Bfing making me eat like a pig...help!

[Lizzzombie]

Help, I am constantly hungry. I know that you are allowed 500 extra calories a day if you breast feed but I am sure I am going over that. I am literally binging and could carry on eating all day.

I've tried drinking more water (in case its thirst disguised as hunger) but I am still hungry. I am terrified that I am going to wake up one morning the size of a house!

So far I have eaten today:
A HUGE bowl of shreddies
A banana
3 chocolate digestives
1 round of cheese & salad sandwiches
1 pack of salt n shake crisps (without the salt)
1 round of peanut butter sandwiches
1 marmite & cream cheese wrap
1 chunky kit kat
half a large dairy milk bar
1 pot activia yoghurt
Half a chocolate brownie
most of a celery, dipped in cottage cheese - in a vain effort to fill up on something vaguely healthy.

Am still hungry.
Has anyone else experienced this level of hunger whilst breast feeding?

DD is 3 months and I am not sure if my wallet can sustain my huge appetite!
DS is 4 yo and was BF for 6 months and I am sure I didn't binge this much with him.

So pleased I've found this thread :o
I never had this feeling with any of my other dc, but I piled on weight when pg. This time I weighed less the day after I had Ds than I did before being pg with him, but bloody he'll, I'm making up for it now
even after a full meal I'm craving something for my chocolate stomach!
Pleased to hear this is normal.

Try drinking more (not alcohol!).

Well known link between increase in thirst and BF, and people often mistake thirstiness for hunger.

Just a thought.

I myself am currently munching on Maltesers and crisps.....but I gave up BF 4 years ago

Me too! Not so much grazing as hoovering. Last night I ate all my tea and sent dh out to get me pudding. A whole syrup sponge and custard. I ate the lot, it was yummy! Had sausage, chips and curry sauce for my lunch.

oh eyebrowqueen I love your link! Have been feeling like a freak with my consumption of even more enormous quantities than usual of chocolate and biscuits.

I'm BFing 3 week old DD2 - I get hunger rage - If I don't eat as soon as hunger strikes I get sooo mad and irritable - grrrr!

Same here, I try to eat sensible stuff like cereal and scrambled egg on toast etc, but invariably scoff choc and biscuits too! Mind you if I don't eat high cal foods I lose too much weight (even before I got preg or ebf) I stopped eating choc once for 3 weeks and ate nuts and crackers and fruit instead and dropped from 8 stone to 7. Everyone kept saying they were worried about me and how was I eating properly. I got fed up of telling people I was the healthiest I'd ever been! Classic case of people getting worried if you don't weigh enough, which I am keen to avoid while ebf. Just dreaming about eating a whole chocolate orange!

I ate loads when bfing but didn't cut down when DS started to drop feeds cos I was just so used to stuffing my face. Not surprisingly I put on loads of weight! & annoying I didn't manage to pick up the habit of drinking loads of water...strange that...

OP: you need to change what you are eating if you want to feel less starving and not pile up the pounds. Sorry if this is a bit blunt, but it is true.

I know BF makes us all hungry (am breastfeeding ravenous 13-month-old who has doubled his feeds in the last month, so I do know), but if you continue eating what you are eating now you will end up not losing any of the baby weight, or losing it much more slowly than you would eating sensibly.

FWIIW, this is what I do:

1. have 5 meals a day (breakfast, mid-morning and mid-afternoon snack, lunch, dinner)

1. do not eat outside those meals unless absolutely impossible not to

1. if I do feel like something in between the 5 meals, then have an apple or a banana, followed by a glass of milk. Wait 15 minutes. If still hungry (rather than just fancying something), then have tea and 1-3 biscuits (count them out on a plate rather than sit with the box)

1. Although it is difficult in the early days, force yourself to sit down at the table and focus on what you are eating (no tv, no books, no telephone, no mumsnet) and savour it.

