Nutrition, Exercise, and Weight Loss While Breastfeeding

by Anne Smith, IBCLC

Most mothers are highly motivated to eat a nutritious diet during their pregnancies. Assuming that you ate an adequate diet while you were pregnant, you can produce plenty of milk for your baby by keeping up this motivation and making sure that you continue your healthy eating patterns during lactation. While you should attempt to eat a "good diet" while you are nursing, you need to be aware that your diet doesn't have to be perfect in order to support lactation. You can still breastfeed even if your diet is less than ideal. You may be surprised to learn that studies have shown that maternal nutrition has only a minor effect on the composition and quantity of breastmilk produced. Usually, unless a mother is severely malnourished, her milk is fine. Mothers whose diets are poor deplete their own energy levels, and may become anemic, but their bodies will continue to produce the milk their baby needs by pulling from the mother's energy stores at her expense, but not her baby's. Most women in this country don't suffer from a lack of food, but rather from eating too much of the wrong kinds.

There are no special dietary rules to follow during lactation. If your eating habits are fairly healthy, there is no reason to change them while you are nursing. There are no special foods to avoid, or certain foods that you need to eat (like milk) in order to produce a plentiful supply of nutritious breastmilk. With rare exceptions, nursing mothers can eat pretty much anything they want to eat - including chocolate, broccoli, pizza, and diet soda - in moderation. Some dieticians and lactation experts feel that one advantage to breastfeeding may be that the milk is flavored by the foods the mother eats, so the baby becomes used to a variety of taste sensations, and tends to have fewer feeding problems as he gets older. One famous study showed that when mothers ate lots and lots of garlic, their milk tasted and smelled like garlic. Not only did the babies who drank the milk not have any digestive problems, but they actually preferred the garlicky milk over the unflavored milk. Think about it - women in South America who eat lots of peppers, or women in India who eat lots of curry don't have babies any more colicky or fussy than babies in the U.S. You've probably heard that eating "gassy" foods like cabbage, beans, or broccoli will make your baby gassy. I believe that this is one of many "old wive's tales", because gas is produced when bacteria in the intestine interact with the intestinal fiber. Neither gas nor fiber can pass into breastmilk, even when you have gas.

Although it is possible for a baby to be sensitive to a food in his mother's diet, he is much more likely to react to a food given to him directly. I suspect that most mothers who swear that they can't eat (pizza, Mexican food, broccoli, cabbage, beans, chocolate, etc.) while they are nursing are actually overreacting to their baby's normal behavior on any given day. There is a natural tendency for every nursing mother to attribute every little thing her baby does to nursing. ALL babies have days when they are gassy, fussy, and spit up. Some babies have sensitive digestive systems, and no matter what you feed them, they will experience bouts of intestinal upsets. The one thing you can be sure of is that there is nothing you can put into a sensitive infant's stomach that will be easier to digest than breastmilk.

When you are nursing, you start to think "...he's so gassy today...must be something I ate...yep, I had pizza for dinner last night...that must be it. I can't eat pizza from now on." When taken to extremes, this sort of thinking can lead to a diet of nothing but boiled chicken and polished rice.