Dieting while nursing/calories burned
Hello,
I've been with CC now for 1 month and I've lost 10lbs. however I am nursing my baby who is currently 5 months old. So my question is........when I type in feeding baby on the "calorie meter" and I type in 240 min. (I roughly chase around my toddler and feed my daughter for that amount of time throughout the day, possibly longer) it says the calories I've burned are 1500 (rough estimate, can't remmeber exact number) I'm supposed to be eating 2100 calories a day (although I never get that high, seems like a lot!) I usually eat between 1800-1900. so yesterday I ate 1950 calories and I subtract the 700 calories burned fromworking out and the 1500 from feeding baby etc... it only leaves about 330 calories, so here's the question
Is that all the calories I've actually consumed that day, because the rest were burned off? I'm so confused! I've been so hungry all day and I've just been snacking on healthy things (bran muffin, fruit yogurt) I thought maybe it was becuase I'd lost some weight and my metabolism was starting to smarten up? am I wrong? please help.
THanks :)
Hi meagang! Congratulations on your new baby 
!! You've got a very exciting life at the moment.. Sounds like you're eating lots of healthy food, but you can definitely afford to eat at least 2000 cal's with your exercise and nursing schedule. A surplus of only 330 cal's doesn't really leave your body much to work with for building and repairing tissues and creating energy for you and your little one. This is a good time to be generous with your nutrition and gentle with your body -- nursing is exhausting! Plus you have another toddler to run after, so you have an even bigger load on your plate. The time will pass quickly (doesn't it always?) until you'll be able to put more energy into your weight-loss goals.
When my son was teensy (he was a heavy nurser!!) I lost a lot of weight (I know it's not the same for everyone). The problem was that I didn't listen to my body and consume more healthy food, plus I decided to get back in shape quickly by doing aerobic excercise a few times a week. Without adequate rest and nutrition, my immunity grew very weak and I got quite sick. I took about a year to recover.
In retrospect, I wish I'd eaten more calories and rested more to keep up with my nursing schedule.
There was a great discussion not too long ago about this topic if you're interested called, "Breastfeeding?" where you might meet some more ppl to share some ideas. Good luck!
Sure thing, meagang! Yes, you should add that to your recommended amount to lose.
My little nursling is now 14 months old and still nursing a lot!
Congratulations on your baby! Incidentally have you seen this thread on nursing that is stickied this week on the top of the board?
well, i haven't had a baby or nursed in well over a decade, but, IIRC, how many calories you burn will depend on how much milk you're expelling (as, obviously, that milk is calories out of your body). it's impossible to know EXACTLY how many calories you're giving your baby on your own (even if you weigh your baby before and after feedings, you still don't know exactly what the caloric content of the milk you fed him or her is - this varies to some extent from woman to woman, but also, based on time of day + when the last feeding was (owing to the variation in fat content) - so long as your baby is gaining weight at a healthy rate, there's no reason to know - ultimately, there wouldn't be a reason to know how many calories are leaving your body even if your baby WASN'T gaining weight at a healthy rate, since VOLUME of milk taken in by the baby is what's correlated with infant growth). how many calories you burn doesn't depend on how LONG you breastfeed - it depends on how much milk is ultimately leaving your body (and women/infants vary greatly in the rate of milk flow). average estimates for a newborn range from about 250-500 calories per day (another study cites an average of 670 cals/day as average energy output for lactating women, but didn't say how old the babies were). as your baby is 5 months, and it would appear from the amount of time you're feeding her that breast-milk is the major, if not exclusive part of his/her baby (is it a boy or a girl? not that it matters here - just curious), the amount of milk your baby drinks is probably at the high end or possibly much higher (weight of the baby matters here, but older exclusively breastfed babies obviously take in more than younger ones).
but this isn't what you really need to know - you want to know how to lose fat when nursing :-). congrats on the new baby, by the way! can't believe i didn't say that earlier!
it's perfectly ok to operate with a mild calorie restriction while nursing - even in cases of pretty severe malnutrition, the milk women give to their babies is usually fine - the danger with being malnourished while nursing is largely to the mother, not the infant, as your body will take what it needs to feed your baby from YOU, if you are not eating adequately. maternal nutrition generally has only a mild impact on the quality and quantity of breastmilk (this has been EXTENSIVELY studied: e.g. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=p ubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch =9478032&ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSys tem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubme d_RVAbstractPlus, there's some evidence that the type of fats you eat can alter the types of fat in breastmilk, but that overall fat content does not change very much based on changes in dietary habits. ok, i'll spare you the findings of all the research unless you're curious). no matter how many calories you're eating, if you're worried that you're not getting "adequate nutrition" (in terms of vitamins and minerals - just as common among those who eat plenty, but all of it junk, as those who don't eat enough), take a supplement (you should probably just keep taking your prenatal vitamins anyways).
you can lose weight while nursing, but you don't want to do it TOO quickly (but that should apply all of the time - slower fat loss is more likely to be sustainable + maintained over time). many women 'naturally' lose weight while nursing (that is, without really trying) simply because they keep eating their normal caloric intake, and the fact that they are breastfeeding creates a natural deficit. BUT, the general rule (don't ask me where it comes from!) is that in the first two months of breastfeeding, you don't want to lose more than 1lb/week (which comes out to a daily deficit of 500 calories) because that is when milk production is still being established, and drastic weight loss during that time can interfere with the process. oops, just saw that your baby is 5 months (gotta edit some previous comments!). so, it would probably be ok if you went a tiny bit faster than that, but 1lb/week is actually pretty good weight loss (how much do you weigh?), so if you want to be cautious, stick with that.
