Is it true that you lose weight from breast feeding?

I'm currently 17weeks pregnant with my first child. I've been told that mothers lose a considerable amount of weight while breast feeding their babies. Or does it only depend on the person?

You can but it still depends on what you put in your mouth. To have a good milk supply you need to eat a little more and it needs to be high in nutrition. What it will do is help your uterus contract back to it's normal size which means you'll loose your post pregnant belly quickly.

This is an interesting topic and I am happy to share some comments on it.

There is a certain truth on this statement and here are the rationales behind:

Mother nature has equipped a pregnant woman to be able to breast feed earlier than the baby is born. Hormonal changes inside the body results in fat deposition in the body. This fat layer serves as a rich source of energy required for breast milk production in the future. On average a lactating woman produces about 700g to 850g of milk daily during the first siixmonths postnatal for exclusively breastfed infant (Buttle, Lopez_Alarcon and Garza, 2002). In order to produce that quantity of milk, she needs around 640 to 780 Kcal / day. Compare to the recommended amount of energy deficit (300-500 Kcal per day) for healthy weight loss, one can quickly see that breast feeding does used up quite a tremendous amount of energy, which in term aids in postnatal weight management. So, she is naturally using up the energy from that fat deposit to produce milk whereas for mom who doesn’t breast feed will need to work harder in order to get rid of it, through diet control and exercise.

However, it is important to bear in mind that a lactating woman should not concentrate mainly on the weight loss part that she reduces her food intake drastically while she is breast feeding. She still needs to consume the right amount of energy and nutrients in order to produce good quality milk for the health of her baby.


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