Episode 344: Breastfeeding & Fat Loss

Intro:

Welcome to The Healthy Catholic moms podcast where we make moving and nourishing our bodies the priority, so that we not only fulfill our vocations, but excel in our callings. I’m Brittany Pearson, a Catholic wife, mom, personal trainer, and I’m here to help you build healthy habits that actually fit your life. I am here to teach you how to get the results that you want and maintain the results that you want. Without spending hours at the gym, or meal prepping all weekend long. I understand I am right here with you getting my workouts done in the nooks and crannies of time, looking up recipes, while nursing babies and trying to prioritize my own health amidst everything else going on. But I have really good news for you, you can get the results you want. In less time without doing hours of cardio and restrictive dieting, I’m going to teach you how to use strength training and eating in a macro balanced way to get you feeling so good and your skin full of energy, and strong to carry out your life. Okay, on this podcast, we’ll delve into how to lose fat in a simple, sustainable way. What your workouts and nutrition should look like during different seasons of life, like during pregnancy and postpartum times. We’ll also discuss healthy quick meals, and how to get them on the table make food that kids will actually want to eat. Mom hacks for making your day run more smoothly, and so much more. All the while with continuous encouragement to stay the course and live with discipline. This is a place where we’re striving to steward our bodies. Well, in order to joyfully serve. I am so happy you’re here. Let’s dive in.

Main Episode:
Oh, my beautiful friends. Welcome to today’s podcast episode. Thank you so much for being here. And I know today is pretty specific. So I’m assuming that if you clicked on this episode that you are probably either pregnant and looking forward to hopefully breastfeeding or are in the midst of breastfeeding right now or maybe in an in between season where you have previously but we’re just interested, I know that this isn’t gonna apply to everybody. But probably if you clicked play already, it applies to you. So I don’t know if you’re a newer listener here, or if you’ve been here a while. But I personally have breastfed three babies so far. And I am due here early December and anticipating breastfeeding my fourth. So I’m coming at this with not only my own knowledge and research around breastfeeding and fat loss, and workouts and fat loss and postpartum all that I have my prenatal and post natal Specialist Certification for training. So a little bit above and beyond just the generic training. All that obviously I’ve been through it firsthand, been walked to this road with a lot of clients. And I want to just say first and foremost that everybody is very different. There is no one size fits all in anything pregnancy, anything postpartum. Breastfeeding is no exception. I just want to share with you some basics and what I think are, can pretty much be considered not standards, what’s the word? Generalizations for most of us, okay, so that maybe, if especially this is your first pregnancy or your first baby that you’re currently breastfeeding, that you feel like Ah, okay, so this can be expected or this is sometimes typical. Where so for example, when I had my first, all I’d heard of breastfeeding was all breastfeeding makes the fat fly off, like, oh, yeah, you’ve got to breastfeed. That’s how you lose the baby weight. And then anyone I knew who struggled to lose baby baby weight was because they didn’t breastfeed. Now, sometimes that’s the case, okay. Sometimes people do experience rapid fat loss, and they attribute it to breastfeeding. It’s really a hard thing to pinpoint. Because like, is it genetics? Is it just the way is it the baby number, right, I lost my baby weight way faster with the first than I did. But the third, I anticipate the fourth to be the slowest of all it because of so many other factors like that. I’m going to be 32 when I have this fourth baby versus being 26 When I had my first baby, you know, there’s an obviously that’s not even a huge span of time. Did I do the math, right? 20 was like 25 or 26? I don’t know because I’m like, that sounds wrong. This is my fourth child. My oldest is six. So maybe that’s right. Either way, some people have babies in their 20s 30s 40s and have things to get married to stop chatting with a mom the other day, who’s in her 50s but she had a baby and babies and I think she had five total. But she’d had babies and all the decades she actually had had a teenage pregnancy too. So she was like, Yep, I’ve can compare when I was you know, just like I wouldn’t recommend having a baby when you’re 16 But I had one when I was 16. And one when I was 20, some 30 something 40 something. And let me tell you like, they’re all different. So there are so many variables, okay. And yes, like some research can even point to breastfeeding might accelerate fat loss. But then I feel just as much you also the other side of research and an anecdotal research showing you that breastfeeding actually makes you cling to fat. And