Breastfeeding moms anywhere?

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officialsah
officialsah Posts: 1 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
Hello all! I am trying to lose weight while breastfeeding my 2 month old. I know that during BF, your body burns 300-500 more calories creating milk. Is there a way I can find out exactly how many calories my body burns producing milk? I'm not really sure how this all works. TIA!

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  • PumpkinPeril
    PumpkinPeril Posts: 22 Member
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    No longer BF, pumped for 13m with my 1st and nursed for 12 with my 2nd.

    The average baby consumes around ~25oz of breastmilk a day. 1oz of milk is ~20cal so the average woman burns 500cal breastfeeding(the 300calls for When you are pregnant).

    That's all average though. With my son I knew how much milk because of the pumping(I would express 65oz and he would consume about 50 most days). If you are pumping at all you can use that as an estimate (oz expressed × feedings per day) but your production will vary on time of day as will the nutritional content of the milk(more fatty milk vs more watery)

    My one word of caution is that your supply doesn't fully become stabalized until the 3rd month or so.

    I would say to log what you eat just to see your average calorie intake and then to slowly reduced from there keeping an eye for any signs your supply maybe suffering (I couldn't cut back until close to the 1y mark, but every body is different)
  • DomesticKat
    DomesticKat Posts: 565 Member
    edited July 2018
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    There isn't a way to find out exactly how many since it's really going to vary from person to person and it's all dictated by demand from your individual baby. Baby teething? Growth spurt? Going to daycare and you need to pump? Starting solids? Did they start sleeping for 4-6 hour stretches? Do they just like to nurse all day and night? All of those things will have an impact on how many calories you're burning via breastfeeding on a daily basis. Everything you'll find on the internet is an estimate.

    The best thing I can recommend is to start out eating at maintenance for your current weight. Let breastfeeding create your deficit and track your weight for 4-6 weeks with a weight trending app (like Libra). Set the appropriate activity level and eat back your exercise calories. Now, for all of this to work properly, you have to be logging your food consistently and accurately. That means picking the correct entries when using the food database and using a digital food scale for solids and measuring liquids. All beverages, cooking oils, etc.

    In 4-6 weeks, you'll have an idea what kind of deficit breastfeeding is creating and be able to adjust accordingly. I strongly recommend not losing more than a pound a week (500 calorie deficit) so you should adjust your calories up if you lose more than that on a consistent basis. This will help ensure you stay healthy and energized and your milk supply is abundant. It's entirely possible while exclusively breastfeeding to lose while eating above maintenance, but accurate logging is #1. If you have less weight to lose, you should aim for a half pound of loss per week to protect your milk supply.

    This is what I did and I've been successful in losing 64 pounds in the last 14 months since my baby was born. I started out with a pound a week and adjusted as I went along. I switched to a half pound a week when I had 15 pounds to go and upped my calories to 2300 a day.

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