Katie Ferraro (0s):

We never want to like finish off a meal with the food that we know the baby will eat. So just conditioning the baby to not eat the FIRST FOODS and wait until the fruit shows up instead, consider taking a Fruit Vacation. You go a couple of meals or a couple of days with no fruit. Hey there. I'm Katie Ferraro Registered Dietitian college nutrition professor and mom of seven specializing in baby-led weaning here on the baby-led weaning made easy podcast. I help you strip out all of the noise and nonsense about feeding, leaving you with the competence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby-ledbaby-led weaning.

Katie Ferraro (41s):

Well, Hey there, and welcome back. Today's mini baby-led weaning training episode is today. Talk a little bit about those babies who overly favor fruit. Hey, this is an episode about a concept known as the Fruit Vacation, and it's just a little tweak that you can do. If you're starting to get worried that your baby might be eating too much fruit. Now I do not in any way, want to denigrate fruit. We're talking about all of the beneficial components of fruit and it's a wonderful food, but sometimes parents get in a rut where the only foods that are offering is fruit. So hang tight. I'm going to be sharing some tips on what you can do. If you think your baby might be overly favoring fruit.

Katie Ferraro (1m 24s):

I like to start each of these mini baby-led weaning training episodes with a BLW tip of the day. And this one is your baby is not going to develop an affinity for sweet foods. If you offer them fruit, because some parents get confused, they hear like, oh, you should do vegetables before fruit, because if you do fruit, then your baby will never eat vegetables. That's not true. And I, I know some parents are like really scared of the sweet taste, but I hate to break it to you. Your baby has already tasted sweet tastes, right? Have you ever tasted breast milk or formula? It's a little bit on the sweeter side, pay the primary sugar in their milk, sugar called lactose. It's sweet. Like this is not the first time your baby has had something sweet when they have fruit.

Katie Ferraro (2m 7s):

But what happens is sometimes parents are like all gung-ho with like falling my five step feeding framework, they do a fruit and then a vegetable the next day. Then they do a starch the next day, a protein food and an allergenic food. And maybe they do that for one or two weeks. And they either stopped going through the a hundred FIRST FOODS list or they stop working in new foods. And then they, I don't know, I didn't have any vegetables around, or I didn't feel like cooking meat or couldn't really find any whole grains or wasn't sure what allergenic food to do. So all they're left with is fruit. And I'll see these pictures of plates that babies are being offered that have like two, sometimes even three different types of fruit, which is not the end of the world with that happens once in a while.

Katie Ferraro (2m 47s):

But if all the baby is seeing his fruit, then all the baby's going to know how to eat is fruit. Kind of reminds me of, I teach nutrition to our nurse practitioner, students at the university of San Diego, where I live and we doing a pediatrics component recently. And the pediatric nurse practitioners are saying, my parents in the office are complaining that all their kids do is eat. McDonald's. It was like, okay, well, are these 10 year old children driving themselves through the drive, through at McDonald's? Or do the parents maybe have something to do with it? Not shaming. Anyone who relies on fast food on occasion, we all do it. Okay. But like, it's the parents who are facilitating the fast food. That's the honest truth.

Katie Ferraro (3m 28s):

Same thing goes with fruit. When parents tell me, oh, all my baby eats is fruit. If it will, if all your baby is seeing is fruit, then maybe all they're eating is fruit. So we just need to go back to basics, which is offering babies of variety of food. So let's talk about overly favoring fruit. And again, there's no problems with fruit. If you're, this is new to you. And you're like, wait a minute. I had no idea that babies were allowed to eat fruit, or I thought offering fruit would make them like crave sweet foods, go back and listen to episode 23, it's called will offering fruit before vegetables, make your baby crave sweet foods. Summarize it for you. The answer is no. And then parents like, okay, I'll do fruit. If you're kind of going in the other direction where all your baby wants is fruit.

