#02 Pain, Cracked Nipples, and Low Milk Supply - with IBCLC Lucy Ruddle

It's The Next Feed, your breastfeeding podcast. Welcome. It's only the second episode, but I thought I'd bring out a guest
who is right up there when it comes to breastfeeding knowledge.
In fact, if she doesn't know something, I would seriously question whether it's even worth knowing.
Whenever I've contacted her almost a year ago, I asked her,
if I make a breastfeeding podcast, will you come on it? Pretty please.
And she said, yes, immediately, I knew then that she would be one of the first people that I'd want to talk to.
And here's why, along with her enthusiasm, I first came across her Facebook and Instagram accounts
just over two and a half years ago. It was a very late night. My baby was just a few days old,
and I was really, really struggling to breastfeed, desperately, desperately trying to search for help online.
I was in a lot of pain. I just couldn't figure out what to do.
I'd already introduced a formula at this stage and wasn't happy about that decision.
I really wanted to breastfeed my baby exclusively and most importantly, painlessly.
And when I came across her accounts, she just had loads of information on her social media pages.
And I remember scrolling through and getting this feeling that all wasn't lost,
that just because I was combination feeding, that it didn't mean that little bit that I was breastfeeding
didn't matter. And scrolling through some of the comments on many of her posts,
you can see how many other people feel the same. She just seems to sort of get it.
So who is this incredible woman supporting thousands of parents online? I hear you ask.
Her name is Lucy Ruddle. She's an IBCLC. That's an international board certified lactation consultant.
That's seen globally as the gold standard in breastfeeding care. She's also a holistic sleep coach,
a counsellor, a mum to two boys. And I don't know how she finds the time to write,
but she's also an author. So let's start with the very basics. Why should we all care about breastfeeding?
Oh my goodness, that's such a big question. I love that we're jumping straight into the good stuff.
Whenever I'm looking at this, I'm thinking about the statistics that we have that tell us
that most mothers who stopped breastfeeding did say before they were ready. And that that then
leads to postnatal depression, breastfeeding grief, breastfeeding trauma. So on a very basic level,
if we're not allowing people to meet their breastfeeding goals and desires, we are immediately
increasing the risk of mental health difficulties for those people and therefore, but people who
are looking after them, their partners, their children, everyone's going to suffer.
When we talk about breastfeeding for a lot of us, there might be a bit in our head that says,
it's the biological norm, it's completely natural. And that really jars with the experiences
that a lot of us have with breastfeeding. Oh my gosh, so I remember when I had my first, so I was,
I worked in the Children Centre and I'd had some peer support or training as part of that
Children Centre work. So I knew the basics of breastfeeding, I knew more than your average person
on the street. And all I had taken from that experience that training was, it shouldn't hurt.
And I latched my baby and it hurt. And I kept saying to people, it hurts. And they kept saying,
oh no, no, your nipples need to tap an up or, um, that looks fine, I don't know why it hurts. And
I think that really damaged my experience and I actually went on to stop breastfeeding as a result
of that. So one of the things that comes up, quite often is we're told it's, it's natural,
it shouldn't hurt, it's easy. But then when we do run into problems, pain, difficulty is getting
babies to latch frequent feeding, it's immediately kind of dismissed or brushed over and seems like
it's not, you know, oh, it's fine. Like, but I was told it shouldn't hurt. So why is it now hurting,
you know, that kind of disconnect between what we're told and what actually happens. And there
are so many examples of that when it comes to breastfeeding where you're told one thing and
you experience another, it's really common. Some people say, oh well, it's always going to hurt
in the beginning because this will be the first time that you've had, you know, a baby on them.
So there's going to be a certain amount of pain and you kind of got to ride it at the beginning,
explain to us then what is the feeling that we should be getting. And then if we're getting pain,
what are the reasons why that might be the case? Good question. Did you experience any pain or
discomfort with breastfeeding? Did I? Yes. And I pretty much did, I think, solidly for
months and months and months and months until a tongue type procedure was done at seven months.
So yes. And the pain can be, I think sometimes when people talk about pain and it came from a good
place, but they said, all it does hurt and you've got to ride it out, you know, it's hard work.
