"Any lunch suggestions? Run out of ideas!!" A post from April 11th 2010 on the ATDT parents' forum.

What follows is a short thread I posted on the Around The Dinner Table Forum in early April 2010 asking the question: "Any lunch suggestions? Run out of ideas!!" Unsurprisingly I was finding it mega difficult to get my son to eat using Eating Plan 6 which CAMHS had given me. It was full of all kinds of stuff that he wouldn't have touched with a barge pole: sponge pudding, custard, butter, cheese... The only things I could get him to eat were from his minuscule list of 'healthy' foods like diet this and that, vegetables and fruit. As a result, getting my son to eat enough calories meant getting him to eat a HUGE VOLUME of this low calorie stuff and by the 11th April, around 4 or 5 weeks into CAMHS treatment for his eating disorder, I had run out of ideas.

You know what it's like when you're mega limited to what they will eat and yet you have to pump up the calorie content. Lunch is a particular sticking point with us... what to put in the sandwich or on toast. Even better, how can I secretly sneak in extra calories? (Suggesting butter is no good as he refuses to eat spread of any kind. Or cheese. Or fatty meats. Or anything fried.)

So I thought I'd start a thread on imaginative high calorie lunch suggestions to expand our repertoire... After yet another fight at breakfast I decided to add up his fats (instead of just calories) and found that even on a quite a high fat day like today (with my super-duper chuck-it-all-in shepherd’s pie!!!!) he is still only having 59g fat of which 21g are saturates. Here in the UK the government recommends an adult male eating 2500 calories needs 95g fat of which 30g are saturates.

But even with the facts in front of him, he (or, rather, the eating disorder) still argues that black is white...

Evening meals are a great way to pump up the fat content, especially things like shepherd’s pie, casseroles and lasagnes - it's just lunch that's a problem. What will he do, I wonder, when I brandish the peanut butter??

This post sounds fairly positive. But it was before my son became ultra-vigilant on what I was cooking and how I was cooking it. More critically, it was before my son was given back control over his food intake during the day. I dealt with the evening meal; he dealt with the rest of the day.

This, of course, was to increase what was already a massive pressure to bump up the calories in evening meals to compensate for the calories he was no longer consuming during the day.

And - with risk of appearing selfish and taking the focus off my son for a moment - it meant that I also had to consume these mammoth evening meals because no way was he going to allow me to consume a grain or rice less than him.

He even insisted on weighing out our portions before the meal to check that I wasn't getting any less than him.

Which, of course, meant that I quickly put on weight (and have never lost it!).

You might ask why I allowed him to control and dominate proceedings in the way that I did?

Well, that is a blog post entirely of its own...

You might also ask why I was getting bogged down in calories and fat content? That's another topic, too.