A Day of Eating (for a Breastfeeding, Strength Training Mom)
This blog is about what I eat on a typical day as the mom of a 9.5-month-old baby with the goal of “body recomposition”!
Background
I gave birth to my first baby in August 2020. She is a wonderful, hilarious, spunky girl named Parker!
9.5 months after giving birth, my current physical goal is “body recomposition”. If you haven’t heard of this before, it’s where you’re eating close to maintenance-level calories and doing progressive strength training (i.e. aiming to get stronger & lift heavier as time passes).
Progressive resistance training + eating close to maintenance calories is a really powerful combination where a woman can add muscle tissue and reduce her overall body fat percentage without having to do the old-school methods of “bulking” and “cutting”.
So, I aim to eat in a slight caloric surplus.
In other words, I determine my maintenance level calories and eat slightly more than that while training hard in the gym to gain muscle tissue.
(*If you’re unfamiliar with the terms “maintenance calories”, “surplus”, “deficit”, etc., here’s a bit of science for you! If you already know about this, skip down to the next section).
The Science of Changing Your Body Composition
A really important principle to understand in nutrition science is energy balance.
Put simply, in order to build muscle tissue, we need to eat more calories than our bodies burn each day.
Otherwise, there is no way we will be able to build muscle. Muscle has to be built from something. It cannot be built from magic pixie dust, ha!
Building muscle requires energy.
Energy comes from calories.
So this is why my intention is to eat slightly more calories than I burn each day.
I eat around 2800-3000 calories daily which probably sounds like a lot for a 5’7”, 155-pound woman.
But I also have to take these factors into consideration:
I train hard. And frequently.
I lift weights six days per week for around 60-90 minutes each time.
And these workouts are tough! I call my style of training “Stronglifting” (which comes from Dr. Bret Contreras. He’s known on social media as the “Glute Guy”. He’s one of the smartest trainers around when it comes to helping women improve their body composition!).
My workouts begin with 1-2 big compound movements like:
deadlifts
squats
bench press
strict overhead press
pull-ups
hip thrust
After that, the workout shifts into “bodybuilding/hypertrophy” work with higher reps (anywhere from 8-20 reps for each set).
All this training burns a lot of calories that I need to replace through food.
The Impact of Breastfeeding
The next factor that increases my daily caloric requirement: I am breastfeeding my baby girl Parker.
During a baby’s first several months of life, they get all of their nutrition from breast milk (or formula). As Parker gets older, she eats some solid food, too.
Currently she gets around 17-22 ounces of breastmilk from me each day (*supplemented with a bit of formula because this girl is growing so fast, my milk supply cannot keep up!).
All of that is to say: my body has to produce those 17-22 ounces of breastmilk, which requires extra energy (from calories).
What I Eat on a Typical Day
At 5 AM, I get up, pump breast milk (with my portable battery-operated Medela pump), and eat some easy-to-digest carbs and protein before my workout.
Right now I’m loving:
2-3 of pieces of Dave’s Killer Bread + a little butter + strawberry jam
Paired with a whey protein shake (for quickly/easily-digested protein)
I buy unflavored whey protein isolate (from Amazon) because anything with weird flavors bothers my stomach.
I blend the whey protein with unsweetened almond milk, ice, stevia, and a couple of ounces of iced coffee (it’s like a Frappuccino - but not nearly as delicious. Lol!).
I keep the fat content of my pre-workout meal low because fat can slow digestion.
Post-Workout
After my workout, I want to replenish and refuel my body with more carbs and protein.
When you lift weights, you do damage to your muscles — and they need time, rest and calories to repair and grow!
I usually have white rice (very easy to digest) with a protein source (sometimes I scramble 1 whole egg with a few egg whites, for example).
Or I might grab some of my pre-made protein pancakes. I like to make protein pancakes in bulk because they’re quick and easy to grab out of the fridge. I can eat them with one hand while holding baby, ha!
The only ingredients in my protein pancakes are egg whites (and/or whole eggs), oats (I blend the oats in a blender to make homemade oat flour), salt and a bit of liquid stevia.
Do they taste like iHop pancakes? Definitely not, but they will suffice! Ha! (*You can also use Kodiak Cakes protein pancake mix which is great!)
The Rest of My Meals (Warning: I Am Boring!)
The rest of my meals consist of:
protein source (like chicken, beef, turkey, fish)
complex carb source (rice, oats, whole-grain bread, quinoa, things like that)
a bit of fat (olive oil, coconut oil, butter, avocado, etc.)
usually a fruit or vegetable (gotta get those micronutrients and fiber!).
(*Quick/practical mom tip for veggies: I like to buy giant bags of frozen mixed vegetables from Costco and roast them in the oven with salt & pepper! I also often buy frozen fruit which can be thrown into smoothies!).
As you can see, my food routine is casual, flexible and low-key — but still nutrient-dense.
That’s what I recommend for anybody with a busy schedule (including caring for tiny humans!). Keep your food simple and straightforward.
Weighing, Measuring and Tracking food
Right now, I don’t strictly measure portions, but if you were aiming to lose body fat (or beginning to learn about portion sizes), I’d recommend using a food scale.
I log my food a couple of days per week in the app MyFitnessPal just to make sure I’m not undereating.
I do not log all my food every single day because I’ve been doing it for so long that I can pretty easily eyeball portions, listen to my body’s signals, and know whether I am consuming sufficient calories.
There is a lot of power in learning how to weigh and track your food.
You can use the knowledge you acquire for the rest of your life! I’ll write more blogs about it in the future!
That’s all for how! I hope you found that interesting!
Never hesitate to send me a direct message or email with questions. I love talking about this stuff :-)