In each of my pregnancies, I gained an awful lot of weight – 55 pounds in the first, 50 in the second, and 63 in the third. Each time I used Weight Watchers and was fortunate enough to be able to get down to my pre-pregnancy weight within about 6 months postpartum. Here is my experience losing the baby weight while breastfeeding.
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When to Start Trying to Lose Weight?
With my first baby, I had read that I should wait about 6 weeks – 2 months before trying to lose weight. That was my plan after he was born, as making sure that I was able to breastfeed him was more important to me than losing the baby weight.
Over the first month, I lost about 20 pounds of water weight, so I wasn’t really in any hurry to start dieting – it felt like the weight was sort of falling off by itself.
In addition, I was really hungry, all the time. I was up around the clock taking care of my baby, and I was starving around the clock, too. The idea of trying to lose weight was just overwhelming.
Around the five week mark, though, the weight loss had stalled, I didn’t like the way that I felt, and I’d gotten my supply up to where I was overproducing.
I decided to go ahead and start trying to lose weight. (With my second baby, I started earlier than that – she was born in mid-December, and I thought it might be easier if I joined everyone else in the country by starting my diet on New Year’s Day.)
Going on Weight Watchers
To lose the weight, I decided to go on Weight Watchers. I picked it because I knew that they had a program especially for breastfeeding parents. Even though I was starting a little earlier than recommended, I didn’t want to jeopardize my supply.
Also, as I said in a previous post, I didn’t really know what to do with the vague calorie guidelines that are given to breastfeeding parents (in the past when I’ve lost weight, I’ve just counted calories) and figured that I could just follow whatever the Weight Watchers rules were.
I ended up being really happy with the plan and counting points.
At first, though, I was STARVING. It seemed like the number of points that I got were really small compared to how many points foods “cost.” After a week or two, though, I figured out how to make it work for me. A few of the things that I did to minimize hunger and live “normally” as much as possible:
- I came up with a few go-to snacks. The big one was fruit (a banana, a bunch of fruit salad, etc.) and a Hershey’s Kiss. On Weight Watchers, fruit is free, and the Kiss was just one point. Between the bulk of the fruit and the fat in the Kiss, it was a pretty filling snack and I’d be okay for an hour or so.
- I limited bread. I LOVE carbs, and I could never do an Atkins-type diet. However, bread costs you a lot of points, and it just wasn’t worth it to me as they didn’t fill me up for long enough.
- With a new baby and going back to work, I didn’t really want to deal with cooking fresh food – when I was home, I wanted to snuggle with my baby. Though it was less than ideal, I found some processed options that worked for me.
- On Weight Watchers, you get weekly points that you can use any time during the week – you can spread them out, eating some each day, or you can eat them all in one day. I almost always saved mine for the weekend, and tried to eat fairly normally then. It was so nice to be able to go out to dinner or whatever a few times a week and not have to worry about points, but just enjoy the event.
I was able to dig up a graph of my progress from my Weight Watchers profile from my second baby. Overall, I was really happy with the rate at which I was able to lose the weight.
When I did Weight Watchers with baby #3, I was about three months in when they switched from PointsPlus to SmartPoints. I didn’t really like SmartPoints, but that just might be because I was used to the old way and change is hard.
I would definitely recommend checking out some other reviews with the current system before signing up.
Maintaining the Weight Loss
Once I’d gotten to my goal each time, I went on the the Weight Watchers maintenance plan.
I was surprised to find out that maintenance only gives you 6 additional points over the weight loss plan, but I went with it. With all three babies, I continued to lose weight on the maintenance plan and a month or so later transitioned to eating to appetite (really being careful to stop eating when I was getting full, rather than finishing everything on my plate – I knew I could always get more later) versus tracking.
So that’s my experience. Tell me about your experience! What worked for you? What didn’t work?
For more information about losing the baby weight while breastfeeding, check out my posts about how many calories you need while breastfeeding and exercising while breastfeeding.
