not unusual for kids to have a little hunger between meals. There was not the extreme level of snacking that you see today. Prior to 40 years ago you never saw toddlers eating in church (being fed snacks). Prior to 40 years ago kids were not fed snacks at other family's homes. Everyone ate 3 meals a day. Because food was an expensive part of the family's budget a child would get one portion and that was that.

As kids we snacked and ate a lot back then.

Breakfast was a bowl of Sugar Puffs with whole milk, lunch was a ham sandwich with chips and dinner was meat loaf with corn and potatoes.

Fillers were bread and potatoes. A lot
of bread and potatoes. We’d polish off a batch of canned pillsbury biscuits with tons of butter with every meal.

Snacks; carrots with salt, celery with peanut butter. Grilled cheese, a can of soup, PBJ or tuna fish sandwiches with lots of mayo…a treat could be cookies or McDonalds or your mom cutting up some apple slices.

One of the main differences is that we were just not very sedentary and didn’t spend much time in the house even if we weren’t into sports. Not being sedentary could mean sitting outside with your friends and talking or just wasting time. We had nothing but time.

So if we were hungry we just didn’t eat or we ran in grabbed a sandwich and ran back out because no one wanted to go home and be put to work or be nagged to death to do the dishes, vacuum or clean your room.

We didn’t spend as much time with parents and their money. And none of us had money sooo no one was biking to the local fast food joint to buy a hamburger and fries. And no one ate fast food more than a few times a month… pizza was a treat not a weekly occurrence.

So many kids eat today for entertainment. Food for us wasn’t entertainment, and TV wasn’t entertainment, because there wasn’t much of it to watch…

Today food is fun and TV is fun and video games are fun… other kids not so much fun and parents are in charge of it all. Restricting and organizing and engineering it all.

So many varieties of all of the above. Chips cookies and candy and fast food (yes Chik-fil-a is fast food), Netflix, Nintendo, XBox… And way to much time with parents and way too much time sitting in the house on butts, eating, playing video games and watching TV.

And everyone is so productive and so unhappy.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:BMI for kids is ridiculous. It's just a snapshot in time. My DD has been flagged for being overweight in the past, but she absolutely does not look overweight. She's VERY active and eats moderately. Now she's not a stick, don't get me wrong, but she looks just fine to me. She does have very muscular legs though, not sure if that's causing her to weight more than she "should"? We found a new pediatrician and they never bring up BMI to us. Not sure if they do to other families.

Some kids are denser than others. If asked the weight everyone would guess the child weighed much less than they do. Different body types

OP provided the actual stats for her child, PP. No child is that dense. The child is seriously overweight.

Yes, but we can see where the problem lies with how many posters on here are trying to normalize this. It sounds like OP's child is still active but I've seen kids literally lose the ability to run they were so obese. I work in an ES.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP. An average day would be:

Breakfast: smoothie (fruit, yogurt, milk, no added sugar), eggs, or overnight oats with peanut butter and half teaspoon of maple syrup
Lunch: whole wheat pasta with mushrooms, garlic, olive oil, and Parmesan or fish with a side of vegetables
Dinner: Tuscan bean soup with a sprinkle of Parmesan or homemade chili with guac and a sprinkle of cheddar

Snacks are almost always fruit or vegetables.

This diet sounds so healthy and delicious. My kids eat like crap compared to OP’s and most of my friends’ kids do, too. I just want to offer a counter to the PPs trying to poke holes in this diet. This is genetics. Mine are skinny and their diet includes way more salt and sugar than this. Genetics.

It’s not that the individual items are, it’s just that it’s a TON of food. Many healthy adults don’t eat that much food in a day.

How do you know that without OP specifying portion size? Soup for dinner and produce for snacks is not a “ton” of food.

Because her DD is obese. Obviously portion sizes are too large.

It’s not as simple as that. It’s often about caloric load and types of foods. Insulin sensitive/resistant people need a very different meal plan.

Dp, not for kids. Her dd is certainly overeating something else than soup!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:BMI for kids is ridiculous. It's just a snapshot in time. My DD has been flagged for being overweight in the past, but she absolutely does not look overweight. She's VERY active and eats moderately. Now she's not a stick, don't get me wrong, but she looks just fine to me. She does have very muscular legs though, not sure if that's causing her to weight more than she "should"? We found a new pediatrician and they never bring up BMI to us. Not sure if they do to other families.

Some kids are denser than others. If asked the weight everyone would guess the child weighed much less than they do. Different body types

OP provided the actual stats for her child, PP. No child is that dense. The child is seriously overweight.

Anonymous wrote:BMI for kids is ridiculous. It's just a snapshot in time. My DD has been flagged for being overweight in the past, but she absolutely does not look overweight. She's VERY active and eats moderately. Now she's not a stick, don't get me wrong, but she looks just fine to me. She does have very muscular legs though, not sure if that's causing her to weight more than she "should"? We found a new pediatrician and they never bring up BMI to us. Not sure if they do to other families.

