I used to find it kind of amusing that one of the most common questions I would get asked before Ollie was on solids was “Are you going to feed Ollie the same way you eat?”
My response was always the same… “If it isn’t good enough for me to eat, then it sure as heck isn’t good enough for my baby!”
Now that Ollie most definitely is eating, on some days I swear he can out eat my husband which is no mean feat, I can most definitely say that YES, Ollie does indeed eat the same real and nutrient dense food that we eat at every meal.
The beauty of anything concerning your child is that YOU and you alone get to decide what is right for him or her. So please understand that the following is NOT parenting advice, but rather what we as a family have chosen to do based on our understanding of health and how the body functions as well as what are the most nourishing, nutrient dense and non-toxic / gut irritating foods.
When to Start?
Most guidelines recommend waiting until your baby is six months old, although you will often hear in New Zealand from four – six months.
Prior to six months, your baby’s digestive system may not be ready for solid foods. This is because when baby’s are born the cells that line their digestive system are some distance apart, basically like a “leaky gut.” Which means that larger molecules from food can cross the digestive system and enter the blood, which can lead to an increased immune response as well as the possibility of developing allergies.
Your baby also needs to be developmentally ready for food. It’s often suggested that when a baby starts reaching for food that are “ready” for food. I disagree with this in part as Ollie started getting curious about food and wanting to pull things off my plate before he was four months old and he definitely wasn’t ready for food. There are lots of delaying tactics you can use, we found that giving ollie a teaspoon to hold and play with worked pretty well.
I had long decided that I was NOT giving Ollie any food until he was at least six months old based on the above. As it turns out, our children are often our biggest teachers in life and I am no different! In the end Ollie tried his first solids at about five and a half months. This was due to a combination of him being very very hungry and me not feeling like I was keeping up with demand and us deciding that we would introduce a little solid food rather than formula at that stage as he was mostly developmentally ready, with the exception that he couldn’t get himself into a sitting position yet.
Real Food: What Foods First?
“Google” will give you hundreds of thousands of answers if you google this topic… many of them contradicting. Again … you get to choose what you do in conjunction with your health practitioner, your partner and your instincts.
The traditional NZ approach is to start with a combination of pureed cereals or baby rice or pureed vegetables or fruits. There was no way Ollie was getting cereals… (there will be a more detailed blog post on that at some stage soon I’m sure) again if it’s not good enough for us to eat, it’s definitely not good enough for him!
So my suggestion is to definitely ditch the cereals and go straight to some nutrient dense real food.
For us, we started with nutrient dense foods which were going to be easy to Ollie’s digestive system and went from there.
The first foods we started with were: egg yolk (I either fried the egg and took out the egg yolk which would be kind of medium – hard or mixed it with breast milk), other things that we introduced quite early on were avocado, banana (mashed or frozen – great for the teething)! chicken / beef liver (initially pureed with some veggies and then as pate), bone broth (from a teaspoon or a sippy cup).
It’s important to note that what was great for my baby won’t always be fabulous for yours. As a general rule leave a couple of days between each new food to see if there is anything that they don’t tolerate well (or react to completely). Pre solids, Ollie was really spilly when I ate nightshades so I knew that they would be a weak point for us when we started solids, so I held off on introducing them for at least a few months. When I did first introduce potatoes at about 9 months he got really spilly and gassy so we have avoided them again since then and will try again soon. Pureed Apples were another one that also made him really gassy and burpy, so we held off for a few months and then tried again at which point he was fine.
With Ollie we used a mix of handheld and mashed / slightly pureed foods with Ollie. Meat, vegetables, fruits and natural fat sources, salmon was a particular favourite. We basically just let him eat what we ate and would mash some up as well as give him some as finger food. We tried to leave a couple of days between foods so that we could see if he reacted negatively to anything.
NB: As far as packaged baby food went, there has been only one company that I have found that was fully made from real food that didn’t have any apple or potato or any other additives added to them. We love Little Angels Pure Baby Food
Delaying Certain Foods? Personally we choose to introduce a few things that may have been considered to be allergenic like eggs (we only used the yolk, not the white), fish (salmon and white fish) and nut seed butters. Eggs and fish were fantastic, but I just had a bit of a funny sense about the nut butter … no major reaction but he just didn’t seem quite himself. So again I used my intuition and laid off it for a while, I’ll probably try it again soon.
So What Does A Day in the Life of Ollie, my 12 month old look like?
We go with the philosophy that if he is hungry, he gets food. Generally we have breakfast, lunch and dinner with a snack or two. Ollie’s biggest meals seem to be breakfast and dinner at the moment… I think he is filling up after a big sleep and fuelling up for a big sleep.
Some days that is HEAPS and other days it seems like he is eating nothing. I now know that he will regulate his food intake as he needs to.
Here is what Ollie ate yesterday:
Breakfast:
- 2 x duck & orange sausages
- 1 x egg yolk
- 1 x banana fried in coconut oil
- 1/4 avocado
Snack:
- Coconut yoghurt
Lunch:
- 2 x chicken patties with spinach, onion and mushroom
- 1/4 c peas
- 1/2 cooked carrot
- 1/2 small kumara
Snack:
- 1 x pear
Dinner:
- 100 g Salmon cooked in coconut oil
- 2 x brussel sprouts
- 1/2 parsnip made into chips
Note: We went through a stage where Ollie would only eat meat and he would throw all his veggies over the side of his highchair, usually with a big smile on his face when he did it! Whilst part of me wanted to give in and give him foods I knew he would eat (like banana or some fruit) I knew that if he was really hungry he would eat. So I employed my rule of 3… if he throw his food off the high chair 3 times, then that was it, food time over for then. I did try to put a little bit of meat in front of the veggies, which sometimes would mean he ate it and sometimes he would spit out the veggies. I also found that if I pureed the meat and veggies together that he wouldn’t eat it at all… talk about stubborn!
Anyway, the moral of the story is that kids will sometimes refuse a food that they have previously liked. You just have to engage persistence and perseverance and know that if you want them to develop healthy eating habits that the easiest time to start that is right from day one. You are not mean parents for not giving in to your child and giving him / her something that you know he / she will eat… you are parents who care very deeply about the wellbeing of your child and are giving them a great gift in nourishing their bodies.
Some Resources that I have used and got a lot from:
Chris Kresser – Healthy Baby Code
Nourishing Traditions (book)
The Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby & Child Care (book)
Well Adjusted Babies (Book & Website)
Momtastic’s Wholesome Baby Food
Super Nutrition for Babies (book)
Please Note: Not all these resources are 100 % By Design / Paleo. However, I found that they all focused on unprocessed and nutrient dense foods that are well prepared. So I used the resources to integrate what worked with my beliefs and what I felt was right.