How important is diet whilst BF?

[Kmxxx14]

My DD is 4.5 months EBF. Since having her I'm really struggling with my diet. During pregnancy I was really strict as I wanted to be as healthy as possible for my growing baby. Now she's here I just don't have the energy to focus on my diet. I'm craving junk food (chocolate) incrediblely bad. I also find myself turning to fast food as I'm often so tired at the end of the day.

I take a multivitamin with vitamin d.

So how important is diet during BF? I don't drink alcohol (I have once or twice whilst BF but it's very very rare) and I don't do anything bad. I feel having a tea and chocolate is something I look forward to to get me through my day. But I obviously don't want to be harming my baby by giving her poor quilty milk.

An example of my diet
Breakfast - shreddies and tea
Snack - biscuit and tea
Lunch - ham rolls and chocolate
Snack - banana and biscuit
Dinner - chicken potatoes and veg/takeaway once or twice a week
Snack - pancakes/biscuits/scones/sweets

I know the nutritional value isn't great so what's your thoughts?

Your body prepares during pregnancy for the fact that you may not be getting adequate nutrition after the birth by laying down fat stores to use up during this time. Nutrition now is as important to you as at any other time in your life, but to your baby it'll make no difference in terms of the nutrition they receive from your breastmilk. There was a large scale study done which compared the nutritional content of breastmilk from mothers on a nutritionally poor African diet to mothers on a nutritionally rich western diet. The nutritional content was practically identical.

Thanks - that makes me feel less guilty about my current diet. I will be tackling it soon but I'm surviving on such lack of sleep that I'm craving sugar like never before.

I think your diet sounds fine. As pp said, your milk will be excellent quality anyway.

You can have the odd drink whilst breastfeeding, it won't do any harm.

If you are worried, eat more veg along with the carbs and the chocolate.

Diet is virtually irrelevant to breastfeeding :)

The quality of milk is pretty consistent, no matter what you eat,. If you ate chronically under-nourished over a period of time, and rarely go outside, then it might be low in Vitamin D, but there's no evidence that any other component is at risk.

Quantity of breastmilk only suffers if the mother is not feeding often enough to maintain production, or if the baby is not feeding effectively. This is not an issue with a baby who is growing well. Mothers who are literally starving like those poor mothers in Yemen we have seen on the news this week will have problems maintaining a milk supply, but again, this is not an issue with mothers in the UK.

Your diet is fine. Have sugar if you want - it makes zero difference to your milk. Nothing wrong with moderate alcohol intake, either :)