Can a baby eat too much?

[doireallyneedaname]

My son is 7 months, we started weaning at 6. I started him with single veg purée for 2 weeks and then we moved on to mix veg, some fish & now scrambled eggs, porridge and things like that. No meats yet other than tuna.

The thing is he will demolish everything we give him and he’s still taking all his bottles. The portion he has is about 3-4 ice cubes I’d say and he now has breakfast, lunch & dinner, occasionally he’ll have a yogurt for dessert and occasionally one of those Ella’s melty stick things in the afternoon.

I know we’re lucky he enjoys his food but he’s my first and I’m not sure if we’re overloading him!

I thought the whole idea of “weaning” was weaning them off milk, so he’d gradually drop a bottle and then another and so on so forth.

He’s not a big baby either, was on the 10th centile when born and stayed there until a couple ninths ago. He’s now around the 50th!

DD is BF and didn’t change the number of feeds for many months after starting solids. She was 25th at birth and around 70th now but has been since before starting solids. She’s the same for height and weight so not overweight (18 months now) and her dad is tall.

He sounds fine, great he’s enjoying his food and he’s only been on it a month so it’s okay he’s still having as much milk. Is he feeding himself food or being spoon fed? It’s possible to over feed a baby if you’re spoon feeding as they can just sit back and open their mouth so you could give him some bits to hold to practise gumming/chewing and different textures.

Thanks for the reply!

He can’t feed himself properly yet, he grabs the spoon and can get it to his mouth, but he doesn’t know to put the spoon back to the bowl for more yet, so we do it.

You are doing great and stick to your cooking moire than extruded snack such as the melty off which are corn flour and oil (very much like Cheetos and Doritos) with some nutrition-void dry vegetable powder to put the name on the packet.
You can't overfeed on vegetable but you certainly can with ultra processed industrial baby food.

Take advantage of this unique opportunity you have to expose him to the biggest variety of vegetables you can. Make some soups with lentils and chickpea, and slowly allow him to sit next to you during your lunches and if he is interested, let him have a bite (but must be no or low in salt) .

When giving yoghurt, make sure it is not a fruit (and sugar) based one, but let him explore the taste of real food in all its variety, from ripe tomatoes cut in cubes with a bit of olive oil to olives and a piece of toast on which you spread an anchovy. Give him real cheese, not processed ( the typical sliced and squared)

How many bottles do you give per day and at what times?

Thanks. Why would you not give fruit yogurt? I give him fruit yogurt and fruit purée on his porridge, but nothing with added sugar.

He takes 7oz every 3 hours starting at 6-7 when he wakes, last one 7pm before bed. Occasionally he will want a bottle around 4 AM!

You should never judge if a yogurt has sugar or not by reading the label at the front, but by looking at the table at the back. Look at the gr of sugars per 100 gr. Many no added sugar yogurts reach 25 or 30 gr (a quarter or a third of the product is sugar). Fruit puree is a legal way to bypass the obligation of reporting sugar.
Plain unsweetened yogurt is a great way to encourage non sweet food. Your DS will get plenty of occasions to have sweet food.

So your son has roughly a litre of milk per day. (6, 9, 12, 3, 6) which is about right. What does your HV say? if you are giving his afternoon snack, a banana or cottage cheese, maybe he can have a smaller bottle. I think it is more around 8 months that you reduce milk. In France , we give less bottles per day but bigger, a 250ml , 4 times a day.

We haven’t spoke to the HV since he was a few months old. Last doctors appointment she was happy with his growth etc.

I just had a look at the fruit yogurt he has. It says no added sugar and the total sugar per pouch is 8g from the fruit, so I’m ok with that as I think that’s pretty good for a fruit yogurt. I don’t give him pre made fruit purée as those are overloaded with it.

Ah it’s interesting that you give bigger bottles, my baby wouldn’t take more than 7/8oz per bottle as it’s just too much in one go for him!

Every country is so different. We live now in Australia, but my 3 DC lived in 4 countries before moving here. From one country to another, massive differences!
In Frances, cereals powders, such as baby rice, baby oats are for the sickly babies, who need to put on weight. In Italy, 2 courses meals twice a day, in Spain, all the seafood in spicy sauces, so funny, the variety.

In the end, I choose to stick with France, as it reflect the way we eat in the house. We don't do finger food for example, as we insist on cutlery from the earliest age and finger food is usually snack food and snacking is a criminal offence in France at any age!