121. Breastfeeding and Nutrition with guest Caroline Conneen from Mother's Best

Do you ever feel ravenous when you’re breastfeeding? Or so thirsty you could down 30 ounces in one sitting? What about those last 5-10 pounds that seem to “hang on” until you wean your baby? My guest today is a lactation consultant and registered dietician. She's talking about breastfeeding as it relates to appetite, weight, and metabolism.

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Read the full transcript here: 

Welcome to the Breezy Babies podcast where we talk about all things boobs, babies and breastfeeding. This is Episode 121, Breastfeeding and Nutrition. I'm breath the IBCLC and I made Breezy Babies with you in mind to help ease your transition into parenthood. Becoming a parent changes your life every way imaginable. Bumps in the road are going to come up as you move into your new role, but my goal is to help smooth out those bumps and help you become the most confident parent you can be. With good education and support, I know you can meet your breastfeeding and parenting goals. Let's do this together. Hey there friends. So good to be with you today for the podcast episode. I tried to record this podcast episode a little bit earlier today when my baby is normally napping, but she decided she did not want to nap so she's finally down. But it's also early out for my big kids, so you may hear them a little bit in the background as I'm recording this today. But that's just how my life goes sometimes, right? Kind of feel like it's now or never. So I am excited to bring you this topic today about breastfeeding and nutrition. I actually have a guest who's going to be sharing with you today, so if my kids are too loud, then luckily you'll just be hearing mostly from her today. Anyway, before we start though, I want to read you a review. And this is a review for Breezy Babies, but it is not specifically for me. It is actually about Alex who is on my team. She is an IBCLC who also lives in Northern Utah and does consultations for Breezy Babies and I love having her on my team. My client who recently met with her, this is a review that they left. She said Alexis was very kind and helpful in helping address some of my issues with breastfeeding. She gave me great advice to try on my own and sent a detailed follow up email with extra resources related to my situation. I highly recommend her. That was a Google review that was left. I love that I always, you know, doing in home consultations is a little tiring, a little exhausting at time, but there is something so cool, so fun, so amazing about meeting with people in their own home and connecting with them that way, being able to help them. Really cool, so lucky to be able to do this job. And I also have to tell you that I've been learning a lot about nutrition and gut health as I was preparing for my latest workshop. You probably already know, I know I've talked about on this podcast episode that I recently taught a baby poop and gas workshop with my friend allegra at Aloha Nutrition. It's already over the live version. You can get the recorded version once I have the updated one on my website. And so I did a lot of preparation for that workshop in learning about gut health nutrition, which has been so helpful because you probably remember I had some of my own fair share of gut issues earlier this year. So I'm doing a lot of personal healing myself. Now this workshop, Allega and I, we set a big crazy goal to try and sell 65 tickets. We're like, that would be so cool. We taught the same workshop last year, so that seemed like a big crazy goal because we definitely didn't sell 65 tickets last year. Well, guess what you guys? In the end, we ended up selling 89 tickets. It was awesome. So if you're listening to this and you came to our Baby Poop and Guest workshop, thank you so much for your support. Ligar and I are two moms who work from home on our laptops while wrangling kids. And it's just so cool that we get to meet with you all over the world and teach you all over the world and get to know you, and it's just really, really fun. Same goes for this podcast as well. So I thought this was the perfect time to bring in this guest to talk a little bit more about breastfeeding and nutrition. This won't be the same things that is covered in the Baby Gas and Poop workshop. It's going to be a little bit different. So answer these questions. Think in your head. Do you ever feel very ravenous, just so, so hungry when you're breastfeeding, or just so thirsty that you could down 30oz in one sitting? I know sometimes that I do. A couple more questions for you. Do you ever feel like those last five to £10 are just hanging on that seem to just not go away until after you wean your baby? What's all that about? We're going to learn a little bit more today. My guest today is going to talk about breastfeeding as it relates to your appetite, your weight, your metabolism, not only for you, but also for your baby and for both of your longterm health benefits. So she's going to be sharing some cool