7 Month Old Eating

She is too young to be eating foods like this. At 7 months she should only be starting on very soft simple baby foods and not very much.

Baby food has almost no nutrients. IT IS NOT HEALTHY! Her formula or your breast milk has the nutrients she needs, she needs the DHA, the vitamin D, the whole thing. She needs you to give her a bottle of formula or nurse her before you give her anything else.

If you do not give her the formula or breast milk you are keeping her nutrition from her. You can add the small amounts of food but she must have the formula or breastmilk for her "food" first. Until she is at least a couple of months older.

Baby food is only to teach her to chew and to swallow, not to feed her meals. That is why lots of babies get really fat when they start baby food, it makes them gain weight and they starve all the time so parents feed them more. They get a full tummy but the don't get the nutrition they need so they want to eat more. They get fat and starve all the time.

Give her what she needs, the bottle, and then offer her foods.

They don't need teeth to start trying different foods-they can gum everything :) If you do carrot stick size pieces then they can pick it up easier and get it to their mouths. Also cereal like cheerios is good for them to practice eating.

Poop changing is normal-diet definitely affects what it looks like. Breast milk will keep it softer and how much solids she is getting will affect it. As long as she is happy I'd just wait until her next well visit to ask the Dr. about it. Below is a response I wrote to someone else that relates as well.
Take care :)

I highly recommend reading Baby Led Weaning. It explains how to start your infant straight to finger foods totally bypassing purees. (which is how it was done before all the pureed baby foods were sold). You basically give them whatever you are eating other than honey and peanut butter. You can ask you pediatrician what they think about it. I wish I knew about for my 1st two kids. I'm doing it with the 3rd and she is eating so well and loving trying all different flavored and textured foods. And it's so much easier too :)

PS-like some other moms mentioned, at this point it's more for practice and fun versus getting bulk calories and nutrition.

If you've ever been bitten by a baby without teeth, you know how hard those little gums are!

Teeth or no, your baby can gum/chew any ripe (soft) fruit like bananas, pears, peaches, watermelon, etc and any well-cooked veggie like carrots, squashes, beets, yams, cauliflower, broccoli, etc. She can also have puffed wheat (which basically dissolves in their saliva) cereal and puffed rice (if you can find it). You could also give her well-cooked pasta with a little melted cheese on.

I would start with pieces of food about the of a large pea and see how she does. If she handles it well and doesn't gag every-other-bite (like my first did! haha), then you could increase the size to a small marble/large blueberry.

As for the poo....I think the more her diet becomes "adult", so will her poo. Just make sure she's not dehydrated or sick at all.

I think you will find a wide variety of answers on this point. Some will say their baby was eating everything under the sun others will say strictly pureed foods at this point. I am on the more conservative side myself, rice at 6 months then a gradual introduction of pureed foods at that young age. I start trying out puffs etc closer to 9-10 months and I let my babies lead. My first wasn't really on anything other than baby food until about a year where my second was trying to snatch food of my plate closer to 8 months or so which really surprised me. So many things come into play on eating, like my first had reflux so I think he took longer to get used to textures etc. What I have always done is go with whatever my pediatrician recommended. Taking things a bit slow in the food dept is perfectly fine bc right now her main source of nourishment is milk or formula. Food right now is just to give her some taste and texture and just to get her started, there's no rush. I would talk it over with the pediatrician if it were me and go from there. I do go slow and I have two really great eaters over here! My little baby is three months and I will introduce rice and other cereals on at a time at six months and then veggies 7 months and usually only introduce something new after a few days to make sure my little man doesn't have any allergies. As far as the poo goes as long as she is getting plenty of formula, seems happy and healthy, I think you are ok!! Good luck :D

My son ate everything we ate (except honey and peanuts) at that age. We started with single ingredients at 5-1/2 months and processed/pureed them into a texture he could handle. So he might have a bottle and then mashed banana, mashed avocado and cereal for breakfast. For lunch - bottle, pureed steamed peas, pureed peaches and pureed salmon. By seven months, we were pureeing the foods we were eating in their finished form. So for example - if we were having broiled salmon, steamed broccoli and brown rice for dinner - we just threw his portions into a mini food processor. If we were having chicken and dumplings - we threw some of the chicken, carrots, dumplings, sauce etc into the processor. I then froze the extras in ice cube trays so it made things really easy. Over time I moved from a smooth puree to a slightly coarser puree to a chunky texture. We probably started soft finger foods at closer to 10 months of age (steamed until soft carrot sticks, banana etc).I don't think teeth are really the issue. I never used 'baby food' - taste it yourself and decide if you would want that to be your introduction to the wonderful world of real food.

Yes, I started feeding my DD soft food at 6 months, as a supplement to the formula that she got. I started with rice cereal mixed with formula, then mashed avacado, then mashed banana, then mashed sweet potato. After that I think I went to pureed veggies: carrots, yellow squash, zuccini, spinach, etc. Then I went to pureed fruits. Good luck.