HiPP's Baby & Nutrition Blog

Hi everyone,

It seems that not a week will go by without photos in the media showing celebrities looking super-slim shortly after the birth of their babies. Just last week Beyonce Knowles was looking slim and healthy 10 weeks after having her daughter, but if the stories are to believed this has only come about after a crippling 4 hour a day exercise programme and a restrictive diet of protein shakes, egg-white omelettes, pineapple chunks and lots of ice-cold water! Not something most of us would want or be able to do, I think.

But is this the best way to lose weight after birth? The concern is that these celebrity mums pressurise, although not intentionally, other women to lose weight too fast after the birth putting their health and well-being at risk.  Crash dieting can have health consequences. As I'm sure many of you already know, having a baby is a tiring business and severely restricting your diet can only make this worse. A lack of energy will mean you won't be in the best state to look after your baby properly and it may well slow down your recovery from your pregnancy. Of course if you are breastfeeding it may well affect your breastmilk supply too.

Weight loss after birth takes time - a pregnancy usually takes 9 months and it can take at least this long to get your weight back to normal. Losing weight gradually can help mums to maintain a healthier weight in the long term, whereas crash diets don't encourage the best eating habits or healthy weight loss or maintenance.

The best advice is to eat a nutritious, varied diet from the start, eating when you are hungry, and not to even think about slimming for at least the first 6 weeks or so after your baby is born. Breastfeeding mums are often hungry and will need to eat more calories than a bottle feeding mum due to the demands of breastfeeding, but some of these extra calories can be met from using body fat stores, so breastfeeding can help with post-pregnancy weight loss. Have a look at our website for advice on eating well while breastfeeding.

Whether you are breastfeeding or not, it is important that you eat healthy meals and avoid eating too many high energy meals and snacks, and that you adjust your portion sizes to suit your appetite.

And don't expect to do 4 hours exercise a day. You can start to do some gentle exercise (walking, pelvic floor exercises, stretching) as soon as you feel up to it after your baby is born, but you should wait six weeks or so before taking up more strenuous exercise. Why not look at our website for some postnatal exercise tips?

Until next time.
Helen

Hi everyone,

There are so many new things to think about when you've just had your baby that what to eat might not come high up on your list of priorities. But it is vitally important that you eat regular, nutritionally well-balanced meals to ensure you stay healthy and that you've got all the nutrients needed for successful breastfeeding.

There are no hard and fast rules on when and what you should eat in these early days. There are some 'old wives tales' recommending foods that should or shouldn’t be eaten, but there is little scientific support for most of these. I've heard it said that 'you need to drink milk in order to make milk' which might have been the case when foods were in short supply, but these days with a varied supply of foods available to most of us the energy, protein and calcium needed can come from other dietary sources. Similarly, although Italian mums might be told to avoid garlic, cauliflower, lentils and red peppers whilst breastfeeding, mothers and babies in India are perfectly happy whilst on a diet containing all these foods.

My best advice would be to eat and drink when you feel you need to; if you are breastfeeding, you may well find you're hungrier and thirstier than normal. Making milk 24/7 is extremely demanding and an inadequate diet could easily affect your health.

The following links on our website give you some other useful information on the foods you should include in your diet whilst breastfeeding, and foods to avoid. Perhaps you'd like to try some of our recipes too, or better still, get someone else to prepare them for you!

• Eating well dring breastfeeding
• Recipes for new mums

Until next time....
Helen

Hi Everyone!

So are you nearly there? After what may have seemed an eternity, is your pregnancy nearing the end? 

For those of you at this stage, you may well be thinking about packing your bag that you take with you to the hospital and wondering what snacks or drinks to put in it. Of course what you take will depend on your favourites and what you think you might fancy, but some suggestions that I can recommend to help keep your energy levels up and to keep you well hydrated during your labour might be dried fruit, dry biscuits, cereal bars, glucose tablets and bottles of water or isotonic sports drinks. Of course these are all things that you can pack in advance, but on the day you might think of adding some extras, such as some fresh fruit, a sandwich or a yogurt. Don’t worry about whether these foods are healthy or not, but I suggest you keep away from any foods high in fats as these can make you feel very uncomfortable and may make you be sick!