facts about calories, nutrition, and breastfeeding. And before I turn the time over to you, I want to introduce her a little bit more so that you can get to know her. My guest is named Caroline. She is the owner of Mother's Best. She also wrote a book called Latching Well Breastfeeding with an integrated approach. She did agree that she would be willing to give away some free audio books. And I thought, how fun would it be to give those away to my email list? I always really take care of my email list. They're my crew, they're my people. And so I think we're going to give them away to my email list just in a really easy, simple giveaway. If you are not already on my email list, there's always a link in the show notes where you can join I really don't spam you. I, for the most part, just send out a monthly newsletter with top three tips, the hottest and latest baby gadgets that are actually helpful and not just a waste of money. And then I also link to my latest podcast episodes here. All right, so back to Caroline. She is also an IBC, just like me, but in addition to teaching about lactation, she's also a nurse practitioner and a dietitian. So you can see where her expertise really comes into play here. She has been teaching for 25 years. I have not been doing it that long, so I can't say that. So she's a bit more of an expert than I am in this field of breastfeeding and nutrition. So here we go. I'm going to turn the time over to Caroline. Here she is. Hello, Bree. Hello, listening audience. Thank you so much for inviting me today to speak about nutrition and breastfeeding as it relates to appetite, weight, calorie intake, metabolism. So we won't be discussing particularly too much about what to eat, but we will discuss a lot of how this impacts growth and development and conditions later in life. So we're going to start by talking a little bit about the impact on mom and then secondly, the impact on baby. And then we're going to talk lastly about the long term effects and benefits of some of these pieces of information that are really interesting to tell you a little bit about myself. My name is Caroline Kanine and I am a nurse practitioner, dietitian and lactation consultant. I like to think that I've had the opportunity to work with mothers and families and really be able to combine all of these skills together, particularly when I'm working with breastfeeding moms. And that's what I've done most of my career in is working with mothers and families through teaching breastfeeding classes and in the community, teaching a mom and baby group once a week, and also working in the clinical setting in the hospital. I've done that for a long time and doing individual home visits. So I've had the opportunity of seeing moms in all kinds of different settings and to hear what kind of concerns that they tend to have. As far as moms go, the number one reason that women initially choose to breastfeed has to do with weight loss. Now, this is not the reason mothers tend to continue breastfeeding, but many women are really interested in the wonderful benefit of weight loss. And it is true that breastfeeding burns about 500 calories a day. So it has 1oz of breast milk has 20 calories, which means that for a full supply, when a mother is making 24oz or more a day, she's burning 480 calories right there in the milk alone. And then there is energy used to produce that milk. Plus the hormones released caused that uterus to shrink back up and flatten the tummy after delivery. So what we're seeing is that the breastfeeding is a beautiful way to help recover from labor delivery and just from the pregnancy. Now, when you're breastfeeding, women notice that their appetite is up, they are often very thirsty and it's sometimes similar to the way a woman feels when she is eating during the pregnancy, but often even more so. Now, this is not a good time to diet. The weight loss will naturally come off itself without working too hard for most women and weight loss will average about £25 in the first six weeks. So this is a good rate of weight loss and then after that it kind of slows down a little bit. And for women who are breastfeeding long term, they tend to find that last five or £10 that just kind of hangs on and that tends to be more related to the extra calories that the body keeps so that there will be energy to produce the breast milk. A lot of that weight, extra pounds, is found in the breast tissue. So many mothers aren't too disappointed to have that. And of course, exercise will help with that with weight loss. And if a mother is concerned, if you are concerned in breastfeeding about reducing your weight, then just cutting out some of the junk food is probably the best way to go. Not doing anything crazy with limiting any kind of food group that has protein, or cutting out too much of anything because it really can impact milk supply. So just trying to cut out some of the empty calories like sweets and cakes and that sort of thing will make a big difference. But it is you will be hungry and you will be thirsty. So it's good to keep