Too much foremilk

[bail16]

Hi,

This is my first post so bear with me!
I have a 6 week old daughter who is breast feeding. However, I have a very fast letdown reflex and she is getting a lot of foremilk very quickly, coughing, gagging etc, feeding for 5 mins then coming off asleep and won't go back on. Or she'll come off after 2 mins, frantically try to get back on, get back on and then promptly come off crying and keeps repeating this.
She also has a lot of trouble with wind all day and night long, and really strains to poo or just break wind. She is also quite sick quite often about an hour after a feed.
Her poo is so explosive, frothy, mucousy and about 8-10 times a day. It's made her bottom so so sore, despite using good barrier creams.

I've googled all these causes and it all comes back to fast letdown.
So over the past 2 weeks I've tried feeding her in numerous positions to try to slow down the flow and work against gravity. I've also this week tried pumping before every feed just 20ml to let off a bit of foremilk. But it seems to be getting worse instead of better.

When I have expressed and put it into a Bottle (to give her when she won't feed well from me) out of a 4oz bottle it is pretty much all the watery liquid and just a tiny bit (few mms) of creamy stuff on the top.

I don't really know what else to do now. I'm seriously considering giving formula instead now as I seem to be doing her more harm than good with the breast milk now. She is gaining weight well (was 6lb 2oz and 6weeks later is 9lb 4oz).

Any help/advice would be greatly received!

Thanks and sorry for long post!

bail, this sounds like over-supply to me....happily easily and quickly dealt with in most cases. Fast let down and apparently 'too much foremilk' are the results of over-supply.

No need to give formula.

No need to express.

All you need do is to reduce your supply by feeding on one side only within each time window of (say) four hours. Very difficult over-supply situations need to have a time window of up to six.

Call any of the bf helplines and talk it over with them.
Lots of posts on mumsnet about over-supply as well :)

I had oversupply/fast letdown and block feeding did help.

However, it is normal when you leave expressed milk to settle for it to look watery with just a thin layer of fat at the top, that doesn't mean you have too much fore milk.

I had oversupply too issues too, it was nightmare. I did as tiktok suggested and fed on one side only, then the other. I stopped randomly expressing as this was just making it worse. The more you express, the more you make, the worse the oversupply becomes.

I sorted the cause of my problem which was tongue tie. Over supply is really common for women with tongue tied babies. The baby can overstimulate the breast because if the TT, which us what happened to me. Might be worth ruling this out too