My Personal Journey: Teaching Myself and My Child about Real Food

When I was child, my mother had a overwhelming fear that I would choke on my food. Because of this fear, she pureed my food until I was 3 years old. I didn't know about this until I, too, developed an overwhelming fear that my daughter would choke on finger foods, which also resulted me in pureeing much of her food.

Photo Credit: Cascadian Farms

First Foods

When it came time for my daughter to transition to food from breast milk, I was completely lost. I was mostly lost because I had no idea how to feed myself, much less feed another person. I spent weeks researching the perfect first food. I was so confused. The doctors said rice cereal; Nina Planck said don't give rice cereal. My mom said give apples, someone else said try liver. My head was literally spinning with all the possibilities. Finally, my mother-in-law mentioned that my husband's first food was egg yolk and those were on Nina Planck's list! And so egg yolks it was!




Feeling Like a Failure

Three months later, after giving my daughter egg yolks, she began to violently throw up. This pattern continued whenever she ate anything with egg yolks. She had developed an allergy to her first food and I felt like a complete failure.


In the months that passed, I spent countless hours over my baby food maker, making her concoctions that I felt were good for her and whenever she would reject them, I would feel like she was rejecting me. After a while, I began to take it so personally that an overwhelming feeling came over me. I can't exactly describe it, but it was a feeling of gross failure and uselessness. It was completely extreme. This feeling made me no longer want to cook for my child. I began to buy pre-made foods from the supermarket and boxed macaroni & cheese. Even though she seemed more interested in this food than my own, the feeling of overwhelming guilt that took over me was enough to keep the feeling of failure in good company.

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Turning to Real Food

After my daughter turned one, we noticed that she would develop bad skin rashes on her face. They were raised and quite red and very itchy. A chiropractor told us it was a wheat allergy and I gawked. All my child ate was wheat at this point.



A few months later, I started to discover more about real food and the Weston A. Price Foundation. Having already heard of Nina Planck, the ideas were not completely foreign to me. I ordered my copy of Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions and began to transition my family to a real food lifestyle.

We began to eat more organ meats, pasture raised and grass fed beef, and raw milk. Then on 4th of July weekend in 2010, 1.5 months before my daughter's 2nd birthday, we all contracted campylobacter, a serious food-borne illness. The doctor's didn't initially think to test my daughter's stool and it took almost a week until we got a diagnosis after an emergency room visit that I will never forget. Everyone had to take a heavy duty dose of antibiotics.

Finding Balance

I hadn't taken antibiotics in years and they really took my body for a ride. All of the health benefits that I had seen from my real food diet were gone. I was bloated and in pain most of the time. My body became significantly inflamed. My daughter also began to experience more illnesses. Having been nursed until she was 25 months, she had a pretty strong immune system but after the antibiotics, she began to get sick quite often. Almost every three weeks.



We decided to take her to an osteopath and to do a food sensitivity test. The test came back positive for almost all of the foods she was eating, including cow dairy and wheat. We cut everything out of her diet that showed a reaction, but I was still clueless on what to feed her. I felt so guilty that my experimentation had made her sick.

Embracing Nourishing Transitions

Overtime, we began to get our groove. She enjoyed goat's milk cheese and yogurt. She liked quinoa pasta and rice. She was able to eat rice bread and ghee. Her skin rash began to disappear and her pickiness also subsided a bit.

It's now 18 months later and I'm happy to report that our daughter is still wheat and cow dairy free and she doesn't miss it one bit. I am so grateful to live in the San Francisco Bay Area where alternatives are so readily available. Having finally figured out how to nourish myself has allowed me to nourish my child. Nowadays, Tali enjoys bone broth soups, fermented foods, liver, caviar and other nutrient dense foods. It's a been a journey but a journey I am very grateful for.

Photo Credit: GeishaBoy on Flickr