And the implication there was that maybe I wasn't tolerating the pain, you know, if I was a bit
stronger, it would eventually get easier. So it was sort of, it was about how I was interpreting
that pain. But of course, pain is different for everybody, right? Yeah. And what I took from that is
you suffered, you kind of put up with that pain for a really long time and it turned out there was
an underlying reason for it. You're maybe needed to have a tongue type in it and because you were told
that your pain was normal or to be expected, you put off seeking that support that could have
got things more comfortable for you and awful lot faster, right? Oh, 100%. I mean, it would have
it would have meant I would have exclusively breastfed for longer, you know, I feel like this is
a therapy session, Lucy. And you hear this would say many people that say there isn't anything wrong
with introducing formula if that's your choice and some of us will have friends and I have
somebody that I've become quite close to recently who from the first day didn't want to breastfeed
at harvested colostrum at the end of a pregnancy, but didn't want to breastfeed and just couldn't
think of anything worse than breastfeeding for her. Though she loved the fact that a lot of her
friends wanted to breastfeed. It's interesting that some of us become really apologetic, don't we?
And I do it. I introduced formula and I didn't want to and I didn't like the fact that I did it,
but it's not to say that anybody asked that does it, well, that there's anything wrong with that.
It's hard, isn't it? It's hard to have these conversations with other people.
It is. And I think going back to this thing around pain, if you're being given misinformation,
the whole, you know, a second or baby is born, oh, the latch is fine. It's just a bit of soon
as if you're supposed to get used to it. Oh, don't worry about it. You need to toughen up. It's the
colour of your skin. It's the colour of your hair or this nonsense. If that's what you're being
surrounded with, and it's really hard to access really good breastfeeding support. This has actually
the reason this hurts is because the latch is shallow. This isn't normal. You are going to end up,
something's going to have to give. We can only tolerate so much and we don't have that village
around us. We don't have that peer-to-peer community support that we would have had 100 or 200
years ago. What we do now have, there is formula. And when you are desperate for help and it's hurting
you every single time you natched that baby, you need to, at some point say, okay, well, a little
bit of formula actually at this point is going to mean that I can continue to breastfeed for longer
because otherwise I'm going to put my boobs off. And that definitely felt like what was happening
to me. So it's interesting there what you took about formula use and it signs to me, Lizzy,
that that's about managing that formula use. Absolutely. And remembering that, you know, in this
case we're looking at the 80% of women who actually want to breastfeed or want to breastfeed for longer,
if somebody has said, you know what, I'm done with this, I just want to form a defeat. That's
totally fine and there's a different conversation. But for this conversation, we're assuming you want
to breastfeed, you want to exclusively breastfeed. The thing that then comes up because we have a
lack of support. So you're in pain, you're being told that's normal, you end up saying, I need to
give some formula to give myself a break. But because of the lack of support, you then find yourself
in a situation where you haven't been given the information you need to maintain your milk supply
because once you start to give formula, you're reducing the amount that you're breastfeeding and
that's going to reduce your milk supply. That's going to mean that a baby is going to get more
fussy at the breast because there's less milk there. You're then going to give more formula
as a result. Your supply is going to get even lower and you're going to end up stopping and blaming
yourself. Even though the issue is that there wasn't the support that you needed in the first place
to meet your girl, like, just, oh, it winds me up so much. I can tell you're so passionate about
this. I'm guessing that you keep hearing similar stories to you amongst some of the people that
come to you. And I know that, you know, everybody's kind of situation is unique, but it sounds to
me that the lack of support there is what a lot of people are facing before they even get to
find out that you exist. And the most frustrating thing is they don't realise they've not had the
right support. They would think that because they saw a midwife in the hospital because they
saw a health visitor or the support worker that they've had the best support, they don't understand
that. I mean, the midwife has quite good training when it comes to breastfeeding kind of similar
to a peer supporter. A health visitor's training in breastfeeding can be really varied and doctors
and pediatricians might have only had one hour in university on lactation and it may not have
involved anything kind of helpful for parents. So we go, well, I've seen the doctor, I've seen the
midwife, I've seen the health visitor, I can't breastfeed. And then they come to me for a debrief
which is where we kind of talk over what happened and it turns out that those people and the people
around them, their friends and family were giving them really awful advice because they haven't
had the training to provide good advice. And then as I say, we ended up, we end up with parents
every day, every day feeling like they're the ones to blame. And in fact, it's been driving me so
mad that I started to write a book about reframing breastfeeding failure because in the years that I've
been doing this 10 years now, I have, I can't think of one person that I can say it's your fault you
didn't manage to meet your breastfeeding girls. It has as far as I can remember, always come down to
