weight loss: bad feeder/low milk supply?

[fififlores]

hello, my baby's two months old and seems to have a weight problem. i'm hoping someone can give me some advice/suggestions.

he was 3.45kg when born, then dropped to 3kg at 2.5 weeks, and climbed back up, reaching birthweight at 6 weeks. In the meantime, the pedaitrican said to give him formula - i did 2 bottles a day, 10am & 10pm, the rest breastfeeds (usually 4/5) and pumping after bottle, to keep milk supply up and top up feeds with EBM when neccessary.

when he got back to 3.5kg, I dropped the morning bottle. now he hasn;t put on weight for the last 2 weeks, so i;m back on the 2 bottles, pumping etc.

he's a bad (sleepy/slow/inefficient) feeder - some times latches well, sometimes not - i;ve tried all the opening mouth/waking up tricks.

but i don;t know if maybe my supply isn;t good - short of talking fenugreek and feeding him as often as possible, does anyone have any experience they can offer re weight loss/bad feeding/increasing milk supply (i saw the post re a nutricious s'wich lunch, so will trying that!)?

Or should I just stop stressing out so much,give it up as a bad job and switch to bottles - feeling so disheartened right now! but i love breastfeeding him, and i know i;d be gutted to stop - but is there any point, if it;s not giving him what he needs? thanks.

Do you always offer him both breasts at a feed? It may be a good idea to offer him three or four sides for the time being (put him back on the first side again when you've finished the second, etc.)

I think your best bet, given you want to keep breastfeeding, is to do a babymoon take to bed with him for as much of a couple of days as possible, strip down for lots of skin-to-skin and feed him a lot as often as possible. I don't know if yoy've got other children or commitments that would make that difficult, though.

I hope tiktok or mears or another expert will be along tomorrow to give you some more expert advice.

Bumping in case anyone better-qualified is around...

thanks lemonaid. i;d been planning to stay home anyway, cancelled going to a mate's house for lunch. i fed him all morning in bed (6, 8, 10am) but he was still hungry, so gave him a bottle. now screaming with colic (?) so taking dog out as being in baby bjorn usually sends him off to sleep! i hate it when it's dog walk/calm baby OR lunch - i'm starving, but woudl rather have a calm baby!!

luckily no commitments to prevent me from concentrating on him - just turned down down offer of freelance work i could have done at home - and i never turn down work! want to get this sorted out.

yes, i do both boobs, as long as i think he;s had enough from teh first. prob is he's v slow - abotu 30-50 mins on each, and sometimes an hour or more.

Hmmmmm....as ever the best way to increase supply is to feed more often. Is this possible? Have you got any bf support groups nearby? Have you got a health visitor or breastfeeding counsellor you can contact - or have you tried the bf helplines?

I had the same problems in that I wasn't producing enough milk to feed my daughter and her weight was dropping fast. My midwife was great, but said you have to do something as she is starving. We switched to bottle feeding straight away and I did give some expressed milk when i could. I know what you mean I felt a failure, but at the end of the day it is more important that your baby gets what it needs and grows big and strong, it's not important where it comes from. I would never put myself under the amount of stress that I did when she was born, by trying to breast feed and express and bottle feed all at once, I barly had time to eat!!

Fifi,

I had a similar problem too. I tried everything and nothing worked. I finally saw a lactation consultant who identified that dd wasn't latched on properly and wasn't able to empty my breasts, therefore my milk supply was getting worse by the day.

There's an amazing free breastfeeding clinic in John Radcliffe Hopsital in Oxford that I went to as well. Between the lactation consultant and the Oxford clinic, I learnt the right way to get my dd latched and she started putting on weight. She was 3 months old before she started gaining weight.

Single pumping didn't work for me. In the end I got a hospital-grade double pump to boost the milk supply and that worked for me.

My dd was 3.46 kg, went down to 2.9 kg after a week, and finally regained birth weight at 5 weeks. I was told to top up with bottles at every feed as I wasn't producing enough milk. But it was a vicious cycle, the more bottles she took the less interested she was in bf. In the end, I made the really difficult decision to take her off the bottle at 6 weeks and she wasn't gaining much weight until she was about 3 months old as it took a long time for me to rebuild my milk supply.

I had been told by community midwives that my baby was latching on properly and that I had a milk supply problem.

