Katie Ferraro (0s):

So, if we're looking at the composition of the meal that we're offering the baby, no more than three foods tops that can totally be overwhelming to a baby. We do a small portion of protein, a small portion of fruit or vegetable. And then the larger component is made up of the starchy or the carbohydrate food. Hey, there I'm Katie Ferraro, registered dietitian, college nutrition professor and mama of seven specializing in baby-led weaning. You're 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-led weaning.

Katie Ferraro (44s):

Welcome back to another episode of the baby-led weaning made easy podcast. I'm your host, Katie Ferraro. This is a podcast all about baby-led weaning, which sometimes gets abbreviated BLW. So today's episode, I'm going to show you how to balance your baby's BLW plate, because parents will be like, yeah, I like the idea of my baby learning how to feed himself or herself early on. It helps prevent picky eating. I'm going to raise an independent eater, but what should actually be on the plate? As far as the food goes that I serve my baby. That's what I'm going to talk about today. As I like to do with every episode, I want to start you off with a bab- led weaning tip of the day. You guys, you do not have to offer three different foods two or three times every day for baby-led weaning in order to achieve variety.

Katie Ferraro (1m 31s):

I get messages all the time from parents are like, are you serious? Like six or nine different foods in one day? There's no way. No, no, no, no, no. Hang tight. In today's episode, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about what should be on the plate, but how you can continue to introduce one new food per day, while at the same time, continuing to expose your baby to the familiar foods from previous days in an effort to offer a variety of foods to your baby and to do so early and often. So let's go ahead and get started. This is all about how to balance your baby's BLW plate. Now some people say, wait a minute, babies eat off of plates. I thought we just put the food directly on the tray or on the table.

Katie Ferraro (2m 12s):

And no, we definitely do not want to do that. Okay. I have a whole blog post all about why we feed off of a plate and a bowl, as opposed to the tray or the table. I'm going to link to that in the show notes for today's episode, if you want to read the benefits of feeding out of a bowl or a plate, but the long and the short of it is it helps promote independent eating. So that blog posts I'll link up at the show notes for this episode, which is blwpodcast.com/45. The number four or five that'll take you. You can read more about the plates. The plates that I like to use for baby led weaning is from a company called ezpz, the original silicone suction mats and bowls that adhere to the table where you're eating.

Katie Ferraro (2m 52s):

If it's dry and flat, the suction under the table, which helps stabilize the baby as they go to scoop and rake food up and out of the bowl, right? Cause at six and seven months of age, your baby doesn't have their pincer grasp yet. They're using their palmer grasp in order to scoop or rake food. And we want to facilitate the baby's ability to self feed. If we put all the food on the trader that table, they just smash it around, push it to the sides. They're not able to scoop or rake it up. They get frustrated. Parents are like, this is silly babies can't feed themselves. They can, we just need to provide them with the right tools. So, I like a product called the mini mat from ezpz. You go to ezpzfun.com. You can check this mat out. If you use the code, Katie 10, you can get 10% off everything at ezpz fund.

Katie Ferraro (3m 36s):

It'll say for nine months up, but it's perfectly safe to use for a six-month old baby. And for those of you guys that are familiar with my five step feeding framework, we introduced one new food per day to a baby. So five days a week, we do a new food Monday, a new fruit, Tuesday, a new vegetable, Wednesday, a new starch, Thursday, a new protein, and then Friday do a food from the challenge category. That includes the big eight allergenic foods plus Sesame, which I just did a podcast episode on that that's episode 43. If you need to learn how to feed your baby Sesame safely. But the challenge category also contains some of the trickier textures and the more complex flavor profiles. Now it's perfectly safe to introduce one new low risk food per day. And parents will say, well, do you only feed that one food in a day?