there’s a lot of research that shows that you cling to a certain amount of fat for your body to be able to produce milk. So everybody’s different. If you fall in either camp, obviously, most of us would prefer to fall in the first camp of experiencing, you know, kind of like an easy weight loss and like, oh, I’ll just breastfeed it’ll come up. But some generally agreed upon number ranges for breastfed moms that’s in most research, most Google searches etc. Is that exclusively breastfeeding moms for just a single baby, we’re not talking twins or triplets here require about 200 to 500 extra calories. Here’s where things already get tricky. The word extra is relative, because maybe you were overeating before. You know, before you even got pregnant. This is the same thing for pregnancy. People say like, oh, you need no extra calories, the first trimester 150 Extra the second trimester and 300 Extra the third trimester, okay, well, what’s extra, because if the person was already eating in a calorie surplus, they don’t really need to hear that and then tack on another 300. And that’s what some people do is like, on and I might as well I had to make flurry to this because I need to eat more for the baby, when really they were already eating. overeating, you know, to begin with. So here two, extra is a relative term. So I personally do not even suggest promote, advertise or practice myself, trying to adhere to a certain amount of calories. What I do promote is dialing in your quality of foods, because that helps us to naturally fall into a good calorie range for our bodies. Now, it’s a little all over the place, because we’re coming off being pregnant and our cravings might be high, and our appetite might be high, and we got to get things back in check. So if we kind of settle into worrying more about quality, about making sure our meals are rounded out with carbs, fat and protein, making sure we’re getting in three to five servings of vegetables a day, this is going to be a lot easier for us to kind of routine eyes and keep the same day to day versus like our calories are going to sway a little bit based on baby’s needs. Like we’ve all been there. This is not your first rodeo where you have cluster feedings, and you’re, it feels like you’re literally been feeding the baby all day or all night and you’re starving, right. But then to think Well, I only need 300 extra calories like it’s it’s all relative. So worry about the quality of food, make sure you’re eating nutrient dense foods. That goes a long way in satiety. So if you, I always use the example of taco salad, like if you eat too small tacos that say equal 500 calories, you might be really hungry again in an hour. But if you eat that same thing, like open it up, put it on a big old taco salad, with the burrito and everything, like you don’t need to scrap anything. But to add a whole bunch of lettuce and make it all 500 calories. Again, you’re gonna be full longer because you ate so much more food, like you got more volume into your stomach for the same amount of calories. So we want to do that we want to make sure we’re not using, you know, our calorie allotment on highly processed foods that make us crave something else and a half hour that run right through us like we want nutrient dense foods. And we want to make sure we’re hitting that vegetable target, we also want to make sure we’re hitting our protein goals. So in general, for most women, I advise hitting 100 grams, to your ideal body weight of protein, in grams. And even just saying it’s pretty safe to say that most people could shoot to clear 100 grams of protein. That’s something that’s going to help here. So this is my personal approach. And truly, this is what I’ve done with all my babies. And what I plan to do for the next one is number one to focus on eating to hunger, eating good foods and staying mostly consistent. So I talked about there being a little variety day to day, that’s going to be normal. But I’m going to try to make sure that what I’m eating is 80% whole clean foods 20% treats, which is the same thing I say to anybody not pregnant or not breastfeeding, making sure I’m prioritizing like sweet potatoes over refined carbs. When I’m looking at what my carbs are. Then I’m prioritizing healthy fats rather than saturated and trans fats like that’s what I want to be doing. So that’s first and foremost. Then number two, I do this through tracking and balancing, what I’m eating, hitting other targets like protein and veg, etc. So I personally don’t typically track right away when I’m postpartum. But sometimes I’ll encourage clients to to make sure that you are in a positive way, like hitting enough of your caloric needs, it’s shouldn’t be the focus at this time should not be on eating in a calorie deficit and then taking in less than we are burning, okay, that could affect your milk supply and things like that. But I have had clients who were like, I just want to see the numbers tracking so that I’m not eating a ton of carbs, and not enough protein and this and that. So if you’re not sure you know what you’re doing in that department, then yeah, definitely track and see the numbers to make sure