Percentiles
So I may have mentioned that Hunter is going in to see a Pediatrician about his growth at the end of July.
I've been tracking his meals, as I imagine that nutrition will pretty much invariably come up and in case she wants to have some clear idea, I'd rather bypass spending another month doing it and do it now and have something concrete to show her at the first appointment. Followups are a pain.
I used the BMI calculator from the USDA Children's Nutrition Research Center at Baylor Medical (here): A 39-inch tall, 35-pound, 5-year-old boy has a body mass index (BMI) of 16.2, which is at the 73rd percentile for age. This suggests that this boy is at a healthy weight. A healthy weight range for this particular boy would be from about 31-pounds to 36-pounds.
A 5 year old should be getting anywhere between 1300 to 1800 calories a day on average and up to 2300 during a grow spurt (from here). So far, with fairly conservative estimating, he seems to take in around 800 calories a day for the past two days but we've been sparse on snack food and focused more on three solid meals a day. I have an entry from back in December and he probably took in 800 at one dinner alone. I can't/don't monitor every single thing he eats at the moment, as he has a shelf in the fridge that he knows he can help himself to whenever he wants and oft does when he's upstairs watching TV or I'm in the shower or otherwise occupied.
I am tempted to invest in something like this:
Because there's essentially a section for each food group and I think it would help us both to eat better if we knew we just had to fill each with something from each group.
That's about all I got at the moment.
I've been tracking his meals, as I imagine that nutrition will pretty much invariably come up and in case she wants to have some clear idea, I'd rather bypass spending another month doing it and do it now and have something concrete to show her at the first appointment. Followups are a pain.
I used the BMI calculator from the USDA Children's Nutrition Research Center at Baylor Medical (here): A 39-inch tall, 35-pound, 5-year-old boy has a body mass index (BMI) of 16.2, which is at the 73rd percentile for age. This suggests that this boy is at a healthy weight. A healthy weight range for this particular boy would be from about 31-pounds to 36-pounds.
A 5 year old should be getting anywhere between 1300 to 1800 calories a day on average and up to 2300 during a grow spurt (from here). So far, with fairly conservative estimating, he seems to take in around 800 calories a day for the past two days but we've been sparse on snack food and focused more on three solid meals a day. I have an entry from back in December and he probably took in 800 at one dinner alone. I can't/don't monitor every single thing he eats at the moment, as he has a shelf in the fridge that he knows he can help himself to whenever he wants and oft does when he's upstairs watching TV or I'm in the shower or otherwise occupied.
I am tempted to invest in something like this:
Because there's essentially a section for each food group and I think it would help us both to eat better if we knew we just had to fill each with something from each group.
That's about all I got at the moment.