Some kids are denser than others. If asked the weight everyone would guess the child weighed much less than they do. Different body types

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP. An average day would be:

Breakfast: smoothie (fruit, yogurt, milk, no added sugar), eggs, or overnight oats with peanut butter and half teaspoon of maple syrup
Lunch: whole wheat pasta with mushrooms, garlic, olive oil, and Parmesan or fish with a side of vegetables
Dinner: Tuscan bean soup with a sprinkle of Parmesan or homemade chili with guac and a sprinkle of cheddar

Snacks are almost always fruit or vegetables.

This diet sounds so healthy and delicious. My kids eat like crap compared to OP’s and most of my friends’ kids do, too. I just want to offer a counter to the PPs trying to poke holes in this diet. This is genetics. Mine are skinny and their diet includes way more salt and sugar than this. Genetics.

It’s not that the individual items are, it’s just that it’s a TON of food. Many healthy adults don’t eat that much food in a day.

How do you know that without OP specifying portion size? Soup for dinner and produce for snacks is not a “ton” of food.

Because her DD is obese. Obviously portion sizes are too large.

+1.

This kid is obese!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP. An average day would be:

Breakfast: smoothie (fruit, yogurt, milk, no added sugar), eggs, or overnight oats with peanut butter and half teaspoon of maple syrup
Lunch: whole wheat pasta with mushrooms, garlic, olive oil, and Parmesan or fish with a side of vegetables
Dinner: Tuscan bean soup with a sprinkle of Parmesan or homemade chili with guac and a sprinkle of cheddar

Snacks are almost always fruit or vegetables.

This diet sounds so healthy and delicious. My kids eat like crap compared to OP’s and most of my friends’ kids do, too. I just want to offer a counter to the PPs trying to poke holes in this diet. This is genetics. Mine are skinny and their diet includes way more salt and sugar than this. Genetics.

It’s not that the individual items are, it’s just that it’s a TON of food. Many healthy adults don’t eat that much food in a day.

How do you know that without OP specifying portion size? Soup for dinner and produce for snacks is not a “ton” of food.

Because her DD is obese. Obviously portion sizes are too large.

It’s not as simple as that. It’s often about caloric load and types of foods. Insulin sensitive/resistant people need a very different meal plan.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP. An average day would be:

Breakfast: smoothie (fruit, yogurt, milk, no added sugar), eggs, or overnight oats with peanut butter and half teaspoon of maple syrup
Lunch: whole wheat pasta with mushrooms, garlic, olive oil, and Parmesan or fish with a side of vegetables
Dinner: Tuscan bean soup with a sprinkle of Parmesan or homemade chili with guac and a sprinkle of cheddar

Snacks are almost always fruit or vegetables.

This diet sounds so healthy and delicious. My kids eat like crap compared to OP’s and most of my friends’ kids do, too. I just want to offer a counter to the PPs trying to poke holes in this diet. This is genetics. Mine are skinny and their diet includes way more salt and sugar than this. Genetics.

It’s not that the individual items are, it’s just that it’s a TON of food. Many healthy adults don’t eat that much food in a day.

How do you know that without OP specifying portion size? Soup for dinner and produce for snacks is not a “ton” of food.

Because her DD is obese. Obviously portion sizes are too large.

Anonymous wrote:OP. An average day would be:

Breakfast: smoothie (fruit, yogurt, milk, no added sugar), eggs, or overnight oats with peanut butter and half teaspoon of maple syrup
Lunch: whole wheat pasta with mushrooms, garlic, olive oil, and Parmesan or fish with a side of vegetables
Dinner: Tuscan bean soup with a sprinkle of Parmesan or homemade chili with guac and a sprinkle of cheddar

Snacks are almost always fruit or vegetables.

Change her diet. Go heavier on protein and fat. A lot more fresh veggies that she can munch on and that take up space in her tummy. Work with her genetics.

Do it gradually, small changes a little bit at a time so she does not become self conscious or anxious about weight.

I have a similar aged DD but opposite problem, she has very high metabolism and we have to make conscious effort to ensure she is eating calorie dense foods.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP. An average day would be:

Breakfast: smoothie (fruit, yogurt, milk, no added sugar), eggs, or overnight oats with peanut butter and half teaspoon of maple syrup
Lunch: whole wheat pasta with mushrooms, garlic, olive oil, and Parmesan or fish with a side of vegetables
Dinner: Tuscan bean soup with a sprinkle of Parmesan or homemade chili with guac and a sprinkle of cheddar

Snacks are almost always fruit or vegetables.

This diet sounds so healthy and delicious. My kids eat like crap compared to OP’s and most of my friends’ kids do, too. I just want to offer a counter to the PPs trying to poke holes in this diet. This is genetics. Mine are skinny and their diet includes way more salt and sugar than this. Genetics.

