Healthy Weight Gain Tips For Your CDH Child

When it comes to CDH babies, one of the most frustrating aspects can be weight gain. Many families will bring home their healthy baby, thinking they beat CDH and all is well, only to begin watching them fall off their curve and struggle with eating. We have compiled a list of our top ten tips and tricks to help your child learn to love eating and develop a healthy relationship with food!

1. Rule out underlying issues: Before anything else, it is essential to rule out any medical reasons for the difficulty with eating or weight gain. You will want to look for tongue and lip ties, consider if they have any allergies or reflux, and make sure there aren’t any vitamin deficiencies. If you discover a problem in one of these areas, consider an alternative diet, medicine, or a chiropractor to help. Chiropractors can help with a wide variety of things from, oral aversions to reflux! If oral aversions do seem to be a factor you can check out this blog for more information. 

2. Improve gut health: Gut health is crucial to weight gain. As babies, our Tiny Heroes are on a lot of antibiotics, and that can mess with the gut flora. Consider adding in a good probiotic to help improve gut health. If you feel the gut health could be a large contributing factor, you can talk to your child’s pediatrician about doing a comprehensive metabolic stool sample to check for malabsorption, maldigestion, bacteria overgrowth, and other things.

3. Add healthy fats: Adding healthy fats to the diet can help promote weight gain. Things such as coconut oil, MCT oil, avocado, nut butters, cheese, eggs, and full-fat yogurt are great options! Certain oils can also be added to other preferred food items, such as milk, rice, or mashed potatoes, to add calories. You can also add other fats to preferred foods such as avocado or almond butter on toast or coconut oil over waffles! Fortifying milk with formula can also help up the calorie count for younger babies that haven’t started to eat solids, but definitely talk to the pediatrician before changing your infants diet. 

4. Baby-led weaning: Many CDH babies have oral aversions and do not care for the texture of baby food and/or being spoon-fed. If your baby falls in this category, consider baby-led weaning! It is great and allows your baby (as young as 6 months) to feed him or herself solid foods in a safe and controlled way! 

5. Repeat Exposure: Typical kids need to be offered a new food 10-15 times before they feel comfortable with it, and CDH kids may need even more exposure than this! So keep introducing a wide variety of foods, and one day they may surprise you! 

6. Sensory Play: If you are ever struggling to get your child to eat, try some fun sensory play with food. You can give them whip cream to paint on the shower walls or finger paint in chocolate pudding. Anything to make food fun, and they will probably sneak a few bites while they are at it!

7. Nutritional Shakes: Nutritional shakes and smoothies can be an excellent way to up calorie intake. You can even add healthy fats to them!

8. Reward/Charts: Using charts and rewards can encourage kids to eat a little more. Things such as getting a minute of tablet time for every bite or earning a special prize for a clean plate can be highly motivational for some kids!

9. Appetite Stimulants: If weight becomes enough of a struggle, you may decide to talk to your child’s pediatrician about medicine to stimulate an appetite. This can be a good option; however, there can be side effects, so this should be carefully considered. 

10. Make eating fun: Kids love to have fun. So making eating fun can really help! Click here to find a list of many ways to keep mealtime exciting! 

Above all, just remember that CDH kids are generally small, and that’s okay! As long as your child follows their own curve, has energy, good skin color, and healthy-looking hair/nails, it will be okay! Putting too much emphasis on eating, food, and weight gain could backfire and ultimately create a power struggle. So keep it fun, sneak in calories as you can, give lots of rewards, and trust that it will be okay! Just relax and try not to stress too much!

Check out our 15 Ways to Make Mealtime Fun blog to bring laughter back to the kitchen table!