Often mums in labour aren’t really thinking about food at all or may not be able to face eating anything. But if your labour is dragging on a bit, or if you do feel like eating something, then I suggest you stick to nibbling on snacks. A big meal will probably not be an option and you really won’t feel like it anyway. It’s a good idea to keep any eating or drinking during labour to ‘little and often’ and probably only in the early stages of labour.

Depending on how long your labour lasts, you may or may not need the glucose tablets to keep you going and the isotonic sports drinks may or may not be necessary, but best to go prepared.

And as for foods that might bring on your labour and therefore your hospital trip? - we did a survey of nearly 1800 new mums and perhaps not surprisingly of the mums that responded to the question “If you ate a particular food to try and bring on labour, what was it and did it work?”, eating ‘spicy food’ including curries came out as top favourite choice, followed by drinking red raspberry leaf tea and eating pineapple. In many cases these didn’t work, but many would argue they were worth a try!

Good luck with your preparations.

Best wishes,
Helen

Hello again,

Looking after yourself during your pregnancy is important for you and will also give your baby the best start in life. I believe, and I hope you will all agree, that making sure your diet is as good as it can be makes good sense at this special time, to optimise your own health and also that of your growing baby. 

During pregnancy, you should eat as wide a variety of different foods as possible to make sure you get all the nourishment you both need. Where there might be concerns that dietary intake might not be enough to meet requirements then supplements are recommended. This is considered to be the case with folic acid which is so important in the early stages of pregnancy, and vitamin D supplements are recommended nowadays too. Speak to your doctor if you want more information on vitamin supplements, or if it’s easier then the NHS website is really helpful. 

For advice on healthy eating during pregnancy, rather than me listing it all out here, can I ask you to visit the HiPP website.

Here you will find lots of valuable information about your pregnancy diet, foods to avoid, recipes to try and what to do if you have concerns about food allergies. And if you have any questions that you can’t find answers for, you can always ask either me or one of my colleagues and we will be more than happy to help if we can.

Good luck with your pregnancy.

Until next time...
Helen

Hello again!

Whether you’re planning your first baby or you’re thinking about having another, a healthy diet makes good sense for both you and your partner. Your eating, weight and lifestyle habits have a significant influence on your health, your fertility and once you’ve become pregnant on the growth and development of your unborn baby.

Now is a great time to reassess your diet and to check that you are eating a wide variety of healthy foods. You need to have a good balance between starchy carbohydrate foods; moderate amounts of protein foods; low fat dairy products and plenty of fruits and vegetables. A healthy balanced diet should supply you with all the nutrients you need, but one vitamin that is particularly important pre-conceptually and in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy is folic acid and so you should take extra folic acid (400mcg/day) in the form of a supplement during this time.

There are also a couple of other nutrients that need special attention at this time. You should make sure you’re eating enough iron-rich foods to build up your body stores in preparation for your pregnancy, so include red meat, fish, poultry, beans, dark green leafy vegetables and wholegrain cereals regularly. Omega 3 fatty acids play a critical role in the development of the brain and nervous system of a baby so it is a good idea to top up your stores of these too by eating two portions of fish per week (at least one of these portions as oily fish such as salmon, trout, mackerel).

Both you and your partner should reduce your alcohol intakes in line with official recommendations and aim for a healthy weight. Being a healthy body weight can help you to conceive – being very underweight or obese can reduce your chances of conceiving, and being obese while pregnant can increase the risk of complications. And for your partner, it is worth checking the diet contains enough zinc and selenium containing foods as these have been shown to be linked with sperm quality. Lean red meat, wholegrain cereals, seafood and eggs are good sources of these nutrients.

If you want to read more, here are two good links which you may find useful:

http://www.nutrition.org.uk/healthyliving/lifestages/trying-for-a-baby
http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/treatments/healthy_living/nutrition/life_preconcpreg.shtml

Until next time....
Helen