somebody somewhere has given them the wrong information at the wrong time or they haven't had the
support that they've needed. And that is a huge issue in our country and a massive, massive failing
from the government down. You know, we can't blame a doctor, we can't blame a midwife. This is
lack of funding, it's a good professional training for all of it. Oh, it's just like, give us more money
we can solve this, you know. When people have had really awful journeys and they're the other side
and by that I mean that they've come to a point where they've stopped breastfeeding their child might
be a bit older. Can you talk us through why we should still care about the fact that that journey
was like that because, you know, some people don't just stop at one child do they and they might have
other children in their future. The kind of impacts there aren't just on the on the birth parent
that really struggled with breastfeeding. Absolutely. And I wonder if you've ever experienced this where
perhaps when you were struggling, well-meaning friends or family who've perhaps had children before
you and then did a formula feeding have said to you, for example, well I used formula, it was fine
or all said is best. Is that something that you came across during your experience? So many times by
my closest friends. And it's well-meaning, right? They're not doing it to dismiss your feelings,
they're doing it to try and make you feel better. And the reason for that often and not always is
it's kind of a defense mechanism. So they often, and again I don't want to assume that everybody feels
like this, but a common experience is that you have a really hard time breastfeeding, you blame yourself
and then when you see somebody else breastfeeding it brings up all those feelings for you that you
failed, you couldn't do it. And then as a bit of a protection against that your brain will kick
into defense mode and be like, well, for me to find why are you breastfeeding? Because you can't
deal with processing those feelings. So when we talk about why should we care? We should care
because parents are carrying this breastfeeding free from trauma wisdom decades later.
Grandparents will tell me about how they failed to breastfeed. And then that then influences the
way that they support their friends and family, which then influences them. And we end up continuing
this issue where everyone just feels really awful about breastfeeding.
And I think that's definitely something that we should explore in a later episode because I think
there's so much to say about how do you navigate these conversations when you're maybe being told
things that you know aren't correct or you're being spoken to in a way that isn't supportive.
It's really difficult isn't it? I can imagine there is so much more to say on this. I think we
are going to have to get you back on. Talk about this. It's a whole episode of itself.
Yeah, hard to have conversations with people to put them straight, but then also not fall out.
I just have to protect your friendships at the same time.
There are quite a lot of people that have fallen out with family and friends. I've seen a lot
of this before. Kido goes through some of the other things maybe that sometimes they might
influence whether we breastfeed or not. And I'm just thinking of one right now, which is about your
diet. Quite a few people in the very early days, we talk about how eating spicy food, when they're
breastfeeding because it made the baby really fussy and that kind of thing. Yes. And as you're
talking that I was thinking about an advertising campaign that was launched, I want to say about 10
years ago now. And it was a big image of mother with her breast-site feeding her baby, but breast
that the baby was feeding from was a burger. And the message was your baby is what you eat.
And the whole message behind this campaign was you should have a really, really healthy diet
if you're going to breastfeed because here's this mother feeding her baby junk food by her breast
milk was the message. And it's just not that true. There is certainly some element of
diet being a little bit kind of having a bit of a spoon things, for example, the type of fact
that's in your breast milk can be influenced by the food that you eat. And things like garlic can
make breast milk taste more appealing to babies. So sometimes a fussy baby will have a bit of garlic.
But then we have all these myths that come in around baby cucumbers or strawberry seeds can pass
into your milk or you must eat an all organic diet or you must drink milk to make milk. And it's
all utter nonsense. And again, it starts with a very many place of well, if the mother's eating
this food, we surely it's passing through to the infant and we want the infant to have the best.
But actually when we look into it, it doesn't really have that much of a difference. But certain
companies, typically formula companies have managed to get hold of this as a message of you need to
be careful what you eat with your going to breastfeed, which then creates a barrier and makes it
harder to breastfeed. So you're more likely to use formula. There are so many other myths I know that
you can talk about. I'm just wondering. I just I know so many that you wrote back on it.
There's so many little things I guess that you get told. And they just even if you're doing okay
with breastfeeding, they just go there and they kind of stay, don't they? So one of the things
that I didn't believe it kind of stayed with me. And I've just thought of it now is my mum said
when she was breastfeeding that she ate loads of oranges and I ended up really rashi. So then she
can eat oranges for the rest of her the time that she breastfed me until this day she does new oranges.
Not quite old now. So it's strange isn't it? But gosh, these things just multiply. I don't they,
one person tells another person and then it kind of stays with them and then they tell their friends.