It’s not that the individual items are, it’s just that it’s a TON of food. Many healthy adults don’t eat that much food in a day.

How do you know that without OP specifying portion size? Soup for dinner and produce for snacks is not a “ton” of food.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP. An average day would be:

Breakfast: smoothie (fruit, yogurt, milk, no added sugar), eggs, or overnight oats with peanut butter and half teaspoon of maple syrup
Lunch: whole wheat pasta with mushrooms, garlic, olive oil, and Parmesan or fish with a side of vegetables
Dinner: Tuscan bean soup with a sprinkle of Parmesan or homemade chili with guac and a sprinkle of cheddar

Snacks are almost always fruit or vegetables.

This diet sounds so healthy and delicious. My kids eat like crap compared to OP’s and most of my friends’ kids do, too. I just want to offer a counter to the PPs trying to poke holes in this diet. This is genetics. Mine are skinny and their diet includes way more salt and sugar than this. Genetics.

It’s not that the individual items are, it’s just that it’s a TON of food. Many healthy adults don’t eat that much food in a day.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm from a thin family, so probably not fit to give advice on the subject. But I do notice that when thicker kids come for playdates they eat larger portion sizes. Like the whole blueberry container. Or a bag of grapes that might keep my family for a week is gone in one playdate.

My guess is it's a combo of larger portion sizes plus being genetically prone to a larger body. I would serve smaller portions at meals as well as put snacks in pre-portioned sizes for her to grab.

My bigger kid will indeed eat all of your blueberries and grapes, but believe that she has always had a bigger appetite since infancy. And we’ve pushed fruits and veggies instead of regular carb snacks, so she loves them and eats a ton. Totally fine for her not to clean out YOUR fridge in one afternoon, but just pointing out that often portion size follows the appetite, not the other way around.

Yes, portion size follows appetite and larger bodies have larger appetites.

It's also worth pointing out that, appetite aside, size follows portion size. Larger portions will produce a larger body, and smaller portions will produce a smaller body.

No child, or human in general, is getting fat from blueberries and grapes. The disordered thinking on this site is really something sometimes…

That isn’t what PP is saying. They are pointing out that some people just have very large appetites. So it isn’t just that they will eat all the blueberries and grapes, but also all the potatoes, pasta, rice, cheese, nuts, etc. to a level of too much. There are some foods that anyone can “eat as much as you want” such as blueberries and grapes, and some foods that portion size should be restricted/limited if there is a weight problem happening (starches, junk, high calorie foods). It’s fine to tell your kid they can have as much broccoli and chicken at dinner as they want but no seconds on rice or no thirds

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm from a thin family, so probably not fit to give advice on the subject. But I do notice that when thicker kids come for playdates they eat larger portion sizes. Like the whole blueberry container. Or a bag of grapes that might keep my family for a week is gone in one playdate.

My guess is it's a combo of larger portion sizes plus being genetically prone to a larger body. I would serve smaller portions at meals as well as put snacks in pre-portioned sizes for her to grab.

My bigger kid will indeed eat all of your blueberries and grapes, but believe that she has always had a bigger appetite since infancy. And we’ve pushed fruits and veggies instead of regular carb snacks, so she loves them and eats a ton. Totally fine for her not to clean out YOUR fridge in one afternoon, but just pointing out that often portion size follows the appetite, not the other way around.

Yes, portion size follows appetite and larger bodies have larger appetites.

It's also worth pointing out that, appetite aside, size follows portion size. Larger portions will produce a larger body, and smaller portions will produce a smaller body.

No child, or human in general, is getting fat from blueberries and grapes. The disordered thinking on this site is really something sometimes…

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP. An average day would be:

Breakfast: smoothie (fruit, yogurt, milk, no added sugar), eggs, or overnight oats with peanut butter and half teaspoon of maple syrup
Lunch: whole wheat pasta with mushrooms, garlic, olive oil, and Parmesan or fish with a side of vegetables
Dinner: Tuscan bean soup with a sprinkle of Parmesan or homemade chili with guac and a sprinkle of cheddar

Snacks are almost always fruit or vegetables.

This diet sounds so healthy and delicious. My kids eat like crap compared to OP’s and most of my friends’ kids do, too. I just want to offer a counter to the PPs trying to poke holes in this diet. This is genetics. Mine are skinny and their diet includes way more salt and sugar than this. Genetics.

I am not trying to be disrespectful PP, but let's have an honest discussion:

" It's genetics" is such a lazy answer to everything.

Genetics is almost always a contributing factor. It does not mean that drug addicts, alcoholics,
impulsive abusers, smokers or even students who flunk out of school get a free pass.

We find ways to be the beat the odds. While we may not always succeed, we still have to try. How is telling OP that your skinny kids eat anything helpful here?

Agree, i would be thrilled if my kids ate like OPs!