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What do you do when you’re just not hungry?
I eat a big breakfast every morning. Lately it’s been an egg and cheese sandwich on sourdough bread slathered in ghee with a mix of salted coconut water and kombucha. SO FILLING!
But then I don’t really want to eat again until mid-late afternoon. I will get busy with my day and just forget to eat. Plus I’m just not hungry. Then in the evenings I’ll eat lots for dinner and ice cream.
This is a huge concern for my 13 year old daughter. She has ADD and we’ve been doing sort of a modified GAPS diet. Basically no grains and making sure she eats at least one egg and some bone broth every day. Grains are a huge trigger for her. The problem is that she always says she just isn’t hungry. What do I do?
In a word: sugar. Obviously, I don’t know what will work for you or your daughter. But sugar helped me tremendously. Eating moderate amounts of easy-to-digest sugar frequently helped me to increase appetite. Sugar can be any form of concentrated sugar that works for you – cane sugar, honey, various syrups, etc.
Also, I found that when I started focusing on eating much more frequently eating easy-to-digest foods in moderate amounts, I started being able to eat more and more often with less trouble. Play around with different foods and see what works for you. For me I found that milk, gelatin, and sugar are the easiest for me to digest. So I focused on eating those things often – as often as every half hour. And soon enough, my previous digestive sluggishness was a thing of the past. Of course I am not sugggesting that anyone should live exclusively on milk, sugar, and gelatin…but these sorts of easy-to-digest foods eaten frequently increased my ability to eat more. So I would maybe start my day with a pint of sugar and milk (I use LOTS of sugar – maybe half a cup for a pint of milk) with a tablespoon of gelatin and some salt. Then I would eat a moderate meal half an hour later. Then I’d eat a few tablespoons of honey half an hour later. Then more milk and sugar. Then another meal. Etc.
Basically, by increasing calories from easy-to-digest sources I increased my metabolism, which started healing all the myriad of digestive problems I had previously. So if my own story is instructive at all then the moral of the story is: eat often and eat lots of extremely easy to digest food. In my own case that has meant emphasizing sugars.
My digestion is ok but I’ll try to add more sugar to my breakfast. Hopefully that will make me want to eat more earlier.
As for my daughter, that makes sense, giving her easy to digest sugars. She doesn’t like smoothies, probably because I put too much kefir or yogurt in them, so it makes sense to lay off the sour stuff and just do milk,fruit, coconut oil, and honey or maple syrup. Because this is a liquid would it be too “cooling”? I can barely get her to eat an egg in the morning! I’ve also tried having her take a teaspoon of sauerkraut juice, which is supposed to stimulate digestion, but she hates it.
When I say that grains are a trigger for her, it’s not that she has obvious digestive issues (or nothing that she will tell me about) it’s that her ADD symptoms just get out of control. She’s 13 and can’t stand still to talk to me; she sways around like a drunk person. She trips over things, breaks things, can’t concentrate on doing a task well, gets bored easily and annoys her sisters just to be a pest, and basically drives me and everyone in the house crazy. So we started doing full GAPS and her issues got a little better, but then her appetite started to wane A LOT and now even without grains her symptoms are bad. I haven’t taken her temperature but I probably should.
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