Calorie intake and breastfeeding

sorayavassad

Hi all - had a baby three months ago and keen to lose the weight I put on in my pregnancy. Can anyone advise me on how many calories I should have whilst breastfeeding please. At the moment I am eating 1700 calories, it doesn't seem to have affected my supply but I don't look much lighter on the scale. Thanks in advance.

kimny72

I don't know if there is a standard answer to that, but I have seen many new moms here say they set themselves to maintenance calories and let BFing create their deficit.

Three months is not a lot of time though. Your body has obviously gone through a lot of stress and it can take some time for it to get completely healed and back on track.

Are you BFing exclusively?
How much weight do you need to lose, and how much have you lost so far?

Congrats BTW

MsOpus

You need to have approximately 500 more per day than you need for yourself. So 1700 would be the minimum you should get as you need a minimum of 1200 for yourself.
You could calculate your caloric needs for a 1lb loss per week and add the 500 to that. It is possible you are actually eating too little for yourself but without knowing all the details, that's just one thought. Start with doing the calculations and go from there.

sorayavassad

Thank you! Yes i am exclusively breastfeeding, although i am expressing most of the time (presumably breastfeeding and expressing burn the same amount?). I want to lose 2 stone overall and have lost 0.5 so far.

kimny72

sorayavassad wrote: »

Thank you! Yes i am exclusively breastfeeding, although i am expressing most of the time (presumably breastfeeding and expressing burn the same amount?). I want to lose 2 stone overall and have lost 0.5 so far.

You've lost 0.5 stone so far? That's 7 lbs, right? That's about half a lb per week, which considering you just created a small human and you have less than 30 lbs to lose is kind of awesome!

Honestly, I'd bet if you tightened up your logging a little (use a food scale, double check that the entries you are using in the database have the correct calories, log every little thing consistently) you'd be right on track.

sorayavassad

Thanks, I'll keep going, i am just impatient I guess but need to remind myself it took me 9 months to put on this weight growing not such a small human - he was 10 pounds at birth!!

fidangul

My baby is 6 mo now. I’ve only started to intentionally lose weight for a month now. Until now I gave myself an extra 300 calories after setting MFP to lose 0.2 kg p/w. But now that I am introducing solids to baby’s diet, I have reduced my additional calories to 200 per day.

To be honest it’s more or less the same as the above poster saying eat at maintenance and let the BF do the deficit. But I just like to see it this way on the screen. And it’s been working so far.

nowNOTthenmylife

I'm speaking strictly from experience and I am not a license dietician or medical personal. When I gave birth , I was breastfeeding and pumping milk. I decided to lose weight and went from 215 lbs to 167 lbs in less than 4 months. I was averaging between 1800 to 2000 calories daily. My diet consisted of eating lots of leafy greens/veggies ( about 6 to 8 cups of steamed veggies) with 2 cups of steamed rice or grilled chicken ( 8 to 12 oz ) with ( 6 to 8 cups of steamed green leafy veggies ) . I ate low calorie fruits in between as snacks ( apples etc). No soda, just pure water. The key is figuring out the calorie density of the food that you are eating . I made sure to eat enough protein because the baby needed b12 vitamins mainly from me. For one meal i paired veggies with carbs or veggies with proteins and made sure the meat f was grilled and veggies steamed . Eating 8 cups of veggies for 150 calories is a lot filling than eating two slices of bread ....