Yeah. And it all feeds. It's interesting. It all feeds on kind of fear and anxiety as well. So
again, if we think about your normal baby behavior, they don't like being put down. They do
want to classify their awake or night. They can be quite tearful at certain times of the day. And
some days are going to be worse than others. And if you someone then says to you, oh yeah, my
baby was like that anytime I ate onions, you're then going to maybe start thinking, oh,
hold on, I was eating quite a few onions last night. And like a baby's having a bad day.
Maybe it's the onions. And then you'll stop eating them and baby will grow right at that
fussy period. And you'll think, oh, you know, this is why baby was fussy. But actually,
it was probably just a coincidence for a lot of things. Some things make a difference.
Chasm at protein is one of them. But by and large, a lot of this stuff is just coincidence
that looks like it's real. And because we're so desperate to make things better when we're
exhausted, we'll be like, yeah, yeah, it was a cucumber, totally.
Whatever, yeah, some of the other myths that your favourite is just for how ridiculous they might be.
I mean, the store receipts one, the store receipts can pass into your milk is just,
I have no idea how anybody knows anything.
Sounds painful. Maybe anatomy of it. I'm not sure that's going to work.
And the other one is, and somebody I often share this one because it's so sweet that I was running
a preparing to rest feed class. And this dad came up to at the end of the session,
all kind of a little bit awkward. Is that my wife really likes to sunbathe?
Is she going to make her milk go sour or curdled? Is she sunbathe?
I'm like, no, my love, that's not how this works. I promise.
For the idea of like, sourd milk for being in the sun, too long, I'm not blessed.
Say, by that reckoning then, we should all be just standing in fridges, right?
Between fash. Yeah.
Just to make sure the milk doesn't go off.
It's crazy.
I do love that. And do you know what? We should be sharing more of these because if anything,
it just, it's entertaining, isn't it?
But then on the series level, of course, it's, it's, gosh, the pressure to,
not to breastfeed, but the pressure to make sure that we're doing everything
right and everything possible to make the breastfeeding kind of for our baby,
you know, the best it can be. It's huge, isn't it?
Yeah, it's huge going back to my, my constant kind of theme in this episode is
we blame ourselves and we shouldn't be blaming ourselves. Like,
whatever area of health or life are you given full and complete responsibility for getting
everything right and if you can't get it right, well, it's your own fault, you just can't breastfeed.
Like, if you break your leg, you wouldn't be told what it's your own fault you've broken your leg,
you know, you'd be given treatment for that and help and support and get when it comes to infant
feeding, it's like, well, this is all on you off you go, you even have to even to the point where
you have to go out, find out what an IB CLC is, track down your local IB CLC, work out how to hire them.
And yet, in any other area of health, you doctor would just prefer you to whatever you needed and
there's so much pressure on on mothers in particular. There are so many things that we've already
mentioned that we're going to be doing kind of a proper deep daule into in at some point on the
podcast and future episodes. But one thing that I wanted to talk about today, which I think is
something that comes up so often, is that the heart of why a lot of women end up stopping breastfeeding.
I mean, you mentioned pain already, which is absolutely huge and the amount of people that I've
spoken to have said, yeah, breastfeeding was really painful. But the other thing is, is milk supply
and having low milk supply hands up. I was somebody who for the first not even weeks and months
claimed that the reason why I had had all of my difficulties as well as all the pain and
other things was I didn't have enough milk. So as an IB CLC, let's talk milk supply, low milk supply.
I had somebody very recently who said that they found breastfeeding really difficult. If they have
another baby, they really want to give it a go again and maybe approach it in a slightly different
way, but they said the issue that I had with my first baby was I just didn't have enough milk.
It's a really complex topic and I think we kind of need to break it down. So there are a couple
of different types of low milk supply. So there's milk supply that's kind of primary. So therefore,
it might be caused by insufficient glandular tissue, something hormonal happening for the mother.