Katie Ferraro (4m 10s):

Let's talk about taking a Fruit Vacation. So Fruit Vacation is a not so innovative term that I coined a number of years ago, started with my son Gussie. So I have seven kids, a Singleton, a set of quadruplets, and then a set of twins. So I started the a hundred FIRST FOODS program when I was doing baby-led weaning with my quads when they were a year and a half old, I had my twins. I revised the a hundred FIRST FOODS program with them following my five-step feeding framework, which is how you get your baby through the hundred FIRST FOODS on my a hundred FIRST FOODS list. And if you don't have the a hundred FIRST FOODS list, you can get it on my free weekly workshop that I teach. It's called baby LED WEANING FOR BEGINNERS. It's all about how to get your baby to eat 100 foods before turning one, without you having to spoonfeed purees or buy pouches.

Katie Ferraro (4m 54s):

So you can sign up for this week's workshop times and grab your copy of the a hundred FIRST FOODS list. If you go to babyledweaning.co so back to gussy, we're working our way through five new foods a week. And I always do fruit on Monday. It doesn't really matter, but if you're following that framework, we did fruit on Monday and my twins are Gus and Hannah. And even those of you guys with multiples know, like with baby led weaning, one starts out a little bit stronger than other than sometimes they flip flops like between the used to eat great is not eating so great. And the one that used to not eat great is, and for a while, Gus, he was eating super strong, better than his sister Hannah. And then like kind of flipped a switch and he wouldn't eat whatever the new foods were. And he would start getting fussy and crying. And what we realized was if he could see the fruit bowl with the bananas in it, he would freak out and not eat the food that I had in front of him.

Katie Ferraro (5m 41s):

Like this kid loves bananas to this day. He's three years old. His favorite color is yellow. His favorite food is bananas. And I was like, I knew it from when he was six months old. If the fruit bowl were in the line of sight, he wouldn't eat the other foods. So it was just like out of sight. Out of mind, some babies are like that, right? You probably realize that with your baby. If you're practicing, like with the tiny cup, the open cup from Ebaby-ledzpz that Dawn Winkleman who's been on the podcast, a lot design. We want to practice open cup drinking with babies as early as six months of age. But some babies, when they see the cup, then they want nothing to do with the food. It's like, we know your baby can drink out of a bottle. I know your baby knows how to drink. We're focusing. And baby-led weaning on helping your baby learn how to eat. So I put the five minutes of open cup training after the food.

Katie Ferraro (6m 23s):

And I don't even let the baby see the cup until the end, because sometimes it distracts them from eating the food. The same thing goes with fruit. Now we also talk about in baby-led weaning the importance of not withholding or dripping food. Okay? You want to have your baby, have the opportunity to have that visual stimulus of the entirety of the plate of food that you anticipate they might eat. Okay. You know, we're never exactly perfect. Sometimes they're going eat more, not all of it, but we want to refrain from dripping food. So dripping food is this idea of putting one piece of food out and waiting until the baby finishes it. And then putting another piece of food out in wait until the baby finishes. It that's dripping. And we want to stay away from that because we're interfering with our babies feedback loop of them, being able to see the food on the plate, pick up the food with their hand, put it in their mouth and then analyze over time.

Katie Ferraro (7m 12s):

How does that make them feel i.e. Less hungry? And that's the point of eating, but if we're never allowing them to see how much food is out there, they're not able to future pace and visualize and pace themselves appropriately. So if you don't know anything about dripping episode, 133 is called don't drip food. And it's about how to pre-portion your plate for baby-led weaning. So sometimes with fruit parents will be like, well, if the fruits on the plate, that's all my baby will eat. So the solution there is not wait until the end of the meal to offer your baby fruit because babies are smart, right? All they do in that case is get conditioned to just not eat what you put in front of them knowing, oh, she's totally going to bring me strawberries. Or she knows I'm in the blueberries right now. And she's just going to bring them to me.

Katie Ferraro (7m 53s):

So we never want to like finish off a meal with the food that we know the baby will eat. Cause we're just conditioning the baby to not eat the FIRST FOODS. And wait until the fruit shows up instead, consider taking a Fruit Vacation. A Fruit Vacation is exactly what it sounds like. You go a couple of meals or a couple of days with no fruit. And it literally had parents been like, are you serious? My baby will die. It's like, no, I'm pretty sure baby's not going to die. There are documented cases of babies going days without fruit and not dying. I know fruit is easy to feed our babies. And sometimes it's just easier to peel a piece of fruit than the cooked vegetables. Sometimes I get that, but it is very important that we're offering babies the same number of vegetable exposures as we do fruit exposures.

