How much food does your baby eat?

Your doctor is an idiot. Solids, particularly cereal, make a child MORE hungry because they're empty calories. A four month old should be fed breast milk or formula on demand, not started on cereal. A doctor condoning that and then making it worse by suggesting more solids before 6 months probably got his/her degree off a cereal box.

For the first year, solids are for experimentation, not filling up and not nutritional needs. Breast milk/formula makes up all the nutrition they need, and should always be offered first, with a few bites of solids coming after milk once they're a minimum of six months. She's also waking less frequently to eat during the night than most babies her age. Which isn't a bad thing, just saying it's totally normal to wake to eat at night.

At 7 months he was having about 24-26 oz of formula a day (on the low side of normal, but that had been his pattern since before starting solids), and solids twice a day. If mush (pureed fruit or vegetables) it would be about 2-3 table spoons per 'meal', and usually he would have puree once and finger food (a cracker, or some brown bread, or some pieces of fruit etc.) once.

I only ever used rice cereal in very small quantities to thicken a puree that turned out a bit runny. I'm not fundamentally against cereal as a SMALL part of a baby-on-solids diet (not as a daily thing) but traditional rice cereal mixed with formula is one of the very few things my son really refused to eat. Since it has very little nutritional value anyway, I saw no reason to push it. He gobbled up (and still does at 15 months!) almost anything anyway.

Cereal is all highly processed starch - which turns to sugars in the body. And this can lead to spikes in the child or adults insulin levels, and can even make you more hungry (baby cereal is like feeding yourself cheap white bread. Docs tell us adults to stay away from white starches like this as they are bad for our health, so why do they recommend it to a baby?)

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Baby at this age should have 28-32 ounces of formula a day - solids do not offer the nutrition baby needs at this age. The American Academy of Pediatrics says to start solids at 6 months, babies at 4 months are going through a growth spurt and need more formula (not empty undigestible starch). Most doctors current on infant nutrition are no longer recommending cereal as a first food, and many recommendations say meat should be added to the 'first foods' baby eats. Meat is easy to digest compared to a cereal grain. You can also google baby led weaning, she can self-feed very soft foods at this age, no teeth needed.

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As for my lil ones, they have their bottles along with a meal. Breakfast is a fruit and cheese or egg yolk, lunch is a veggie, and dinner is a meat and veggie/fruit combo. Food is either served fork mashed, or I let him feed himself (something like his sweet potato slice). Maybe a spoon or two serving size for each component.

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EDIT DO NOT FEEL BAD! Baby food and formula companies heavily push their products on doctors. Docs are treated to perks for listening to "research" about the benefits of the product and how to tell moms the benefits if they try the free samples - but mostly it is all marketing.