Katie Ferraro (4m 17s):

And the answer is no. What I like to do is a baby can eat and sit in the high chair for about 15 or 20 minutes. So let's say a feed is 20 minutes long. You're in your first week of baby led weaning. Okay. And let's say you're starting with the simple starter foods, avocado banana and sweet potato. What I like to do is I like to spend the first 10 minutes of the meals serving the baby, just the new food of the day. If it's Wednesday of the first week, we do sweet potato. Okay, nice soft strips of sweet potato cut about the size of your pinky finger or a French fry. The baby can play around with trying to eat the sweet potato. They're very new at eating. Don't freak out if they don't eat very much, right? Because breast milk or formula remains your baby's primary source of nutrition for the first few weeks and months of baby-led weaning.

Katie Ferraro (5m 2s):

So don't stress. If you're not eating that much, remember they have to learn how to eat before they can start increasing the amount of food they eat, decreasing the amount of milk they drink. That's the point of weaning, right? Our babies don't wake up on their six month birthday magically knowing how to eat all these foods. That's why we give them the opportunity to practice. So back to the 20 minute meal, I'll spend the first 10 minutes of the meal. I like to serve the single isolated food in a bowl. So ezpz makes a tiny bowl and a mini bowl, they're both fabulous for introducing new foods. The tiny bowl is a little bit smaller. It's a five ounce portion. So I put maybe French fry shaped strips of the soft sweet potato in there and give the baby 10 minutes to explore the food. Don't wipe the baby's mouth off. Don't talk to the baby.

Katie Ferraro (5m 42s):

Don't have the dog there. Really allow the baby 10 minutes to just explore this food on their own. You're sitting there, you're observing the baby watching for any potential choking incidents, but the babies go into town on the sweet potatoes. They're going to smash it and smell it and put it in their hair. Some of it might end up in their mouth. I'll do that for 10 minutes. The second 10 minutes of the meal. I mentioned the bowl, sorry, for the first 10 minutes I do the tiny bowl, which is five ounces. The mini bowl is also an eight ounce bowl from ezpz and it has a square footprint. Depends what shape your highchair tray is. If you're using a tray or if you can pull your baby up to the table in the chair and have them put the mat or the bowl on the table and have the baby eat out of there with the rest of the family is a nice feature of baby-led weaning as well.

Katie Ferraro (6m 23s):

So I'll do the first 10 minutes of that food by itself in the tiny bowl or the mini bowl. And then for the second 10 minutes of the meal, what I'll do is I'll swap in a mini mat. Now the mini mat has three compartments. So there's three different foods on the mini mat. And what I'll put in the mini mat is sweet potato, which is the new food of the day. This is their second exposure, right? The second 10 minutes of that 20 minute meal. And then the other two compartments, I will put a previous day's food and another previous day's food. So if it's day three and they've had avocado on day one banana on day two and sweet potato on day three for the second 10 minutes of the 20 minute meal that mat, the ezpz mini-mat will have three foods in it, sweet potato, and then two familiar foods from the day before now, as you move your baby through a few weeks of baby-led weaning, you're getting five, 10, 15 new foods.

Katie Ferraro (7m 6s):

You're doing a new food every day. The second 10 minutes of that meal do a traditional quote-unquote meal with three foods in it. We never want to feed our babies more than three foods. I'll tell you guys a quick story. I spent a lot of time on social media doing baby-led weaning, and as a registered dietitian specially in this area, I see a lot of not so great content out there. And I saw it actually, it was another registered dietitian, which was unfortunate posting pictures of a mini mat that had seven different food's on it. Here's what my baby ate today. I was like, first of all, this was the massive amount of food that certainly, some babies might one day eat that much food, but completely overwhelming to the baby. There was seven different foods. First of all, what parent on the planet has time to make seven different wholesome, whole homemade from scratch recipes for your baby.

Katie Ferraro (7m 53s):

But also that's incredibly overwhelming to the baby to be trying all those different textures and the colors and the flavors. And then parents just feel like, oh my gosh, I'm so inadequate. I'm only feeding my baby two or three different foods. I say three new three different foods, tops per meal. And if you don't have the effort or the energy to make three types of food, every meal, that's fine too. I think especially for breakfast, I sometimes find it challenging to come up with three different foods. However, more often than not, I aim for about three foods. So explain how I split the 20 minutes with the first 10 minutes being the new food. The second 10 minutes being a mini-mat with two familiar foods and one new food. Now, what do you do? Do you put three different fruits? We tried, let's say it's week five. We've tried five new fruits.

