What can we help with?

Our dietitians have many years of experience in dealing with a wide range of nutrition concerns.

Services

Faltering growth/poor weight gain in babies, children and adults

If your little one is not gaining enough weight or height, or you’re worried that this is the case and would like clarification, it can be very useful to have growth assessed by a paediatric dietitian. Our team have lots of experience working with children experiencing poor growth from infancy, into childhood and adolescence. There is usually a lot we can do to support adequate calorie intake and adequate growth. Seek support sooner rather than later.

For an adult who is struggling to gain or maintain appropriate weight and muscle mass it can feel very difficult and isolating. Come and see us for support with optimising your nutritional intake and improving your wellbeing.

Selective eating

A large proportion of children will experience a phase of fussy or selective eating at some time in their childhood. For some children, this can become a lengthy and problematic phase, affecting growth, nutrition, family relationships and social interaction. For parents and caregivers, having a child that doesn’t eat well, or seems to barely eat all, can be a source of enormous stress. It can feel as though one of your core duties as a parent is not being met. You can feel a huge amount of worry about your child’s health both now and in the future. The daily grind of producing meals and snacks, hoping that your child might eat them, can be totally disheartening and disappointing. Mealtimes can be a battleground, and you might feel as though you’re constantly harassing and prompting your child to eat, and still getting poor results. It is our belief that every family unit can achieve positive mealtime experiences with the right support. Our philosophy is that children will often begin to bloom into natural curiosity about foods once a supportive and positive food environment is created. Removing pressure, coercion and expectation from food experiences is at the heart of our approach. We support caregivers to ensure their child is nutritionally safe (getting adequate calories and protein for growth and weight gain, and meeting needs for micronutrients), while facilitating the journey towards improved family feeding dynamics. We incorporate concepts from Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility in Feeding, the Sequential Oral Sensory (SOS) Approach to Feeding, Sensational Mealtimes, and Basic Needs Theory in Feeding (Jo Cormack). We have substantial experience in supporting the families of children who are on the Autism Spectrum, those with ADHD and children diagnosed with ARFID.

Tube feeding

Some babies, children and adults are unable to consume enough calories and/or fluid orally to meet their nutrition and hydration needs. In this case, they may need to be fed via tube. Our dietitians have extensive experience supporting tube fed people (including babies and children), to ensure appropriate nutrition, feed tolerance, and meet requirements for growth and development or weight maintenance. We have worked with people who have nasogastric tubes, those with gastrostomies, and those who are fed jejunally. We have worked with many children and adults with disabilities and we’re aware of the varied needs and presentations of people with disabilities, and the importance of realistic and practical support for the families of people with disabilities.

Weight Concern

We live in a world that is consumed by diet culture and the “thin ideal”. We are told that there is only one type of body that is acceptable – a thin body. Parents and caregivers are often made to feel that their larger child’s body is somehow “wrong” or “unhealthy”. Adults and children in larger bodies are often subjected to weight stigma, bullying and discrimination, which can negatively affect their health over the longer term. The experience of weight stigma and the constant pressure to conform to beauty standards can lead to a strong desire to shrink the body using calorie restriction and dieting, which often leads to short term weight loss, followed by longer term weight re-gain (and often additional weight is gained from the original weight). This is called diet or weight cycling, or yo-yo dieting and has a negative effect on health and wellbeing – both physical and mental.

The truth is that size diversity is a normal and expected phenomenon. We’re not all supposed to look the same and fit within a narrow BMI category. It is absolutely possible to be healthy and well in a larger body. We are able to offer support to both children and adults who are living with weight concern, or have a difficult relationship with food and their body. We work in a weight-neutral framework and aim to support people to find peace and freedom in their relationship with food.

Suspected or diagnosed food allergies or intolerances

If you or your little one suffers unpleasant reactions to foods, it can be helpful to navigate this with the help of a dietitian. Exploring food allergies/intolerances/sensitivities is a complex task and some people may need to exclude core foods from their diet. In these cases a dietitian is able to support the exploration phase, and help you to discover what you or your child reacts to (this sometimes also requires referral to an allergy specialist doctor). A dietitian can also support you to ensure your child continues to grow well and that you or your child are meeting nutritional requirements in the context of food exclusions. In some cases a baby has been diagnosed early in life with food allergies and caregivers require support to reintroduce the allergen safely. A dietitian is an important part of the team for a child or adult with food allergies and intolerances.

Coeliac Disease

A new diagnosis of Coeliac Disease can feel overwhelming. It can make the supermarket feel like a whole new world of stressful decision making. It can take some time to learn to identify which foods contain gluten and safely navigate food labels, cooking new recipes, and supporting your child in their care setting, to ensure that you or your child are eating safe foods. A dietitian can assist in educating you, your child and your family members about Coeliac Disease, and how to navigate the world of gluten-free foods with confidence.

Support with introducing solid foods to your baby

Do you feel a little bit worried or confused about how to introduce solid foods to your baby? Are you receiving contradictory information from friends, family and health professionals about when to start, what to start with and how to progress? Are you wondering whether baby-led weaning is best for you, or whether you should follow a more traditional approach? Come in for a session with one of our dietitians to map out a clear plan for introduction of solids. This should be a fun, exciting experience, and seeking support from an experienced dietitian can help to take the stress and uncertainty out of it.

Nutrition information for your family

The world of nutrition information can be confusing and contradictory. There is so much information available via the internet and it can be hard to know what’s best for you and your family. It can be easy to get bogged down in worrying about the latest fad diet, or the inconsistent information you’ve received about diet from friends, family members and even health professionals. If you’d like some advice about how best to feed your family, from an evidence-based perspective, please come and see one of our dietitians for a chat.

Working with adults

We are able to accept a full caseload of adult patients. We can support people with type two diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, food intolerances, eating disorders, Coeliac Disease, people requiring tube feeding, and any other nutritional concerns. We are particularly keen to support adults who are interested in working in a weight-neutral framework. This means that we work on behaviour change in areas such as regularity and adequacy of dietary intake, nutritional quality of diet, becoming more attuned to body signals such as hunger and fullness, and supporting joyful movement. There is no focus on weight loss as a goal or outcome of our work. We are able to support adults with eating disorders, disordered eating and body image concerns. If you’d like to feel more at home in your body, stop thinking about food incessantly, and feel a sense of freedom and peace around food and your body, please get in touch.