What Does Isla Eat?

Because I get questions quite a bit on this...let's talk about food. This topic is SO important to me. My story of infertility is long, but it boils down to this: once I changed my diet, I got pregnant. I have PCOS (poly-cystic ovarian syndrome), endometriosis, and hypothyroidism. The main problem with getting pregnant for us was that my body wasn't ovulating. I spent a long time learning about this and what was going on inside my body. My hormones never quite peaked high enough to release an egg every month. So instead, my body would try to grow eggs, which ended up turning into cysts. At one point I had over 75 cysts in both ovaries. We tried all the medicines and eventually fertility treatments. Around this same time I started to learn WHY my body was doing this. It always amazes me how the medical world just treats the symptoms. Or even we as consumers do the same thing. You have a headache, take tylenol. But it bothered me that I didn't know WHY. So when I started to dig, I found how much diet affected everything. With PCOS, my body had a hard time with insulin. Too much insulin affected my hormones, which in turn affected my fertility. I also found out that I was estrogen-dominant. This means my body had so much estrogen that it didn't know what to do with it. Many women are estrogen-dominant and don't even know. It can be from foods, leaky gut, or products we use. Xeno-estrogens are found in TONS of products (shampoos, soaps, detergents, etc.). When you are constantly putting that on your body, your body reads it as estrogen and you get an overload. So when I finally ditched the toxins that were creating false estrogen in my body and changed my diet so my insulin was in check, I started to get my very own cycle. Eventually I started ovulating and we were able to naturally conceive right before we started IVF. Finding my PCOS diet was the best thing I could do. THIS is why diet is so important to our family. I will also add, I 100% believe diet is the cure to more than we think: autoimmune disorders, gut issues, headaches, insomnia, etc. (it's worth looking into if that's you!)

So fast forward and here I am feeding Isla very similar things. Her diet consists mostly of whole foods (fruits, veggies, meats, quality cheeses, quality grains, etc.). It's like the caveman diet. PCOS can be genetic and I want to do everything I can to avoid her body from going through what I did. On top of that, brain and body growth during this stage is happening rapidly. Did you know the brain does the most growing in the first three years of life? Did you also know that sugar/junk food has devastating affects on the brain and body? Not only does it not have any nutritional value, but it literally can act like an addictive drug within the body. Sugar has been found to lead to a wide range of health problems, learning disabilities, and developmental issues. It is really hard to explain to others, in a short sentence, why we don't allow Isla to eat sugar and processed junk. I can think of 4 situations over the last several weeks where I had to stop someone from giving junk to Isla, or try to explain why I wouldn't let her eat something. My job as her parent is to take care of her in the best way I know how. And her diet is included in that. It won't always be like this. And I promise I won't be the hovering mom at the birthday party monitoring what my child eats. But, SHE'S ONE YEAR OLD. So right now, I am going to monitor what she eats. It is very important to both of us that we give her the best of the best. Michael and I eat fairly healthy (I do for fertility reasons and he does for health reasons). So it's pretty easy to just give her what we are eating off our plates. But we have not done so great while travelling and during the holidays. We have eaten junk and it's hard to keep her on track too.

I will also add, Isla has been pretty sick the last two weeks. Most of our immunity is found within our gut. When we keep our gut happy and healthy, our immunity is strong. But when we start feeding it junk, our body has a harder time fighting illness. I 100% believe she has been more susceptible to germs lately because we have all been eating poorly around here. The new year is a great time to start over, cleanse our bodies, and move forward into a healthy year!

Something I love about my mom and MIL is that they both are very quick to ask if Isla can have something, if they are unsure. They also respect our decisions in her food choices. I know it's not always convenient or easy to eat healthy, but to us it is very much worth it!

I also get a lot of questions about how we have chosen to feed Isla. We chose to do baby-led weaning. This is a newer term to those that haven't had a baby in the last 10 years. The idea is to give your baby table food in an age-appropriate way. There are all sorts of books and studies on why this is beneficial. The basics of it are this: baby-led weaning reduces picky eaters by exposing your child to different textures, tastes, and feelings within their hands and mouth. It also reduces the amount of food-related allergies across the board. In the 90's, there was a huge increase in childhood allergies (peanut, shellfish, gluten, etc.). There are many reasons for this, but a big one is that many medical authorities said to avoid allergen foods. This ended up causing the opposite problem and children started developing more allergies than they had seen in years past. The AAP now recommends introducing high allergen foods as early as 6 months to reduce the likelihood of future food allergies. Another reason we like baby-led weaning is because purees and baby foods are often heated to such great temperatures during processing, that they lose all nutritional value, as well as, may contain unwanted things (did you see the article on lead found in baby food?!).

Of course, there are rules to baby-led weaning. You don't just slap a sandwich down in front of your 7 month old and say "go!". If this is something you are interested in or want to know more, I'd love to share my resources with you.

And if you want to know what Isla eats, here are some lunch and dinner samples for Isla (she *usually* eats what we are eating, unless we are being bad and eating unhealthy foods):

Mama's lunch (on the top) and Isla's lunch (on the blue plate)- veggies, pesto shrimp, chicken sausage, artichokes, quality cheese, berries

everything green- pouch, olives, pickles, green pea sticks, spinach pancakes

blueberries (halved to avoid choking), nut bar (early exposure to allergens helps prevent allergies in the future), olives, chicken sausage, quality cheese