Katie Ferraro (8m 34s):

Do I make the meal three different fruits? No, we like to have a balance and you don't have to do this, but I think it's a good idea to get in the habit, of offering your baby. Let's say we're using the mini-mat. The mini-mat has three compartments, is make like a smiley face. If you guys go to ezpzfun.com, you can see the mat that I'm talking about. It has, the eyes are two ounce portions. And then the smile is a four ounce portion. Parents say, well, that's bigger than the two ounce ones. What should go in the bigger portion? My recommendation is that you should always put the starchy or the carbohydrate food in the smile portion of the ezpz mini-mat. It's a visual reminder to us that most of our babies calorie needs, the majority should come from carbohydrates, not refined white crappy carbs, like goldfish crackers, which on occasion, those are fine to feed, but we're talking about sweet potatoes or some of the different whole grains that are in the starchy foods category, or we're talking about, you can do regular potatoes, you can do pasta, you can do rice.

Katie Ferraro (9m 32s):

We want to have a mix of whole grains in there as well. But those are the starchy carbohydrate foods, which your baby is growing rapidly during the second six months of life. And you can think of carbohydrate as the fuel that basically drives your baby's body, the car. Okay. And so carbohydrates should make up the majority of your baby's calories. Now. Not all of them though. Okay. We don't want to get in the habit of just serving soft carb foods to our babies. So that's why the other two components, I recommend splitting it between a small portion of protein. And then the other component is a small portion of fruit or vegetable. So now you have a smile face mat in front of your baby. The top two portions, which are two ounce, one small portion of protein, one small portion of a fruit or a vegetable.

Katie Ferraro (10m 15s):

And then the four ounce portion. It's not totally full. Okay. You can make it about half full, eyeball it. I don't give set portion sizes because there's no evidence to support an exact portion size. You'll sometimes see stuff that says don't feed a baby more than a half a cup of food, or do two ounces of a protein every meal. All babies are different. We want to offer babies a variety of different foods. I think from a nutritional balance, you want to have a high iron food on that plate each time. Well, that's why we do the protein foods. That's where the iron is. Fruits or vegetables, don't get in the habit of serving fruit, every meal, or your baby will become conditioned to expect fruit, every meal. I like to mix it up between fruits and vegetables. So, do a portion of fruit or vegetable, but don't be scared of those carbohydrates.

Katie Ferraro (10m 56s):

Okay? Those starchy foods should provide most of the energy for your baby. And so that's how I partition the meal. If it's lunch, let's say you could do sweet potato as the starch. You could do a small amount of shredded chicken as the protein portion, and then you could do some soft cooked broccoli. Now let's say broccoli as the new food of the day, you might spend the first 10 minutes just serving your baby broccoli and then bring in the mat for the second 10 minutes, that has three foods, including the new food of the day broccoli with two familiar foods, your baby has already seen, which might be chicken or sweet potato. If you guys want to learn more about that five step feeding framework, you can sign up for my free online workshop. I teach this every week.

Katie Ferraro (11m 36s):

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. I do a lot of visuals in the workshop. You can sign up on the show notes page for this episode and I'll link to some of those different products that I was talking about from ezpz as well. If you go to blwpodcast.com/45, again, I recommend the tiny bowl in the mini bowl for trying out the new food in the first 10 minutes. And then I love the ezpz mini mat for the second 10 minutes of the meal, to introduce a small portion of protein, a small portion of fruit or vegetable, and then the larger component there is filled with the carbohydrate.

Katie Ferraro (12m 17s):

So there you have it, just a few tips on how to balance your baby's BLW plate. Again, linking up all of the resources from this episode in the show notes at blwpodcast.com/45. Thanks for listening. Bye now.