I had telephone advice from bf counsellors at La Leche, I took fenugreek and I fed dd 2 hours at a stretch many times a day.

If you can get to the Oxford clinic, I would highly recommend it.

Apologies for the really long post.

I'm sure you are producing enough milk, however it sounds like you may benefit from improving the quality - if you are allowing DS as much access to the breast as he requires ?

This time round I am making a BIG effort to eat more protein - tendancy to veggie food. I make sure I have breakfast, a milky coffee (decaf), for lunch something with protein (tuna/egg/avocado) then something, perhas yogurt &/or milky coffee mid afternoon. Tea is also protein (fish/prawns) . DD2 is 19 weeks & again about 6 oz a week & generally sleeps through the night since about 10 weeks.

I know there is lots of talk about quality of food not impacting milk, I disgree as have found it to make a HUGE difference - you can but try

just noticed you have said you are starving - hope you've managed to get some food inside you !

Mojo - truly, you cannot make any difference to your milk quality by eating differently/better.

Please don't perpetuate this myth - it's not helpful to mothers. It's great you felt it made a difference to your baby, and I am all in favour of mothers eating delicious, healthy foods, but it is not possible for your tuna and avocado sarnies to translate into better quality milk. This is biology, pure and simple - it just doesn't work like that. If you want to know more, you can search the archives where I have posted links that explain this.

You say you are 'sure' fifi is producing enough milk - how can you be sure of this?

Hi Tiktok, I thought you might have something to say about my comment - how do you know it doesn't make a difference ? I know the talk of starving women feeding their babies, but those babies don't really thrive (otherwise there wouldn't be starving babies)

I believe there is an impact on what a lactating mother eats & until I read a specific study indicating otherwise, I make sure I eat regulary & in accordance with what I wrote earlier.

Hi Mojomummny - MrsRecycle here - how are you? I just wanted to back you up. I've been having problems with ds1 putting on only 1oz in 3 weeks. It coincided with a time of me trying to lose weight and not eating much. After reading about oats on mumsnet, I started to have some porridge in the morning and also stopped my diet. The result was ds1 has put on 4oz in 1 week. He has also started sleeping through the night.

He has completely fallen off the growth chart but he was a small baby anyway so really doesn't have much space for lee-way on the chart. But he is happy and contented.

Also, I after eating porridge, the next day I expressed (only express when ds1 is asleep) 5oz in 5 minutes - compared to the 3oz in 20 minutes I regularly did at the same time every day. Okay I know expressing shouldn't be compared to proper latch on but this is MY personal experience.

How do I know?

Because I have read the considerable scientific literature about this, and I have some personal knowledge of work in this area (with mothers who are poorly nourished).

I am not talking about mothers who are literally starving - the ones dying through lack of food. They are usually not able to make enough milk (quantity, not quality) for their babies to thrive.

It's not the thread to go on and on and on about this - if you are open to learning more, than start a new thread and I will post some links

I also found that if I was skipping meals, I had less milk. In my personal experience, eating slow burn food (ie a big bowl of oats porridge for breakfast) and lots of protein ( 2 eggs and a serving of meat per day) helped keep the milk flowing. I think that had to do with the fact that I have a high metabolic rate anyway.

There is some evidence that quantity of breastmilk can be increased with so-called 'galactogogues' inc. herbs and carbs, and porridge is often mentioned with positive results. Nowt wrong with porridge!

Mojo was talking specifically about 'quality', and in fact she said she was sure that 'quantity' was not an issue (not sure how she was sure, but......!)

My response was based on that.

dear MARFC, thanks for your post - not too long for me!! i would love to go the john radcliffe clinic but can't as i live in spain! have been in touch with bf counsellors in uk by email, who advised frequent feeding to build up supply, and also staying in bed with him, both of which i've tried. today he has been tugging away all day without latching on properly, despite me trying to put him on zillions of times, changing his position, my position, windingm, changing nappy, etc etc. Now my husband's giving him a bottle - he was starving, poor little sausage.

i am almost thinking of coming back early for xmas so i can get some decent advice - but maybe it;ll be too late by then and i'll have given up! there's an organisation here, but it's very anti-bottles, so i;m apprehensive about approaching people who will already condemn me. there;s also an english midwife i contracted for the first month, so i'll ask her to come round & try&help.

not sure about the diet thing as i generally eat ok - fruit/yogurt/jam sarnie/all bran for breakie, cheese or tuna salad sarnie for lunch and fresh fish & veg (cooked by hubby!) for dinner with loads of fresh&dried fruit in between, and lots of seeds&sprouts. obviously there are days when all that doesn;t happen (tho the sarnies is reliably quick&easy).

