After birth, your baby still relies on you for nutrients. Without the umbilical cord, it’s a little less immediate, but what you eat mostly determines what you’re giving your baby.

Eating for Two

• Instead of 3 large meals, try to eat 5-6 small meals or snacks each day.
• Since the baby will be waking and sleeping at odd hours, many women find this fits their schedule better anyway.
• You need 200-300 more calories per day than what you ate while pregnant.
• This isn’t a lot of additional food. You can fill these calories easily by:

1. Adding an extra cup of milk and half a sandwich
2. Grabbing a handful of almond and a slice or two of cheese
3. Spreading some apple slices with peanut butter

Can I lose weight and eat like this?

• Nursing a child requires a lot of energy, the same as running about 4-5 miles/day!
• Most women who breastfeed while maintaining a healthy diet will continue to lose ½ to 1 pound per week.

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Pregnancy and delivery can be incredible challenging and yet when your sweet baby is born, your journey as mother takes a new turn. When you make the switch from expectant mother to proud mama, life gets a lot more complicated and what you learn day-to-day and minute-to-minute is incredible.

You think that the hard part, giving birth, was overwhelming, now you have to figure out how to feed this little person while at the same time recovering from birth. You love this baby and you want them to only have the very best, and yet, this is a new skill and you’re probably exhausted. (more…)

New Moms are confronted with a gazillion new things to learn, cope with and react to. Many new moms haven’t spent a lot of time around babies and children, which makes the tsunami of feeding, diapering, sleeping and recovering from childbirth issues overwhelming.

It’s hard to know what to do when there is no magical book that tells you exactly the type of person you are, match it with your baby’s temperament and add in to it all of the unpredictable factors like labor and delivery experience, breastfeeding issues, sleep, crying, spitting up, you name it.

Feed Me – I’m Yours

Feeding babies is a highly emotionally charged experience when you break it down. Some parents worry that the baby is not getting enough to eat and could become sick. Others, worry that the baby is eating too much and will be overweight. All of this is dependent on parent’s own relationships with food, how much their baby weighed at birth, whether they’re growing appropriately on the weight chart. It’s difficult to not obsess about these things. (more…)

I received a question the other day on this website about what feeding options moms have when they are HIV positive.  It’s an amazing question for a few reasons.  The answer really depends upon where in the world the mother lives.

Because breastmilk is a bodily fluid, it can transmit the virus.  There’s evidence that the longer a mom with HIV breastfeeds, the more likely her baby is to get the virus. Transmission can occur from labor and delivery and it also occur from breastfeeding.

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After you give birth, it’s recommended that you wait at least 3 weeks before re-starting the birth control pill, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

This advice is to help decrease the risk of serious complications such as blood clots. I agree, and want to add a bit more information for new moms. I encourage all of my patients to breastfeed their babies for 6-12 months if possible. This is the  recommendation of  the American Academy of Pediatrics. (more…)