1. If you fancy something you know you should not eat (biscuits, cake, chocolate, other junk) it might help to ask yourself whether you really fancy it long term (on your hips) and/or whether you are happy for the baby to eat the by-products of it.

1. Have lots of healthy food that you like in the freezer or in the fridge. In the early days I had lots of thos innnocent vegetable pots for lunch- they are not brilliant, but do the job and are very filling, so did not risk wanting anything else on top. Also used to make a large batch of soup every week and freeze it in single portions that could go from freezer to plate in 5 minutes.

1. Buy yourself nice healthy food and healthy treats. No idea what you like, obviously, but in my case it meant having a fresh loaf of bread every day (luckily DH likes baking), lots of dried strawberries for when I needed something sweet to much and easily put together meals (eg mashing up avocado and ricotta, add a little lemon, salt and pepper and spread on fresh bread, adding smoked salmon if you like).

1. You need protein, good fats (olive oil, avocado, nuts), dairy food and complex carbohydrates (pasta, bread, rice) or you will not feel full. The trick is to measure out portions (e.g. a standard portion of pasta weighs 80-90gr when dry) and make sensible choices (150grams of ricotta are much better than 100 gr of camambert).

Adapt to suit your taste and keep the medium and long term aims in mind when making food choices. Otherwise, you risk resenting your baby when he is 18 months or so and you are still not back to where you want to be. Also, it is much easier to lose weight when breastfeeding then afterwards, so might as well do it when it is easy.

FWIIW, in my case ate as much as I wanted of the above and lost about 0.5kgs per week over the first3-4 months (anything more than that is apparently not good for either mother or baby) and then went a bit slower. Was back to pre-baby weight when DS was 9 months and am now below it (though still eating all I want).

Ah, one final thing: although it is difficult with winter babies, try to go out every day. Walking with the pram is a good way of using up some calories and being in the sun (even when it is overcast) helps you secrete hormones than make you feel happier and less hungry. It is good for the baby too and they sleep a lot better as well.

PS it might also help to go out to a park or other open space rather than the high street, so that it is not convenient to stop and have something in a cafe if you feel hungry. Take bottle of water and healthy snack instead (maybe apple or banana?) so that you are tempted to stop and eat you can distinguish between true hunger/thirst (for which what you have brought with you will do fine) and the wish for cake/cappuccino/whatever.

Just another "I'm glad it's not just me!" response here. I've put a post-it note reading "HAVE A CUP OF TEA INSTEAD" on the biscuit tin, which has worked for nearly a fortnight. But now I'm sick of drinking de-caf and peppermint teas. I want chocolate Hobnobs.

Lots of good advice here. Try to eat protein and complex carbs when you can rather than binging on sugar etc - easier said than done, I know.

But to a certain extent just make the most of it - I got more and more ravenous as my EBF 91st centile baby approached 6 months, but now at 7 months he is eating three meals a day (though still BFing 7 times a day!) and the ravenous, demolish-a-pack-of-biscuits-every-afternoon hunger has really eased off. What a shame! I am having to watch what I eat now to make sure I don't carry on my former eating habits and put loads of weight on (am back to pre-preg weight though could still do with losing half a stone or so).

First of all, you are 'allowed' to eat as much as you want! You're an adult and there are no Food Police rules. If you're hungry, eat. Having said that, it really isn't necessary to eat an 'extra' 500 cals while breastfeeding. Your milk will be absolutely fine regardless, and as long as you eat sensibly and reasonably healthily, so will you. SuiGeneris has some great advice. (Though hard to implement once you're embedded into the Biscuit Zone! As I know to my cost...)

I just ate whatever I fancied with DS1, which was EVERYTHING, and actually started putting weight back on while bf. After 2 years of that, it took WW to shift a stone or so. With DS2 now, I am starting to slip back down that slope and the cupboard has about 4 different types of biscuits in. I'm going to try to stick to SuiGeneris's very sensible tips and try to keep on track.