Katie Ferraro (8m 36s):

So I would challenge you for every, if you're going through the a hundred FIRST FOODS list, there's five food categories. One is fruit and one is vegetables. The other three are the starchy foods, the protein foods and the allergenic foods in the challenge category offer as many vegetable offerings each week. As you do fruits, if you follow that five-step feeding framework that I teach inside of the baby LED WEANING FOR BEGINNERS workshop. You'll automatically be offering as many vegetables as you are fruits. You'll have 20 different vegetables that you can kind of use to balance out. I don't want to say counteract, but balance out the fruit. And so when we talk about balancing your baby's plate, sometimes parents feel obligated to put fruit and vegetable on the plate. And I want to discourage you from doing that.

Katie Ferraro (9m 18s):

I think it's important to have fruit or vegetable on the plate, but not fruit and vegetable EzPz makes the original silicone suction mats and bowls. And there are many mat is perfect for maybe six months of age and up. And it has two, two ounce portions and one, four ounce pocket. Okay. I don't care about the portion sizes, cause there's no such thing as set portion sizes for babies, but I just want to emphasize that there's two smaller components and then one larger one. And I generally will put the starchier, the carbohydrate food in the larger component. So we offer a slightly larger portion of that because babies needs slightly greater percentage of their calories from carb than from fat or protein. And then in the two smaller components, I'll do a serving of fruit or vegetable and then the other component, a small serving of protein, but you don't need to do fruit and vegetable.

Katie Ferraro (10m 1s):

Cause what you do is we generally don't want to do more than three foods on the plate that can be very overwhelming to the baby. And if you're doing fruit and vegetable, it means you're crowding out one of the other important food categories. If you want to learn more about this kind of balancing act on the mini mat, I have episode 45, it's called how to balance your baby's BLW plate. That goes into more detail about that concept. I just kind of went through it really quickly. And if you're looking to get an EzPz, mini Matt, I'm an affiliate for them. And my discount code, Katie10 always works for 10% off at ezpzfun.com. And again, it's the mini-map make sure you're not getting the happy Matt happy. Matt is from much bigger kids.

Katie Ferraro (10m 42s):

It doesn't fit on Hydra trays in the portion. Pockets are way too big for babies. It's the mini mat that has the three components, but you can also use their tiny bowl or their mini bowl if you're starting baby-led weaning. So for the Fruit Vacation, the concept is take a couple of days, break from fruit, okay. Offer vegetable in that smaller pocket, you can do vegetables for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. You can do the same vegetable a couple of days in a row. We generally don't want to get in the habit of offering any one food at every single meal or every day. Cause the baby again, will be conditioned to expect that, but there's certainly nothing wrong with taking a couple days break, getting yourself back into the habit of trying new vegetables, right? Go through that a hundred FIRST FOODS list, okay.

Katie Ferraro (11m 25s):

In the vegetables category and see how many of those foods your baby has had, whichever ones are in season or you can get affordably. They're all possible to make it safe for baby-led weaning and get back in the habit of offering your baby these foods. And I know sometimes we get stuck on the bitter vegetables. There's quite a few bitter vegetables on my hundred FIRST FOODS list. Go back and listen to episode 155, it's called bitter vegetables. How to safely offer bitter vegetables for baby-led weaning. And I think you'll find some in there for really mixing up the flavors so that we're not just always offering the sweeter foods, which are fruit. And again, there's nothing wrong with fruit, right? Fruit and vegetables contain important flavor compounds, important nutrition, fruits, and vegetables have vitamin C, which helps the baby absorb iron from the other foods.

Katie Ferraro (12m 13s):

So lots of reasons to feed fruit. But if you have a feeling that your babies love and it just like a little too much, don't be scared to take a Fruit Vacation. All right. So that's it for today's episode, I'll link up all the different episodes that I mentioned as well as a link where you can sign up for that free workshop and grab my hundred FIRST FOODS list. You can do that directly at babyledweaning.co. Or if you go to the show notes page for this episode, that's where all of the other resources will be linked. That's BLW podcasts.com/209. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time.