Take the Guesswork Out Of Weight Loss After Pregnancy With A Little Math And Some Breast Feeding

Losing Weight After Pregnancy

If you’ve just become a mom you might be among those who gained some weight, perhaps even up to 50lbs more throughout the duration of your pregnancy. It can be hard enough losing weight, but weight gain associated with pregnancy usually seems twice as hard to get rid of.

This may be attributed to a variety of reasons – including but not limited to that constant feeling of hunger you may experience particularly if you had problems keeping down your food before your little one got evicted :).

Still breastfeeding and or exclusive pumping can turn out to be one of your greatest helps in postpartum weight loss if you want to melt that fat and return to your usual weight in no time.

If the lactation specialist told you that a benefit of breastfeeding is weight loss, don’t scoff at the idea because it has some merit. I was skeptic but after hitting my college weight after two weeks of breastfeeding, I’m sold.

How Breast Feeding and Weight Loss are Correlated

So here is how it works: you are bound to lose about 10lbs that accounted for the baby, the placenta and the amniotic fluid. It is said that you lose an extra 300-500 calories per day while breastfeeding.

If your little one is feeding at least every two hours that’s between 2100-3500 calories per week! Plus that doesn’t even account for the calories your body will burn while making the milk :).

Now for every one ounce of breast milk you burn 20 calories, so what you can do is calculate how much your baby drinks each feeding time and multiply it by 20 to figure out how many calories you lose each day.

 If you breastfeed exclusively it can be hard to calculate and track the calories you are burning to ensure you monitor your food intake correctly, so you can express some milk and see how many ounces will satisfy your little munchkin.

An electronic pump can be a big help since you can express and freeze your milk for months, and each time you pump you’ll be able to measure your calorie output.

Nutritionists suggest that a safe rate of weight loss is ½ – 1lb per week. In order to lose ½ lb you would need to burn 1750 calories for the week.

This then makes it easier to maximize your weight loss. You would just need to decide how many pounds you want to lose and pump out that amount in calories day by day until you hit your goal.

One thing though, haphazard feeding or pumping won’t yield the results you seek because the secret to this is that you put your body to work each time it has to produce the good stuff.

This being said, this must either breastfeed and/pump regularly to get your body to burn those calories. Now that you know how it works and how to calculate it, happy feeding!