Breasfeeding

shamyd3

I have a question..is there a way to log breastfeeding as an exercise? you do burn calories while breastfeeding it would be great to log that in the app.

thanks!

malibu927

There should be an entry in the exercise database for it. Or you can log it as food (giving you a negative adjustment), manually add the calories to your goal, or eat at your non-breastfeeding maintenance calories and let it create your deficit.

DomesticKat

Breastfeeding does create a pretty big deficit on it's own, but it's really not possible to know how much because there are so many variables that influence milk production and it's highly individual. I'm hesitant to recommend a generic 500 or 350 calorie entry for that reason because it may not be appropriate for you as a nursing mother. It was not appropriate for me.

Instead, I recommend setting your account to maintenance for your current weight. Make sure you're logging everything accurately. A food scale helps with that. Also make sure that you're setting the correct activity level and eating back exercise calories. Try that for 3 or 4 weeks and track your weight loss with an app like Libra that will show your rate of loss over time and daily deficit. That will give you an idea of how many calories breastfeeding is burning per day. For the vast majority of us, as long as you're logging correctly you shouldn't have to incorporate a deficit on top of the deficit breastfeeding creates. I recommend losing no more than one pound a week to protect your milk supply.