Safely loosing weight while breastfeeding

Been putting it off for so long but finally plucked up the courage to weigh myself and I'm 15kg heavier than before I was pregnant 😭 I exclusively breastfeed and have a velcro baby so always contact napping during the day or occasionally will sleep in the pram. I'm really keen to get healthy and lose some weight but does anyone have any tips on how to do this safely without affecting my milk supply? Feeling so rubbish about myself but really not sure how I suddenly find more time for exercise as I already feel at my limit. Have had lots of breastfeeding struggles too so am very nervous about doing anything that might affect my supply, especially when I've worked so hard to be able to breastfeed. Please help!

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Exercising won’t affect your milk supply at all so you are free to do what you like! I started gentle exercise at 6 weeks postpartum and it wasn’t long at all until I was back to my normal routine. If you can only do short bits at home then perhaps follow some videos on YouTube…these could be HIIT or yoga - anything that gets your body moving and you can start gently with and build on x

I really recommend the bumps and burpees post natal programme!

It’s safe to exercise without milk being affected. I just do 15-20 mins of a postpartum exercise video series on YouTube and it feels like I’m getting stronger and confidence back in moving my body. Baby loves to watch, sometimes he laughs at me 😅

I think the key thing when breastfeeding is to consume the amount of calories that you can consume if you weren’t breastfeeding (if that makes sense). You don’t need to eat extra calories when breastfeeding but your body burns 500-700 calories extra a day to produce milk. I’ve been loosing weight for about 5 months now and at first my milk supply decreased because I wasn’t eating enough calories. I was probably only consuming 1200 a day which was way too little! I would say i consume between 1800-2000 a day now and I loose around 1 to 2 pounds a week. So far I’ve lost 33 pounds in 5 months which I don’t think I would have lost if I wasn’t breastfeeding. In terms of exercise I never find the time (or the energy) so I tend to just walk as much as possible.

I second Mel's comment, I've been working with a nutritionist who basically worked out the amount of calories I should be having to maintain weight, then dropped some to be losing, and then ADDED loads to accommodate breastfeeding. I've been losing 1-2lbs a week, and I still eat whatever I want just fit it into my calorie intake (and it feels like loads)!

Thank you all, that's really helpful. Just hard to know where to start sometimes but think I just need to make small changes that I can stick with and just focus on the long term goal of being healthy

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