Breast Feeding and slow weigth loss

dnunny70

I bf for 36 months, and never really saw a weight loss. I probably counteracted any weight loss with a craptastic diet.

nkmcginty

My son just turned 9 months and he's been exclusively breastfed this whole time. Hasn't even started solids yet! It's taken me 3.5 months to lose 12 lbs. I eat around 1800 cals and walk or do a Jillian michaels video a couple times a week. It's definitely going much much slower than it did pre-baby. With my first, I breastfed him for a year and gained weight. I was so hungry all the time and found it impossible to lose which demotivated me. As soon as I weaned, I dropped the 15lbs I was holding onto in 6 weeks without even trying. Everyone's bodies are different! Just keep being healthy and don't lose heart. It's just a season and will pass all too quickly!

Marll

From experience watching friends and my wife, it sure appears that the difference is what the mother is eating when she is breastfeeding. If you are gorging on grains and other carbs that turn into sugar, the response seems to be sent to the brain that you NEED more food and therefore you eat more than needed carb wise.

A friend of ours ate a high carb typical American diet with her first and gained quite a bit of weight when breastfeeding and changed completely to a lower carb/paleo diet with her 2nd child and lost with nearly no effort over 50lbs in 9 months. She kept breast feeding because of this for about 1.5 years and now (in our opinion) is too skinny.

From what I've been reading, if you adopt a more whole foods approach (less processed foods), low sugar, low carb, high fat diet combined with breast feeding gives better results, but may still vary by individual.

My wife will be trying this approach with our 2nd due in a couple of months, as she had other health issues/hormonal imbalances that caused her to not be able to breast feed our first for more than about 3 months, and her diet was complete crap during that time anyway.