Hi tiktok - agree this is not the place

Would enjoy & be very interested in discussing this further - although concerned that if I opened a thread it might get out of hand ? perhaps there is some other way.

Ref the I'm sure abou the milk -that had been covered by other posters so I was just offering my thoughts & experience on the weightloss/bad feeding (did anyone mention tongue tie ?)

Would it be possible for you to see a breastfeeding specialist in Spain? If your lo has trouble latching on properly like my dd did, I think that would probably be most helpful.

La Leche in Spain might be able to recommend someone if you don't know where to look. I actually saw a lactation consultant in Malaysia while I was there visiting family. She has IBCLC accreditation and was excellent.

I found their Spanish site for you. This is it.

hth

Thanks for the link. La Leche don;t have a group in my area, annoyingly. I will try the scary anti-bottle people, at least they should be able to help with my latch (though this being Spain, I;ve now left 3 phone messages and never been called back!). This evening he latched on really well, then wouldn;t suck properly!! Bloody nora, it really is something else, this breastfeeding lark!

Yeah, bf is a bi*. Nobody tells you it's this hard when they tell you about the benefits of breast. Best of luck with the scary people. Let us know how you get on.

Just an anecdote re: what you eat affecting breast milk... mine definitely didn't feed well if I'd had curry the previous evening. Don't know if it had any effect on the quality, but they didn't seem to appreciate the taste.

And fififlores - don't be disheartened. Lots of people have trouble with bf. And don't worry too much about gaining weight every single week - lots of bf babies tend to be a bit leaner than their ff counterparts.

your baby sounds a lot like my daughter... i was covered in scratches from her fussing at the breast and she didn't put back on her birth weight until she was 6 weeks old.

i tried:

babymooning
switch feeding
fenugreek
fennel
guinness
domperidone (seasickness drug with lactation as side effect, it helped a bit actually)
feeding constantly
pumping with a hospital grade machine
something they recommend at the oxford clinic which is to commit to pumping with the hospital grade pump every two hours for 48 hours (every 3-4 at night). dh does the feeds. can help kickstart lactation again esp if used in conjunction with domperidone, i was told. it did help a bit, actually.
drinking more milk
eating porridge
if you are feeling short of practical advice i would also google dr jack newman as there is some really good advice on his website along with some video clips of good latches.
cranio-sacral therapy, this would have helped DD i think if we'd got there earlier

i'm sure there was more, actually, but it's all faded a bit... please note that my 'strategy' to increase my supply really amounted to taking every piece of half-baked advice that i was offered and doing it until the next piece of contradictory half-baked piece of advice came along, so i can't say from a medical perspective if any of the things i've suggested have any merit.

i managed to mix-feed til 5 months, i'm glad i did i must say. (although i do wish that once i was happy with dd's weight i'd done more babymooning and held back on giving her the formula and ebm, cos i was filling her up with it i think. again NO IDEA if this is medically recommended, and it occurred to me too late to try it.)

a big part of me thinks that mix-feeding screwed up my BF, but there were lots of other factors too. try the jack newman thing, deffo. good luck and congratulations on your lovely new baby (who will be fine, you know, if this all doesn't work out for you both.)

'covered in scratches' sounds a bit wussy... i had to put a plaster on one of them. god she really was a PITA feeder. it's all such a blur now, i'm delighted to say.

I reeally feel embarrassed about contributing to a thread and contradicting what other posters say.....but fortyplus, what you say about breastfeeding babies is just not correct. Breastfed babies in the early weeks tend to be heavier, not lighter, than formula fed babies. The gap - when bf babies are lighter than ff babies - starts to emerge after about six months. The typical bf baby gains weight quickly at first and then slows down.

It's good to encourage fifi, but when it comes to her baby's weight, she is right to see it as a concern and to try to address it. This is a 2 mth old baby who is no bigger than he was at birth and this is not a good sign.

Just to clarify: I don't say that what you eat does not affect breastmilk - my point was that there is no evidence at all that what you eat can improve the quality of breastmilk. This has been studied.

I still think this is better discussed on another thread.