If lots of calories & carbs equal weight gain? Why am I still losing weight?

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  • Christine_72
    Christine_72 Posts: 16,049 Member
    Nikion901 wrote: »
    At your age, with a young baby yet, you are probably eating less than you burn. Wait, in another decade you will be complaining that you eat nothing and gain weight! :)

    Lol so true.. OP enjoy it while it lasts :smile:
  • tlflag1620
    tlflag1620 Posts: 1,358 Member
    savithny wrote: »
    tlflag1620 wrote: »
    annaskiski wrote: »
    A person on my feed calculates about 500 calories for a couple of minutes of breastfeeding.
    So its plausible you can eat well over 2000 calories and lose....

    It's 500 calories per day when breastfeeding a baby younger than six months. Once solids are established, that number drops, 300 per day is a pretty good average in the second six months of baby's life. It's not that they burn 500 calories per couple of minutes, it's that adding 'one minute of breastfeeding' at 500 calories is simpler than trying to figure out how many minutes you spent nursing, and how many calories per minute that ends up being, IYKWIM. But, yeah, nursing mothers are often told not to go below 1800 cal per day. Someone who doesn't need to lose weight might need to go quite a bit higher than that.

    Problem is, the OP is not logging much at all, and when she does she only guesstimates her portions. She has no earthly clue what her CI is, much less her CO.

    Like I said above - I calculated how much my kid was eating, based on how much pumped milk she got at the sitter and how often she nursed -- and how much weight she gained.

    *she* was taking in at least 600-700 calories a day for awhile, 100% of which came from me. That fits with the number I just looked up on Livestrong. Another site says that at 500 calories a day you're still pulling 250 calories from maternal fat stores, too. It takes metabolic energy to turn food into breastmilk.

    Long story short? If she's even moderately active and not tiny? Maintaining on 2500-3000 calories a day is not just believable, but likely.

    She's 5'4" and 111 lbs. To me, that's pretty tiny, lol (I'm 5'7" 144, lightly active, and maintain on 1950, without adding breastfeeding calories - tho my baby just turned one, so she isn't nursing around the clock like a newborn anymore). It certainly is possible, likely even, that she can maintain on 2500 if she is moderately active (3000 seems a stretch unless she is super active). Problem is, as I said above, she is not only not logging, but is not logging accurately on the rare occasion that she does log. She thinks she's eating "a lot" of calories, yet is losing weight. It's possible she has a medical condition. It's possible she's a special snowflake. It's also possible that she's eating less than she thinks she is and/or is underestimating her calorie burns from exercise and/or breastmilk. Odds are, it's the third option.

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