Weight loss and Breastfeeding – The Basics
We’re delighted you’ve chosen Nature’s best for your baby – you’re giving them a great healthy start in life and they’re worth it!
The Department of Health recommendation is for breastfeeding women not to follow a diet for weight loss until weaning begins. This is because it’s important for mothers to eat enough food to ensure the adequacy of their breast milk.
Diet
The Balance of Good Health, on which our weight loss and healthy eating programmes are based, is equally applicable to you whilst breastfeeding. So, your daily diet (or food intake if you like) should ideally consist of 3 regular meals, and snacks if desired, made up of food in the proportions shown in the Balance of Good Health.
This means plenty of fruit and vegetables, an equal amount of starchy foods (potato, bread, pasta, etc) and smaller portions of meat, fish, eggs, milk, cheese, etc. Cakes, chocolate, biscuits, etc are also permitted but, needless to say, in much smaller quantities than foods from the other groups – especially if you want to lose some weight.
Water
It’s important to listen to your body and respond to thirst, as well as hunger, because this indicates what it actually needs to support breastfeeding. Water forms a large part of breast milk so it’s obviously important to get enough fluid.
Drinking enough, e.g. water, herbal or fruit teas (keeping ordinary tea/coffee to a minimum), squashes, is also necessary to help prevent constipation – common during breastfeeding.
Activity
If you're looking to get back into shape with exercise, as well as watching what you eat, you probably wonder which is the best activity. An enjoyable form of exercise for one person is an absolute 'torture' for another. [GetFit Nutrition] believes that any sort of movement is beneficial in helping lose those pounds.
So, an important question to ask is, what do you enjoy doing? If you enjoy it, you're much more likely to keep doing, and the more you do it the more you'll benefit – sounds simple doesn’t it?
For somebody who has recently given birth, it's important to start off gently and gradually build up the intensity to a level that feels comfortable.
Walking is an excellent activity – it's easy to do, inexpensive, no special equipment required and you can do it any place or time. To get fitter, you would need to walk briskly, but to simply burn calories for weight loss, walking at your own comfortable pace is all you need to do.