Sensible post partum calorie advice please!

[toothiepegs]

I’ll preface this by saying I tried to do too much too soon, got frustrated and starving (what a surprise) and eventually came round to sensible thinking about my post partum body.

Currently 63.5kg, usually around 60kg and 6 months post partum. I’m breastfeeding but weaning is going well so it’s reducing - still pumping at least twice daily though.

I haven’t lost any weight for the last 6 weeks or so, which is fine - loosely tracking calories but I know I’m not being accurate. However, I’m falling back into bad habits of restricting, then getting hungry then eating sweets/sugar/bites of whatever’s in the cupboard/baking and eating it. I’m aware this is not a healthy attitude to food, there’s no point counting calories because eating like that makes it impossible to do it correctly.

I run 15-20km a week, do 3 half hour HIIT workouts and walk at least 10k steps a day. I would estimate I’m eating around 2k calories on average but some days I suspect this is much much higher.

I need to fix my attitude to food but where’s a good place to start? Calculators put maintenance at 2.6k which seems insane - but then if I’m maybe eating 3k + some days it might be about right? Would 2k give me enough to feel satiated but start losing the last few kilos?

I’m 5’7’’ and 35 if that makes any difference!

Hey! It sounds like your burning off a lot calories, being very active and exercising a lot. Definitely give 2.6 a try and see how you get on. If it stops the being starving then eating all the sweets etc, sounds like you’ll still be on a deficit and eating more healthily. Are you back at work? I found after my first it was all much easier once back there xx

I don’t know how many calories you should eat but you know you need to stop letting yourself get too hungry this is the worst thing to do, it just leads to a binge. Look up hunger satiety scales - you need to keep yourself at a manageable level of hunger to avoid being too hungry or too full.

You could count calories but you aren’t because you want to carry on lying to yourself about what you eat? It’s really hard to spend the time trying to estimate what you need if you aren’t going to count/weigh/measure so I am not sure there is a point working out your TDEE calories, and as you binge/restrict I don’t think fasting sounds good for you either (which is why I can’t do it)

You need to work out what’s the lesser of the evils and pick a way to work out what to do if you do want to lose weight. You can do neither but all options involve being honest with yourself about the snacking

Hi both! This was a year ago - in the year since, my body had some mad autoimmune crisis, I developed alopecia universalis (still absolutely nothing) and severe joint pain and I am now starting from scratch. It’s made me quite sad to read how desperate I was to get back to being ‘me’ because now I am so disconnected to how I look and so far away from where I was then that I wish I’d just enjoyed it. I do wonder if trying to do too much too soon had any impact on this too - maybe not eating enough, exercising too much whilst breastfeeding and not sleeping.