For the past five months I’ve used one excuse to deny myself absolutely nothing. An extra slice of pizza? My kids’ hot dogs? Halloween candy? “It’s OK,” I’ve said. “I’m nursing!”
I was under the impression that nursing was something like liposuction. With how much the baby is nursing, surely she’s sucking the fat cells from my body, right?
But recently I learned that nursing is no reason to go crazy at the buffet—quite the opposite, in fact. I need to make sure I’m filling up on the right kinds of foods in order to properly nourish the baby. And, to my chagrin, I learned that my ravenous appetite has nothing to do with the voluminous amounts of breast milk I’m producing.
For a nursing nutrition reality check, I connected with Frances Largeman-Roth, the senior food and nutrition editor at Health magazine, author of Feed the Belly: The Pregnant Mom’s Healthy Eating Guide, and, most famously (to me), the inventor of the Better Than Elvis milkshake. (My review of her book is here.)
As a nursing mother herself, Largeman-Roth sympathized with my ravenous appetite and gave some recommendations regarding my diet.
“If you’re breast-feeding exclusively, you’re burning up to 500 calories a day,” she says.
And what should I eat for those extra 500 calories? It turns out that pepperoni pizza and chocolate chip cookie dough didn’t make the cut. Go figure.
Next page: What I should be eating
Comments (1)
Holy moly–I am ravenous while nursing. Even now with a 10.5 month old baby that nurses exclusively while eating table food! Like you, I crave high sugar, high fat foods. While they are not the healthiest choices, I find that my baby prefers the fatter, sweeter milk. He is never satisfied when I eat salads. Perhaps I already have trained him to have bad eating habits! I will try to substitute a few more eggs to satisfy my cravings. Thanks for the tip!