feeding my baby

How to Live Aligned with nutritionist And as the mother of a beautiful 10-month-old baby, I don't know if it was the result of chance or that we called each other, but lately in my office there are many mothers who come to ask me questions and advise you about food and nutrition. of your babies

I have decided to explain my personal experience as a mother and as a nutritionist. As you tell me, you feel very identified with me and it is something that you have been asking me for a long time.

My daughter Naiara is 10 months old (as of this publication) and has gone through some intestinal "problems", for example, lactating colic y acute constipationWhich caused me quite a bit of concern. By the way, I don't know if you know, but our future health depends to a large extent on our intestine and its intestinal growth.

Right now Naiara has a totally solid and varied diet, you could say that she almost eats like her parents, but we better start at the beginning...

For medical reasons, I was only able to exclusively breastfeed Naiara until she was 3 and a half months old, despite the fact that it was hard for me to break away from my baby and it was not what I would have liked to do. I had to introduce formula milk. According to some scientific studies, this can be detrimental to the intestinal health of the baby, but it can be alleviated by introducing other foods to complete this diet. Evolutionarily, breastfeeding has been shown to contain a high nutritional value that fully helps the development of the baby. It is useless if when we stop breastfeeding we start feeding him with industrial, processed products, with high sugar content and that contribute little or nothing. We cannot fall into that mistake, because otherwise, everything we will have gained with breastfeeding and natural feeding could be thrown overboard without hardly realizing it.

Starting from these premises, personally, when I started giving him formula milk, I introduced him to the intake of all kinds of fruits at the same time. It is important to know that we should not try to get our children to eat everything if this means suffering for them. Little by little, they will want to try it. At that time they were given crushed to improve chewing and swallowing, but after 6 months everything changed.

From 6 months I began to introduce the technique of Baby Led Weaning (BLW) or Baby Guided Complementary Feeding. And here comes the intricacies of the story… What is this?

As the name indicates, it refers to complementary feeding guided by the baby itself, that is, it complements the breast (or bottle in my case) which will continue to be the main source of energy during the first year of age approximately. With this I do not mean that at 6 months that is the exact age that determines when to start with this technique, the baby himself will be the one who will mark when to start eating solids.

What we have to know is that the baby has to be able to sit without support and without his head falling to the sides. He has to know how to grasp, explore and take the food that is within his reach to his mouth and finally, he has to start chewing with his gums or with his first teeth, in addition to starting the lateral movements of the tongue to move the teeth. food inside the mouth.

Obviously, and as many of you may be thinking, the biggest fear of this technique is if the baby could choke. From my experience I can tell you that it is difficult for it to happen as long as we are at your side at all times and we know how to cut, prepare and present food correctly. This experience cannot be generalized, it will always depend on the baby and how he can assimilate this method.

The incorporation of new foods must be done gradually, slowly and in small quantities, respecting an interval of a few days (between 3 and 5 days, for example) for each new food and observing how it is tolerated. If I said before that one of the drawbacks we can have is the fear of choking, there is a very obvious and clear benefit in the psychomotor development of the baby: the acquisition of manual skills to feed themselves.

I started doing it with some small adaptations, such as cutting the food into small portions inside the vegetable purees so that the amounts I ate were always well balanced. As the months progressed I introduced more foods (legumes, more variety of vegetables...), until today he eats practically our food.

Well, we are going to make an important point, it is a new method, contrary to what we have been taught for years, the traditional method and the guidelines that we have established by pediatricians. This method represents an important change in the approach of parents. In the time we dedicate to feeding with our babies and the attention we give, assuming a great daily effort. We must add having to "fight" with traditionalists such as our beloved mothers, grandmothers and acquaintances, whose phrases par excellence will be: "he's going to be hungry", "how crazy that you give him food without grinding if he doesn't have teeth”, “with purees it is faster to eat everything and it is more complete”, etc.

I can tell you that children who self-regulate tend to prefer healthier foods and in the future they would be less likely to be overweight. Important factor if we know the staggering numbers of overweight and childhood obesity that exist in Spain.

It is extremely important to generate a good relationship around food, with patience and taking the time necessary to avoid resorting to the fast lane of elaborate food. This you can achieve by knowing read product labels and never trust the cover of the product. Remember something: the fewer ingredients a product has, the less processed it is.

Well mommies on my Instagram account @nutritionist_irene I will give you some ideas to be able to start with this type of diet or at least, so that you can see what a healthy diet for children would be like (and adults too of course, only that you will have to eat a little more if you don't bite your nails?).

You have to choose with conscience to raise with conscience.