Yes. Your pediatrician won’t bring it up unless it’s really an issue. So listen carefully. He or she looks at the height and weight chart to get your child’s BMI (body mass index), a measure of fatness. Your pediatrician is looking for a change. For example, if your child is in the 80th percentile for BMI, and suddenly there’s a blip and he’s in the 90th or 95th, something has happened. What’s going on? This is especially important if there are any health issues in the family, such as a history of heart disease.
Now the question is what to do about it? Look at what’s going on at home, at your family’s style of eating. Are you eating at the table or just grabbing food on the go? I consider a place mat to be one of your most effective tools. At each family meal, offer your child at least three items—and make sure a fruit or vegetable is always one of them, whether he eats it or not. We think our kids won’t eat any fruits and vegetables, but we tend to give up too easily.
Don’t withhold food at the table, though, and don’t tell your son what he should and should not eat. There’s a time to educate your son about eating habits, but it’s not at the dinner table. Kids need quality time with their parents. When you’re sitting down together to eat, your son needs you more than he needs a lecture about food.
Eileen Behan
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Compassion is what's important here. This can so easily become a life-long issue for your son if it's viewed as a "problem"). I like the last sentence up there, "your son needs you more than he needs a lecture..." I couldn't agree more. What a different world this would be if we were compassionate towards our bodies instead of brutal and punishing.
Children are born with the ability to detect when they are hungry and when they're full. It's up to us to teach them to respect those signals and listen to them.
I know I wish someone had done that for me! I bet a lot of us wish that....:-)
Good luck!!
Something to keep in mind is that BMI charts for children only take age, weight, and gender into account. They don't look at the child's height or body composition. Even if your child is a good 6+ inches taller than most children his age, the fact that he also weighs more than 95% of children his age will point to him being obese, even if his body fat percentage is normal. According to the BMI charts, my 4 year daughter who wears size 7 slim jeans is obese.
My 5 year old nephew rarely eats anything and when he does it's nothing but cookies, ice cream and frosting. Occasionally his mother says he eats cereal. He whines and cries until he gets the food he wants. His mother says he'll eat when he's hungry. I have never seen a vegetable, fruit, mac and cheese, even a burger or egg, or peanut butter and jelly in this child's mouth. We see them often. His mother doesn't seem concerned because he's bright eyed and active. Should someone be worried?
My daughter is a dancer and as a lot of muscle on her and is skinny. She is considered overweight according to BMI. Her doctors are not worried because they know she is active and eats right, not to mention the fact she is a bean pole. I would not worry about it unless he is visibly overweight. BMI charts are controversial anyways because there are so many things they do not count as far as weight goes.
I have an 8 year old daughter.. She is over 120 pounds. About 2 years ago my daughter was barely 50 lbs. She was put on a med for her ADHD and this is when I opened up and saw in a 2 months she gained 20 lbs out of no where. She is was taking off that med that I was thinking was causing her wieght gain. Now for the pass year or so she has gain many pounds along with a throwing up issue. this is not what I am understanding. I am the one who brought it up to her doctor about her weight gain. I asked her back in January I am not understanding why my child is gaining so much weight when she is very active, she barely eats except what she should be eating and she throws up. All the doc did was come back with a smart comments well something was be staying down for her to gain all this weight. BUT Why Is she not Loosing just gaining? Right now I am in the process of looking for a new doctor and hoping I can find some resaults out before she is 10 years old and 300 pounds.
I generally agree with Eileen that the doctor probably wouldn't bring the issue up if he wasn't concerned.
While there is a lot of controversy over body mass index as an accurate indicator of body composition and "fatness", the inaccuracies in BMI tend to be most exaggerated in people who have athletic builds or higher-proportions of lean tissue (like muscle). This is what Kia is talking about with her daughter .
However, most children are not carrying large amounts of muscle around on them, so the problems that are present with BMI in adults are typically not as common in children. In fact, doctors use a different BMI calculation altogether for children.
The Big Picture is right that BMI doesn't do a particularly good job of telling you specifics about a child's actual body composition (percentage of lean tissue to body fat), so it can sometimes be inaccurate. If you are really concerned about the accuracy of the doctor's evaluation, you could always have a body fat analysis done -- either use something like calipers or one of the other more advanced methods.
That said, I would take this concern from the doctor as directional. Many kids will put on a little extra weight only to take it off as they become older. However, I do think it's important to make sure that kids are eating well and avoiding some of the things that can cause them to develop bad habits earlier in life, so that they don't carry those habits into adulthood, where it can cause much bigger issues.
If anyone is interested in learning more about the body mass index (including some of it's flaws), you can check out this article:
http://www.answerfitness.com/217/what-is-bmi-ask-the-fitness-nerd/
Best of luck!
matt
have a look at the goverments new scheme