that up. As far as a baby, when the baby is breastfeeding, what happens is the baby on the breast works literally 40 times stronger than when the baby is taking a bottle. What this does is it literally helps the baby learn how to breathe, suck and swallow. So all of the muscles that are being used for eating and breathing are being worked out. And this in fact is the world's best baby exercise. That is part of the reason it's actually better, if possible, to put the baby on the breast as opposed to expressing your milk with a breast pump and putting it in a bottle. Now that's also very good, but keep in mind the baby will get more advantage directly from the breast. When the baby is on the breast and or getting breast milk, there is a hormone called leptin that is released through the milk. This hormone, which is not found in formula, regulates the baby's appetite. This is important because it teaches a baby when to stop suckling and when to keep going. When breastfeeding, a baby can take ten to 40 minutes of breasts, so the feedings take quite a while, with the average being 15 to 20 minutes. For many of the feedings per side, give or take. Every baby is a little bit different, of course, but that gives the baby time to sense when they're full and when they're not. When they're taking a bottle, oftentimes it can come out very quickly and sometimes they can't get that sensation. So it certainly is easier with the bottle to think, oh, the baby still must want something because the baby is rooting or suckling. But babies learn about their world through their mouth, so their behavior can be awfully deceiving. So that's a little bit less likely to happen when the baby is taking most, if not all, of the feedings directly from the breast. The other interesting thing is that breast milk, regardless of a mother's diet, has a lot of lactose in it. And lactose is a natural milk sugar. And what it does is it helps the baby's brain development and it also enables the baby to absorb quite a bit of calcium, zinc and iron. And this is true more so than when the baby is getting formulas that may have other sources of carbohydrate, such as corn syrup solids or their derivatives. Let's go ahead and talk a little bit about some of the longterm benefits of breastfeeding. When a mother breastfeeds, she will lower her cholesterol level in the sense that the cholesterol is leaving through the breast milk. So the amount of cholesterol in her body actually decreases. It allows a place for it to exit. And this is actually not a good time, believe it or not, to get checked for bone density or cholesterol level because it can be a little bit deceiving. The levels can. When mother is producing milk, the risk of osteoporosis goes down long term. When a mother breastfeeds, a mother is also less likely to experience later in life something called metabolic syndrome, which is related to blood pressure, lipid levels and blood sugars. So it keeps her healthier down the road. As far as a baby goes, we know that babies are less likely, 30% less likely to be obese as children if they were breastfed as infants. The other beautiful thing is that it sets up the stage for a lovely feeding relationship. And what I mean by that is that the baby is very good at sensing, oh, I'm hungry, let me eat more, and oh, I'm full, let me stop. And it's very important for us throughout our lives to be able to sense that the baby who is breastfed will be less likely to even have cholesterol problems as an adult. Likely because they got a lot of breast milk cholesterol through the breast milk. And this enabled them to learn how to metabolize that cholesterol at a young age when their organs were developing. So it certainly is wonderful in the immediate short term and also wonderful for the long term metabolic effects on health. So thank you so much for allowing me to tell you a little bit about some of the short and long term benefits of nutrition and metabolism and weight and appetite with your baby and with you when you're breastfeeding. And if you would like to learn more about nutrition or breastfeeding, please feel free to check out at Latching Well, which is my Instagram handle or my breastfeeding book, Latching Well Breastfeeding with an integrative approach where you can see a comprehensive guide to teach you all kinds of things. That includes nutrition and so much more. Thank you again for having me today and I appreciate it. Bye bye now. There you have it. Wasn't Caroline so great? If you want to get to know her better, she is at Latching Well on Instagram. I loved her. Take home message of breast milk has both short and long term health benefits. Sometimes we forget about those long term health benefits not only for you, but also for your baby. So thank you so much for listening in. I hope you have a great week. Come back next week where we talk more about ways to help you and your baby make it through and get to your lactation goals with ease. Of course I'm going to leave you with you are strong, you are smart, you are beautiful, you're a good friend. All see you.