My daughter was on a mainly dairy-based diet, as I have written. The transition for us was not that big a deal. She was about 1.5 years old at the time, but we substituted dairy milk with nut-based milks — hemp milk, almond milk, and, more recently, oat milk. My daughter never articulated or expressed resistance. She loved cheese — still loves cheese — but we cut that out for about a year and recently started re-introducing it on occasion. Our household craves pizza, so we have pizza once a week.

I would suggest that you experiment. I have come to believe more in diversity. I think that it will take a long time and a lot of experimentation to figure out the optimal diet for each person. In the meantime, while I’m still trying to figure it out, I’m constantly fine-tuning, trying to hedge my risks by increasing diversity over time. With dairy, she doesn’t have too much of it now and never complains about it. Try the nut-based milks. There are nut-based cheeses as well, which we tried but don’t use regularly.

The other night, I made fresh tomato sauce with whole grain pasta and my daughter did not want the tomatoes. She then agreed to try it with some parmesan cheese. After a few spoonfuls, she didn’t realize that I stopped dipping it in the cheese and ate the rest of the tomatoes / onions / garlic with no cheese.

With veggies, my daughter still loves cold-pressed juices so she gets kale, spinach, celery, cucumber, pineapple, apple, wheatgrass, etc in her juices. However, she’s recently decided that she doesn’t like green vegetables (even though she’ll drink it). So we constantly reinforce the story of “Green Eggs and Ham” and reinforce the idea of just trying new things. It’s slowly working. I’ll ask her to try just one bite of something that has greens. 90% of the time she doesn’t want it. 10% of the time she’ll continue to eat it.

My goal in the short-term has been to get her body accustomed to how much more energy it feels with higher quality food. With this, I hope that later on she notices her body’s disappointment from eating less healthy foods.

What also helps immensely is what she sees from my husband and I. We eat what we preach, and she is naturally inclined to imitate.

Good luck! And please let me know how it goes.