that you are rounding out what you’re eating, okay, I do not drop calories, or have any of my clients drop calories. So again, if we’re worrying about your milk supply, we’re not trying to slash calories. And make you know, when you’re in a calorie deficit, you usually have a little bit of a pinch where you feel like my am a little bit hungry, I don’t want you to be a little bit hungry when you’re breastfeeding. The goal is to be producing milk for another human, it’s not. And we can have a simultaneous goal of also wanting to get leaner, also wanting to lose our baby weight. But if you’re trying to sustain the life for another human, that’s going to trump getting to your pre baby weight, or what you ideally want now, you know, in a fast manner, it’s not saying you can never get there. But it is true there. Most research says, you hold on to five to 10 pounds, as is the range of what you hold on to an extra five to 10 pounds while producing milk. And that’s still arranged because some people who were like, borderline too thin before might hold on to more body fat. And those of us you know, who had some body fat to give might end up being a smaller size than we were before we were pregnant, right? So that is my truly my approach, I would never tell you anything that I don’t do myself, and I don’t cut calories, I don’t start tracking the day I have the baby. I’m not on this race to get to the scale. Because at this point, I’ve gotten comfortable knowing that there are certain markers that just seem to be more natural. I’ve done a couple other postpartum exercise episodes. So you can go check those out. But I’ve shared before that for me, though, that month, like zero to six months, is like I’ll just lose the weight that pretty much like the baby weighed in, I’ll like I’ll naturally drop that whatever first 10 pounds or something when I come home from the hospital. They’ll weigh myself then and I’m like, okay, that’s I’m down something. But then I don’t expect to see much more until about nine months. Now what this coincides with, for me is my baby, usually picking up on eating a lot more solids. So that’s something to look forward to. And hopefully be encouraged by like, this is not a forever thing. I know a lot of us, though, are like pregnant breastfeeding, pregnant breastfeeding. And it’s hard because we want to get back to feeling like ourselves, and we want to get to a body fat we’re comfortable with. But we’re also not trying to rush it this spur. A lot of you know, you have to take this into being your own consideration and personal decision here. I’ve had friends and clients who have stopped breastfeeding sooner than they thought they would, because they did want to be a healthy weight again before getting pregnant again, because they wanted to have a lot of kids and they knew that to have a healthy pregnancy, they want to be healthy body weight. And that’s all true as well. So we all have different goals and priorities in mind. Just know that it’s not maybe the news you want to hear. But it’s been true for me in my last few pregnancies that before nine months feels a little bit more of an uphill battle besides what naturally comes off. And then
nine to 12 months starts feeling like Ah okay, feel a little bit more myself. And then I personally have weaned each kid right around 11 to 12 months 11 to 13 months, I think the first one I went to like 30 months with and that’s when when they’re totally done. I’m not nursing anymore, that that last five to 10 pounds truly comes off. So it’s like exactly where the what research and data shows has been the case for me. So it’s tough to sit in that sometimes I know I get like that at like six months, which for me this time. I’m doing December. That’s gonna follow right in the middle of summer and I know next this time next year, I’m gonna be like, Man, I’m a trainer. I’m still feeling pudgy here. Like I’m not back to what I the body fit. I like the physique I’m comfortable with. But then I just have to do this kind of gut check of like, alright, well do I want to wean and Go to formula or do I want to, you know, stick this out and know that I just have another couple months and there’ll be a little bit more on solids. And then, you know, this won’t last forever, this too shall pass. So that’s the personal part. But know that, like, everything in between here is very normal. So if your friend or whoever had their first baby dropped all their weight through nursing, that might just be them. That might just be genetics, but it might be the other way around as well. So this is the realistic view of what you can expect. All right, I hope that’s helpful. And if you have any questions, you can email me Brittany to healthy Catholic moms.com or anything to add to this conversation too. If you’re a seasoned mom, and you want to share some things, I would love to hear that I know a lot of people have really rich backgrounds who listen to this podcast and work in these fields and might have something to share here too. So I’d love to hear that. Alright, ladies, I hope you have a great rest of your day. Talk to you next time.

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