One of the greatest challenges I’ve been gifted as a mother is having an extremely picky eater. You can read more about our journey with Feeding Therapy (2017-2019) in this post. The other challenge I have been gifted is having that same picky eater also be a Type One Diabetic, and not eating and having diabetes don’t really mix well together.
Some backstory on our picky eating journey.
Having a picky eater can be very anxiety-inducing, especially for a new mother. Our journey with food started in 2017, when my son was only 6 months old. I remember the days when my entire day was spent getting my son (now 4.5) to eat, and by the time we finished one “meal” it was time for the next. After about 2.5 years of stressing and feeding therapy, I was able to finally let go. He was growing and pooping normally, and I finally said, “He’ll eat when he eats, and as long as he’s growing and pooping, it’s fine.”
So for about 1.5 years picky eating became part of our daily life, but it wasn’t consuming my mental capacity anymore.
Now fast-forward to January 2021.
My son, Azi, was diagnosed with Type One Diabetes just after his 4th birthday. If you don’t know, T1D happens to a lovely group of select, special individuals whose pancreases are essentially “dead”. Your body doesn’t product the insulin that it needs to break down sugars, causing extremely high blood sugar, which can be deadly. Diabetics take insulin to help regulate their sugar levels. Now here’s where the trouble comes in. Sometimes, and often for no reason at all, blood sugar levels drop very low, which can also be deadly. Now, when blood sugar goes low there’s no medicine for that. A diabetic needs to eat in order to raise their blood sugar again.
You may now be seeing that diabetes and picky eaters might have a little problem with one another. The biggest being that my 4 year old doesn’t always want to eat when his blood sugar is low, but if he doesn’t it could be very dangerous.
So now we’re back to me worrying about my picky eater and his eating habits all over again, like I did from the very beginning.
Practical tips:
I won’t pretend to be an expert and give you a magic solution to the picky eater’s diabetes dilemma. I can’t because I struggle with this dilemma daily with my son. But I do have a few things I try to do to make the situation a little easier. So I’m going to share those with you.
- For starters, we’ve started talking about food in a different way. We name food groups (proteins, carbs, veggies, fruit, etc) and strongly encourage him to have a variety throughout the day.
- When it’s necessary for him to eat carbs when he has low blood sugar, we give it to him straight. We tell him that it’s not safe for his body when his blood sugar goes low, and that he has to eat carbs/sugar to help it go back up because we want him to be healthy.
- We try to give him his choice of carbs/sugar (2-3) when this situation happens.
- I talk about how mommy and daddy want to keep him healthy. We have this discussion often and openly, but also pretty casually. I don’t want to stress him out about eating and diabetes more than he needs to be.
- We talk about different food groups and how his body needs them all to be the big, strong superhero that he is.
- And when he refuses to eat certain things, I tell him that his body might not feel good if he doesn’t eat the right things.
It’s a really hard line to walk, and it’s an important one. I try my hardest to let him be a normal kid and still make sure that I’m helping him stay healthy. It is extremely tiring. I won’t lie about that. But I do believe that, with time, it will become easier. And I can already see a small difference in the way he eats and the way he’s open to new foods.
I hope some of these tips are helpful to you on all of our journeys in raising healthy, happy and kind humans.
Got any other picky eater tips? Especially ones with diabetics? Drop them in the comments! xo
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