breastfeeding?

evelonies

how do you adjust your calorie total if you're breastfeeding? i'm currently breastfeeding my son. milk production burns approximately 500 calories per day, but w/ the calorie total i've been allotted on here, i wouldn't be eating enough to support that AND exercise.

AMOMONAJOURNEYTOCHANGEHERLIFE

I would add those 500 calories in your diet. But make the calories count. Like eat fruit, lean proteins, I craved food horribly while breastfeeding it was worst then when I was pregnant. I wish I would have watched what I ate to manage my needs.

SuzanneRogers

The average only needs to eat 1200 to lose weight if their body takes 1500 calories a day to fuel itself. So you add the 500 to your 1200 calories and eating 1700 before exercise in order to shed the weight and keep up mil production. So at the end of the day you need to eat no less than 1700 calories. Then X number for exercise for what you burned during exercise.

Check out this great site for more information on working out and eating while pregnant, breastfeeding and years afterward. She helps me after having my twins. www.momsintofitness.com

jljohnson

You can account for breastfeeding several different ways:
1. Manually adjust your calorie count. Take what MFP gives you, then go in and customize your goal to add the extra 300-500 calories.

2. Add breastfeeding as exercise. Put in a number of minutes and calories burnt each day, and your total calories alloted will increase.

3. Add breastfeeding as food. This works well if you're pumping and know how many ounces you're expressing. If you search for "nursing" in the food database, it will come up, and you can enter the number of ounces. It will enter a negative calorie amount (-20 cals per oz), and you'll be credited on your total calories for the day.

I've seen people do it all 3 ways, it's just a matter of preference. I was adding mine as exercise (option 2), but my production is starting to go down, so I've recently switched to adding it as food and tracking how much I'm pumping.

Hope this helps!!

evelonies

thanks everyone!