So you need to help your toddler gain weight? Same, sis. Same. The internet is full of false promises and toddler protein shakes with ingredients like corn maltodextrin, sugar, and canola oil. For the love of tacos, do not feed that to your children.
(I needed a minute to compose myself after I read the ingredients in a very popular nutritional shake. It has four different sweeteners—FOUR.)
My kids’ extra creamy, extra nutty, extra banana-y oatmeal has so many extra calories, I’m not sure I should even lick the spoon—but I do. While “breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” was a slogan invented by a pair of 7th Day Adventists to sell more cereal, at my house breakfast is the most fattening meal of the day. Thus making it the most important.
The twins have been hanging out in the 3rd percentile on the growth chart. While (considering they were born 17 weeks early) that’s a water-into-wine miracle, grape juice will not close the growth gap for us. This is especially true for my Margot, whose short gut doesn’t absorb as much nutrition as we’d like.
A month ago, we went through a two-month period where Margot didn’t gain any weight. There is a special type of anxiety reserved for parents of kids with chronic illness, and mine came back for a long visit during those two months. My stomach turned at the thought that our gastroenterologist here in Florida might try to talk me out of a plant-based diet (he didn’t), so I consulted with a second gastroenterologist who advocates for a plant-based diet. Both our GIs and our pediatrician told me to pile on the fat.*
It had scared me to add too much fat to her diet, thinking it would make her diarrhea worse. It had also freaked me out to give a bunch of nut-butter because, allergies. Turns out, early exposure is the best way to prevent nut allergies, so add that to the list of ways I have failed my children if you’re keeping track.
So here we are, 20 months old (16 months adjusted) and way more interested in dropping food on the floor and saying “uh-oh” than eating it, and I have to figure out how to pump them full of nut butters, seeds, and avocado without them catching on.
The easiest way to do this was to add the fat to the foods they are obsessed with, and by foods they are obsessed with, I mean oatmeal. They eat oatmeal with a kind of rapt attention that I reserve for Hillstone’s kale salad, but who am I to judge a toddler’s palate?
And now, the most fattening bowl of oatmeal I’ve ever made…
I love this recipe because it has a bunch of different textures. My life’s work is to ensure I don’t raise picky eaters (deep, I know), so I’m all about variety in texture and taste.
Recipe makes 3 servings
3 tablespoons of organic, cooked whole oats
2-3 tablespoons of any organic nut butter
1/3 cup of organic, unsweetened coconut
2 tablespoons of MCT oil
1 banana
1/4 teaspoon of organic honey**
Full fat oat milk to taste
We make 4 cups of dry oatmeal at a time at our house since everyone eats it every day, and we reheat the oatmeal in the microwave in the morning for 45 seconds to a minute. It will seem too hot, but it needs to be hot enough to melt the nut butter when you mix that in.
Using a fork, smash everything except the banana, honey, and oat milk.
Dish out your oatmeal and mash half a banana into each bowl. I reserve the honey for days when the girls think they are too busy to eat. The extra sweetness is a re-engagement strategy that I find unnecessary most days. If you think the oatmeal needs to be sweeter, just remember your toddler’s taste buds don’t have 30 years of damage yet, and if you hold off on the honey, maybe they never will. (ouch.)
I had been feeding the twins a variation of this recipe with a higher oatmeal to nut butter ratio. When the doctors said pile on the peanuts, I switched to a 1 to 1 ratio of oatmeal to peanut butter. This and the addition of a high-fat snack (recipe coming soon) were the only changes we made to their diets, and we saw weight gain within two weeks where previously here had been none. So if your little one doesn’t need the extra lbs, but you’re looking for a nutritious breakfast without corn, sugar, and canola oil, you can use less nut butter and more oats.
*We were also dealing with chronic diarrhea due to short gut during that time, so piling on the fat wasn’t the only recommendation our doctors made, but it was the one this blog post is about. As always, consult with your doctor about your kids’ health. It’s not the thing you want to entrust some lady on the internet with.
Where to buy your ingredients:
I was anti-grocery store before the pandemic, the pandemic just made my grocery delivery habit more socially acceptable. We buy all our ingredients (except the bananas and milk) for this recipe from Thrive Market. Use my link for 30% off your first order.
**children under one should not have honey. Consult with your pediatrician