Elimination Diet?

Why don't you try the formula for a few weeks (while pumping to keep up your supply)? See how your little one responds, then try the nursing again and see what happens. Best wishes!
-L.

You can do it! Keep it simple. Wheat, gluten, dairy, soy, corn, these are the most important to keep out of your diet. Make lots of stir fries with brown rice. Snack on veggies that you can eat(tomatoes bothered my son until a year old). Think Of it as a very short time in your life, but his little digestive tract is still developing and setting the stage for either a healthy digestive system, or a life filled with food sensitivities. I'm a health coach, and I see this all the time(I also have two very sensitive kids, and I eliminated foods for several months). It will also help immesely to give him baby probiotics to help restore healthy bacteria to the gut. You CAN do it! Think of it as a perfect time to clean up your own diet!! Good luck!

Also try eliminating white flour <<< that and any sugar.. as you may know, they can exascerbate yeast growth in the gut, which in turns makes allergies much much worse if not brings them on altogether.. try that and drinking even more pure water in your diet if you don't already..

best of luck

This is absolutely the most difficult way to do things. I think it's great that you want to continue to BF and I encourage it. I would supplement so that your baby gets the balance that you are getting. Then you don't have to eliminate all these things. Think about it - a generation ago, we didn't have all these issues with ourselves and our kids!! So you need to add in what's missing, not take out everything you love. Besides, if the turkey and lamb are raised in CAFO (confined animal feeding operations) and are full of antibiotics, what are you going to do then? There is a right way to supplement and a wrong way - but it's so much easier than what you are faced with.

Go to get your baby tested at an allergist. At 6 mos he/she is old enough to get tested and the results will be valid. My son is allergic to corn and I was on the elimination diet and it wasnt working. When we went to the allergist, it took one test in the office to tell me that corn was the offender and I got a list of ingredients and foods I could not eat. I cut those things from my diet and by 2 weeks he was completely better - no rash, no throwing up, no crying for hours on end. It was the BEST thing I could have done. The probelm with the elimination diet is it doesnt take into account all the ingredients that are soy, dairy and corn based that you just don't know about. It's not enough to look for 'soy' on a label, there are a million fillers made from soy or corn and you need that list from a doctor to know what to look for.

Also, that diet you list in your question sounds CRAZY. I have never heard of an elimination diet that only consists of those foods only. Go to an allergist and/or get a second opinion from another pediatrician.

One more note... Alimentum might not fix your problem depending on what the issue is. Plus, it tastes awful - my baby wouldn't go near the stuff. The liquid version has less of the most common allergens than the powder, so I would recommend the liquid over the powder. If you know the specific ingredient your baby cannot have, then you can search for a more appropriate formula for that issue. All formulas have different ingredients and we were able to find something that was corn free and didn't taste awful so my baby would still want to eat (I use Baby's Only Organic Soy).

Hi G.,
The only thing you didn't mention was wheat. Are you avoiding that also?
I had to do the same thing with my son when he was a baby. He was exclusively BF, and he had terrible colic. By terrible, he cried ALL day long for 8 hours or more, esp after he ate. After putting up with this for almost 5 mos, and eliminating everything I knew of from my diet, I switched to formula. And mercifully his colic and reflux subsided quickly afterward. Formula saved all our sanity. LOL When he was old enough (1 year old) we had him tested for everything, and knew what to avoid from that point forward. He did have multiple food allergies, some quite severe and we still tote around an epipen.
I didn't want to stop BF either, but honestly, I was just torturing my poor baby. He cried all the time, and the spitting up was terrible. His eczema was out of control. Ear infections ALL the time. He was miserable and so were we. It just wasn't worth it. There are some cases where breast just isn't best, I don't care what the advocates say. I never felt guilty one bit for switch him to formula. It was the right thing to do in my case.
Go the elimination route first. Eat what you can. The elimination route takes some time. If that doesn't help, go the formula route.
Hope this helps.

I had to figure out food allergies with all my kids and breastfeeding. I was able to figure out what they're allergic to without eating the yucky stuff. With 4 of my kids it was only dairy but with one of mine I couldn't eat dairy, soy, corn, gluten or chocolate. I was able to figure it out because the next day she'd break out in rashes and scream her head off. I'd figure out what I ate the day before and eliminate it to see what happened. I BF her for two years and was able to figure out everything within the first year. Good luck!

I went through this as well. It's tough. I would ask about allergy testing. If that won't give you the answers (it wouldn't in our case as it was an intolerance to the milk protien - not an allergy), I would try formula. My son was 8 weeks when we faced this. He was in such pain (abdominal) and would scream for hours a day. The elimination diet would take up to two weeks to clear my system and help him. We switched to nutramigen (and yes it's icky), but after about 3 days he was so much happier. I was so sad to stop BFing him, but it really was best in our case. He's 3 now and no longer reacts to milk protien that way - he outgrew his intolerance (it wasn't an allergy). Good luck with your decision.

As I said in your last post, your child is old enough for allergy testig, a simple blood test (no the skin prick test!). The children's panel has environmental and food triggers. Most asthmatics started with allergies, ear infections and exzema.

As an adult, I would get his done as well. Like I said, it's a simple blood test. I wish your doctor was more updated on the testing available to you, this would bring down your stress!! If I can be of help telling you the specific test, let me know. There are several and some are scary.

I think the decision has to be yours, as to whether or not you want to continue breastfeeding enough to do the elimination diet.

A word of caution, however, is that alimentum tastes terrible to me and you because the proteins have all be hydrolyzed (to help prevent allergic responses) and free amino acids taste very sour and bitter. Most babies will take it without question before 4 months of age, but studies have shown that after that it's very unlikely that they will drink it. I'm surprised your doctor is not aware of that or didn't mention it. If she won't take it, you may only have one choice anyway.

I had this same problem about six months ago when my DD was three months old. It's such a hard decision. I decided to try the total elimination diet first in an attempt to save breastfeeding. I was faithful to the diet for four weeks but unfortunately while she did show a little improvement, it never fully fixed the problems. In our case she didn't have eczema, but terrible gut issues. Finally, after the fourth week I decided it was time to bite the bullet and try formula (Premixed Alimentum). Within two days she was like a different baby. I was so glad I made the switch. We later figured out that she is sensitive to corn and one of the foods I had been eating while on the ED was potato chips that I didn't realize were cooked in corn oil. Had I known about the corn oil I might have been able to continue breastfeeding, but I have absolutely no regrets about switching to the Alimentum. It allowed my little one to begin to feel better and that was the important thing to me. Once we got that under control we realized she also had silent reflux, so she started taking prevacid which made things even better, until the prevacid caused her to have a bacterial overgrowth in her intestines so she wasn't able to tolerate any solids. We just finished two weeks of treatment for the overgrowth yesterday and she is the happiest/healthiest she has ever been. She is nine months old now and still only drinks the Alimentum, but we are going to try solids again next week. Sorry for the long story, but the point I was trying to make is that sometimes all you can do is make the best decision you can at that moment and see where it takes you. Either way you go, you are working towards resolving your little ones health issues, so it is just a matter of which you are most comfortable with.