How many calories should I be eating?

ehimay10ins

What do you think?

If I use a calorie calculator for a regular woman its says I should be eating 1650 calories.
If I use the nursing calculator it says 2100.

I am nursing around 3 times a day. My daughter is not living off of my breastmilk. Each feeding is followed with a full formula bottle. My milk is not fatty at all, it does not satisfy her. She drink, needs, wants a 4 oz bottle whether or not she was nursed first.

I would like to lose weight, at least 1/2 lb per week, but at the same time I know I need to give my body calories for whatever milk i'm creating.

I have myself at 1900 calories right now. Is that the correct number? What do you suggest?

childrenrus

I'm glad you asked this as I'd like to know myself!

I am for the majority bf my 7 week baby but she does have one bottle of expressed or formula given to her at night,

I've only returned back to MFP & unsure of how much calories I should be eating, I'm a bit clueless as how to work it out! Which nursing calculator did you use? Help!

Celia_Arminta

Just wanted to share my experience so far. My baby is 10 months and I have been doing Jillian michaels workouts on and off for about 5 months. I heard that its around 500 calories to breastfeed. I eat as little as 1200 calories and havent lost my milk yet. I feed 5-6 times daily. My friend dieted hard and lost her milk around week 3 when her baby was 10 months. I wonder if I will lose my milk too?

ehimay10ins

I used this calculator

http://www.freedieting.com/tools/breastfeeding_calorie_calculator.htm

Celia_Arminta

thanks that site said 2400 cal for me

andylllI

Hi,

There are a few options. You can use "breastfeeding an older baby" as a food. There are -300, -250 and -200 calorie options for that. If you do that, on top of whatever intake MFP suggests for you, you also need to eat back some proportion of your exercise calories because they aren't included in MFP calculation.

MFP calculates your calories based on your basal metabolic rate (for age, gender, ht and wt) and non-exercise thermogenesis. Unfortunately, the caloric burn estimates in MFP for exercise seem to be high. At least, I found if I added them back in my weight loss really stalled. So you might want to eat back 1/2 or 2/3 or whatever depending on hunger.

I've just redone my intake by estimating my TDEE using the data I've logged over the last month. I think this is a good option if you've been logging for a while. So how this works, I totaled up all my calories eaten over the last month (so everything that went into my mouth) and in that time I lost 3.5 pounds so I added (3500 x 3.5) to that total and divided by the number of days. I got a result of 2600. that's my TDEE (BMR + NEAT + exercise-associated thermogenesis). Then I subtracted 20% from that and that's my new goal (2080) for average calories a day whether or not I exercise. Simpler for me and I no longer have to worry about breastfeeding calories. I'm going to repeat this process every month. If I stop losing weight then I'll reevaluate. If I lose > 1 lb a week I'll reevaluate. The cons to this method are that you have to be very consistent and accurate about logging intake.

whatever method you chose, just be sure to evaluate and adjust every 2-4 weeks based on what happens to milk supply and your weight/ changes in your body (if you want to use measurements or how your clothes fit instead of the scale).

ehimay10ins

AndyIIIII, your post makes sense.

the one thing I am unsure of is my milk supply. I am able to express milk anytime I try, however I have no idea if my supply is high or low. My breasts dont get full/engorged if I skip a day of feedings, like it did when I skipped 1 feeding with my first child.

Also since my baby is not dependent on my breastmilk it's hard to tell from her whether or not she got more, less, or same milk as the previous feeding.

any ideas on that?

andylllI

I have no idea. My kiddo has boob refusal (except for a small amount of comfort nursing at night) so it's easy for me...I can SEE what I pump.

But seeing what you pump, apparently, doesn't correlate well with what the kiddo can extract by direct nursing...so doing a pump "yield" is not a good way for you to see what your supply is doing.

I think what I would do if preserving nursing was really important to me, would be to be kind of conservative on my deficit (say 10-15%), accept a slower weight loss in the beginning and watch my baby for signs of hunger or changes in nursing behavior. And then adjust from there. If no changes in nursing behavior, I would assume that milk supply is adequate and if I wanted more weight loss, increase my deficit another 5-10%. If changes in nursing behavior, I would reduce the deficit by 5% and see what happens.

Personally, because I'm looking to lose weight but maintain my lean muscle mass I'm not willing to go below a 20% deficit. But I also have < 10 lbs to lose. If you have more, you could probably be a little more aggressive.