My Story

The chronicle of the journey from infertility, to miscarriage, to finally raising twin girls born in June 2012.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Breastfeeding exhaustion

I'm leaving this little factoid out there for every woman who is trying to explain to her man why she is so friggin exhausted by breastfeeding.

On the outside, producing milk doesn't seem very taxing.  However, I've just done a little math and in the last 2 months, I have output my own weight in fluid through my boobs.

Using my own numbers (and if anyone reminds me that I'm fat, thanks, I'm aware of that), here's a little perspective.  It took 8 months of twin pregnancy to gain about 60lbs.  I started somewhere around 235 and finished somewhere around 295.  Within three weeks of giving birth, I was back down to 240lbs and now it seems to have settled somewhere between 235-240lbs.  Yay me!

I've been producing milk and squirting it out of my boobs and into bottles for 10 weeks now.  I average 60oz a day.  Yes, I told you before, I'm producing enough for 3.  Yay me again!  So 60oz a day times 70 days = 4200oz.  16oz = 1lb.  Therefore, I have produced approximately 262.5lbs of milk.

That's right - 8 months to produce 60lbs worth of baby and other materials, 10 weeks to produce 262.5lbs of fatty fluid!

Holy shitballs and Yay me hard core!

8 comments:

  1. Wow that is crazy!!! No wonder people lose so much weight while breastfeeding.

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  2. Yikes, that's a lot! Keep-a rocking, er, pumping! ;)

    Now just for fun...

    262.5/10 = 26.5lbs/week (or 26.5/7 = 3.79lbs per day!)
    One US Ton = 2000lbs

    2000/26.5 = 75.47 weeks
    or
    75.47/52 = 1.45 years to produce (literally!), a ton of milk!

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  3. Wow you are producing a lot of milk!

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  4. It also burns a thousand calories a day when you're feeding two :) but WOW, I never did the math on that, although I did donate my excess milk a few times and I carried some HEAVY bags!

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  5. Holy shit balls indeed. I wish I had that problem. I'm struggling with the demand of my hungry bird. It seems that if I'm not pumping, I'm feeding - when are we supposed to eat-sleep?

    With regards to the myth of losing lots of weight breastfeeding, yes, that would work for me, if I wasn't so damn hungry. All the time.

    S

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  6. Wow that is incredible!! I've breastfed my 4 kids for a total of almost 5.5 yrs so I wonder how many pounds of milk they've actually drained outta me, craziness! I've never thought of it in those terms before...I'm definitely sharing this with hubby LOL! Keep up the good (hard) work!!

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  7. Holy. Crap. If I'm lucky enough to have a decent BM supply, I totally want to do the math like that- amazing!

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  8. Holy crap! I love how you figured it all out!

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