Diet when Breastfeeding

Remember, when you are pregnant or when feeding your baby, you need good nutrition; so it is a wrong time to diet. A woman who is feeding her baby needs more calories than a pregnant woman. During pregnancy, a woman needs 300 more calories than she normally would, whereas a woman feeding a baby would need 550 more calories.

A woman feeding a baby should avoid too many spices, since these could give a peculiar smell to her milk, making it repulsive to the baby. She should drink plenty of fluids in any form -- be it milk, soup, lemon juice or buttermilk, to make up for the loss of fluid in milk. Less water does not reduce the amount of milk produced, but it makes the mother’s urine very concentrated and therefore unsafe.

A woman feeding a baby can have a normal non–spicy diet, with greater concentration on pulses, green vegetables and milk.

Our Traditional Recipes
Our traditional recipes (ladoos, dry fruit or mewa, jaggery, or whatever else you can make) contain ingredients that are traditionally believed to be beneficial to a woman who has just delivered a baby. In parts of south India, a woman who has delivered a baby is given water to drink, in which an iron rod has been boiled. This makes it a wonderful iron drink.

The point is to have the traditional recipes in moderation. Eat half or one ladoo with your early morning tea, when you know that activity will follow; or after a period of activity. Do not eat it as pudding after dinner before you go to sleep. That would just make you put on weight. Overeating of anything heavy can make you put on weight.