Giving birth is a difficult time, especially in the way that it can make mothers put on a lot of weight. After giving birth, you probably want to get dieting, lose weight, and feel better about yourself, but what can you do when there’s breastfeeding to take care of? Some diets just won’t cut it – you may even cause your child damage as you don’t get enough nutrition.
Keto Diet and Breastfeeding – Is It Safe For New Moms?
Fortunately, you can go on the ketogenic diet whereby you consume a high amount of fat and take the best keto supplements to ensure good health for both you and your child.
A low-carbohydrate diet plan can be a brilliant one to follow when breastfeeding. You can lose a lot of excess weight also eating all of the nutritious fodder that both you and your child require. However, some strict low-carbohydrate diets can be dangerous when breastfeeding is concerned, so it’s important to get some carbs in.
Let’s look at how keto really works as a low-carb diet and why you should consider it as an option when you’ve got a child.
How does keto work?
If you’re wondering how to improve your diet, let’s look at what keto does. The premise behind it is that your body will become more used to burning fat for fuel than burning carbohydrates.
You try to get your body into a natural metabolic state known as ketosis whereby you burn fat to create ketones that are used for metabolic energy. When you stick to this diet, there are many benefits that ensue. It is a great diet to improve the skin, lose weight, and some say that it is even a diet to improve fertility.
The ketogenic approach is based on carb restriction. When you’re breastfeeding, we would recommend consuming at least 50g of carbohydrates a day. Eat a lot of fat (60% of your calories) and protein (20% of your calories) to help ketosis.
Preparation and hydration
When you start out on keto, your body will adjust and produce the symptoms commonly known as the “keto flu”, including dizziness and brain fog. You won’t want to have these when you have your newborn, so adjust your body early on.
When you are on a keto, your body will lose a lot of water as you’re consuming fewer carbs than normal. You will also want to stay completely hydrated so that you can increase the supply of milk.
As you lose water, you will also lose your electrolytes, so stock up on the supplements that can replace the potassium, sodium, magnesium, and calcium lost. This will be important for producing good quality milk.
Keto Diet Grocery List: How to Follow a High-Fat & Low-Carb Diet
Loss of sugars
In normal situations, people can consume a few carbohydrates, and the body will handle it well. However, when breastfeeding, sugars are lost via your milk – even as much as 25g a day, and you won’t want to eat too much sugar.
A great way to improve the diet when breastfeeding is to consume nutrient-dense berries and low-carb fruit to get your sugars and nutrients, as well as low-calorie vegetables such as kale, spinach, broccoli, peppers, spring onions, and generally any leafy greens that grow above the ground.
Get enough energy
As a breastfeeding mother, you need to make sure you’re consuming enough energy in the form of calories, especially to produce high-quality milk, but you won’t want to eat too much sugar and carbs. Nor will you want to starve yourself.
Go for healthy fats, anything that contains a high amount of monounsaturated fat such as almonds, macadamia nuts, tuna, fatty meat, and avocados. This is important, especially as the milk you produce is high in fat content.
You will want to consume fats that come from high-quality sources and no junk food or trans-fat-based snacks in order to provide the best fats for your child. If it isn’t good for your body, then throw it out!
Time to improve diet
When you’re thinking of the ways to improve your diet, keto is a great idea when breastfeeding. We hope that you can take away some of the points we’ve made and decide if it’s going to work for you. Hopefully, you will make an informed decision that takes you and your child’s health into account.
Have you ever tried keto? Is it a diet to improve energy? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