all studies show that it's BENEFICIAL, not harmful, for a lactating woman to exercise (at least moderately).
i assume that in your weight loss, you want to lose FAT, not muscle, right? (if you don't know, the correct answer here is "YES"! ;-) - at least one reason for this is that your basal metabolic rate is largely determined by the amount of lean mass that you have, so losing muscle is just plain counterproductive to fat loss + maintenance of you new body). losing weight too quickly makes it more likely that you're losing large amounts of muscle with the fat, although the more fat you have to lose, the more fat you can lose in a given period (e.g. a week) without also losing muscle. therefore, it is essential that you know your body fat percentage - as your losing weight, you will therefore know how much fat and how much muscle you're losing (the way to preserve muscle during fat loss is through resistance training - i.e., lifting weights): for example (i'm just making up numbers because i don't know your stats, so i'm picking ones where the calculation is easy), if you start at 200lbs and 25% body fat, that means you have 50lbs (200 X .25) of fat and 150 lbs (200 - 50; or 200 x .75) of lean mass (which includes a lot of things other than your muscles - e.g. your bones); if you were to lose 10lbs and STILL be at 25% bf, that means you would have 47.5 of fat (190 x .25) - a loss of 2.5 lbs of fat; the other 7.5 lbs you lost would be muscle. it is essential that you know your BF% so that you don't inadvertently do this!
once you know that the weight you are losing is fat, it is relatively easy to figure out your caloric needs (this will be more complicated if you're also losing muscle): say that you lose 1lb (of fat) in a given week. 1lb of fat = 3500 calories. that means you were operating at a 3500 calorie deficit that week, or a 500 calorie/day deficit, NO MATTER WHAT any online calculator or other device tells you about your basal metabolic rate, or how many calories you burn during a given activity, or how many calories are in your breastmilk. that simplifies things, huh? since you're counting calories, you know how many calories you're eating. the easiest way to know how many calories you need is by constantly (at least once/week) taking your weight and measuring your BF%. right now, it's hard to say what your needs are because you lost 10lbs in 1 month, about 2.5 lbs/week, but we have no way of knowing how much of that loss was fat, lean mass, water, etc. the best (and easiest!) way to figure out your needs is to go by your results.
lastly, one "trick" of nursing women who want to lose weight is to express (manually or by pump) their extra milk. less full breasts have higher fat content, and how much milk you make depends on how full or empty your breasts are at a given time (hence, for women who aren't making enough milk, "emptying" their breasts is recommended), so you don't need to worry about this reducing the quality or quantity of milk for your baby. you should, however, probably empty them AFTER your baby has fed, for the obvious reason. on an aside, if you do have extra milk (and if you don't, you can easily increase milk flow by extra feedings and expressing as much as you can), think about donating the extra to a milk bank - lose weight and do good at the same time! many women are unable to breastfeed their infants (e.g. women whose babies are so premature that their milk production isn't established yet; infants of HIV-postive women [you may have heard about the relatively simple heating process that kills most of the virus in breastmilk, but thusfar, this is only recommended in the third-world, where the mother's breast milk is all that may be available. in the US, it's still not generally recommended for HIV+ women to breastfeed] - thus, in many cases, the infants who need breastmilk THE MOST are the ones whose mothers may be unable to provide it to them), and because of the enormous benefits of breastmilk, donated milk is the only way to get it to them. if you're thinking of pumping your extra milk as a weight loss trick, you may want to consider giving that extra milk to an infant in need (of course, a lot of factors will affect whether that's feasible or even possible for you - contact your local milk bank if you're interested).
Wow! Congratulations on the new little one. Sounds like you eat healthy snacks. I think that you are on the right track with the bran muffin.
You got some really terrific replies here. The one reply mentioned what I was going to which is the Mom's body makes sure that the baby is taken care of. . . you the Mom are the one who will be affected by any lack of nutrients, etc. A prenatal vitamin is a must.
I remember feeling pretty ravenous for the first 6 months with each of my two babies (who both nursed until about 18 months. The first being cut off at the end of the first trimester of being preggers with the second; they are a little under 2 years apart). One thing to think of is having a glass of water when you feel hungry before you have a snack. You didn't mention how much water you drink. Sometimes early feelings of thirst feel a lot like hunger.
At about 6 months, as I introduced more foods that contributed a higher percentage of their caloric needs, I noticed that I was less hungry. I think that the danger is that moms need to adjust their food intake as nursing changes. (Especially for my first, I was in the mind set of 'well, I'm a nursing mom I deserve it" and I think that ice cream was a bit of a balm to make up my lack of sleep.)
Until I stopped nursing I continued to hold onto about 15 pounds. It actually took several months until my weight got down and my chest shrunk back to almost pre-pregnancy. My youngest turned 2 this past Sunday (May 11) and I still can't fit into most pre-pregnancy bras. The last 5 pounds will be whittled away this month if I stick to my exercise guns. ("No, rest time is NOT over, Mommy is still exercising!")
My attitude: I haven't gotten back to my pre-pregnancy weight yet, but I did something that I felt was important for my kids. Now they are a little bigger and I'm ready to do something that is important for me.
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