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Breastfeeding helps you to lose weight? Not if you eat like a 17st darts player
Yesterday morning a weary Jane Garvey dutifully dedicated a large chunk of Woman?s Hour to National Breastfeeding Week. The conversation was dreary: medical benefits, the difficulties facing midwives, cuts, rights of the baby, bonding, evils of formula milk, yadda yadda. I had to make myself two strong coffees just to stay awake.
And yet, breastfeeding is a lively issue, as evidenced by several impassioned e-mails sent in by listeners. Women at that stage in their lives are obsessed with it: how to do it, when to do it, which is the best nipple cream (Kamillosan), do cabbage leaves work on sore breasts (not in my experience) and how to maximise milk production (fennel tea).
I should say at this point that I was lucky. I gave birth to two greedy little monkeys who knew exactly how to find their way to the feeding station. Our house was like a full-blown dairy in the first weeks and months of their lives.
But the thing is this. There were times when I really wanted to give my children formula milk. Times when I longed to have a few hours off from being half cow, half woman, reclaim a bit of dignity and leave the house in an underwired bra. And that, for the breastfeeding lobby, is bad.
The scenario that the breastfeeding zealots (or, as Myleene Klass described them yesterday, the Breastapo) like to paint for anyone even contemplating the bottle is nothing short of apocalyptic. New mothers are extremely vulnerable, often quite fearful creatures, and Breastapo strategy is to exploit this, ruthlessly. Favourite sticks with which to beat new mothers include:
If you don?t breastfeed your baby will get sick through lack of antibodies. Mmm. My son regularly drank his own weight in breastmilk and still contracted a very nasty infection at the age of four months. If it hadn?t been for our brilliant GP, who diagnosed mastoiditis (inflammation of a bone behind his ear), who knows where we?d be today. The sanctimonious health visitor who frowned at my back-up packets of Aptamil certainly didn?t spot the problem.
Mixed feeding (bottle and breast) is bad. No it?s not, it?s the key to being able to breastfeed for longer. Women are supposed to breastfeed until their babies are at least six months old, right? Fine. But there?s a big difference in the amount of milk that a three-week-old needs and the amount a strapping five-month-old can put away. A bit of top-up formula can make all the difference between a few hours? peace and the howling void of insanity that is a hungry baby.
Breastfeeding helps you to lose the ?baby weight?. Not if you develop the eating habits of a 17st darts player to produce enough milk. Habits that tend to stay with you rather longer than you?d planned.
Breastfeeding helps you to bond with your baby. True. But it can also give you dreadful udder brain ? imagine having really bad PMT all the time, coupled with a chronic inability to find the house keys. That was my experience of it, anyway. When I stopped, it was like a thick fog had finally cleared.
The fact is, breastfeeding is a vital part of being a mother, but some women struggle. Just because something is natural doesn?t mean that it?s easy: look at childbirth. If the breastfeeding lobby stopped being so stubbornly prescriptive, they would have a much better chance of achieving their goal ? to get the majority of babies on the breast. As it is, they just make me ? and many others ? want to switch off