Some reason why the body isn't producing enough milk that comes from anatomical, physiological
thing. And then we have secondary milk supply, low milk supply, which is what most people will
do with. And secondary low milk supply is very real, but it is caused by a very sleepy baby that you
can't wake up to feed using a dummy schedule feedings, a ton tie, a chale latch, all these sorts
of things that mean that we aren't breastfeeding as often as is ideal or that when the baby does
go to the breast, they can't move like in your situation. They can't remove the milk as well as
they need to. Over time, this poor inadequate breast stimulation reduces milk supply and then you
end up in a situation where you don't have enough milk. And amongst all of that, we then have
perceived low milk supply when the baby is actually behaving in a very normal way, but because in our
society and in our world, we're not used to things like cluster feeding and needing to hold our
baby's 24-7, we think it's low milk supply. And the whole thing can just get very, very
mother-to-duff and complicated and incredibly quickly. I was just thinking, as you said, that I went
to a place where, and I didn't realise this, it was kind of a cafe where they were running a
breastfeeding drop-in session at the back of the room. And I remember sitting there and I'd like
to think I wasn't staring, but I was kind of looking at across at them and there were all these
mums there with their babies. And I thought how lovely that they're there and how brave of them
because, as well as not being able to go to a drop-in because they weren't running at the time
because of COVID. I also, I think with all the issues I was having, I don't think I would have been
brave enough to actually go out and breastfeed him in public. And then I thought, actually,
that all the babies seemed really calm and they were all breastfeeding beautifully. And I wondered if
that's not quite a snapshot of every mother breastfeeding. And actually, they're the ones that went
out with babies that weren't being particularly fussy that day or that week or that month.
I'm thinking, I wonder how many of those babies had had a top up before they came out because
the mum was worried that they might be problematic. How many of them were just soothed by the background
noise of being in a cafe? Was there the oxytocin of all the mums in the room that was contributing to
the calmness? How many of them were breastfeeding well because the support had been around and
helped them 10 minutes before you walked in? Like, there are so many things to bear in mind. How
many were just napping because it's the time of day that they napped and that it was in the morning
that tends to be a better day for baby, but a time of day for babies compared to say if they
were missing six or a couple of evening when it would have probably just been absolutely hell.
Just screaming babies everywhere at six p.m. So it's very easy, isn't it, to look on social media
or to see a mum breastfeeding on a park bench or in a support group and think, oh, wow, you've
really mailed this, you've got this, but what we don't see is like you say what's happening behind
closed doors when she gets home and that baby hits that fussy period at five p.m. and she's
worried about her milk supply and all these other things that are going on and a lot of breastfeeding
is, it's not peaceful and glamorous and beautiful. A lot of it is, look at me, say, do you honestly
want to feed again or why won't you latch or why are you screaming at me? I just fed you or why are
you throwing up? Like, there's so much of that. I wonder if this is a really good point to
talk about what breastfeeding does normally look like. So right from when you first give birth and
you have your baby, can you talk us through the golden hour, the importance of that and also
what we can expect in those first few days? Yeah. So the golden hour is this period of time after
a baby's born that it takes if you've had a very straightforward birth with no kind of drugs,
no complications if you place a baby from the birth canal straight onto the mother and leave them
there. I can never remember the exact amount of time but it's something like 56 minutes. If you
leave them and then maybe alone for 56 minutes and everything has gone well, the baby will go through
a series of actions using all of their reflexes, their stepping reflex, their routine reflex,
they will wiggle their way up the month's body, they will find the breast, they will lick at the
nipple, they were chew on their fist and then they were kind of lunge themselves out of the nipple
and latch on and it takes, as I say, I think it's 56 minutes. It's a precise amount of time.
I can never remember exactly but it's just less than an hour and when we tend to do in the west
is we tend to baby is born, baby is picked up, put on a scales, they may have a bit of an K injection,
they're separated immediately or very soon after birth from mum and that interrupts this dance,
this kind of breast crawl that we call it is a very, it's kind of a part of the birth, it's actually
a continuation of the birth experience and interrupting it means that the sunbabies,
when they then do go to breastfeed a little bit later on, they're not quite as good at it,
it's a little bit more likely to be painful, mum's a little bit more likely to be a bit anxious
about it, the oxytocin has come down, she's not on that high from birth anymore, per kind of
logical thinking brain has kicked in a bit more, maybe this anxiety is coming up and the whole
thing could just make breastfeeding a little bit harder. So in an ideal world, baby is born,
they're not weighed, vitamin K can be given while your skin is skinned with your baby,
but not cleaned, you are left alone with your infant for at least an hour. If you've had any
medication or you've had a C-section, it could be two hours before this happens, so really we
should be looking at the golden two hours and people were so oh we have to weigh the baby,
yeah great let's weigh the baby after they fed, that's a really good thing to do.
The other issue we have with this though is that if there's any issue with your placenta,
if you've had any kind of stress or trauma during your labor and that birthing experience,
they're going to want to get baby latched quicker because it helps to explore the placenta.
So you may find that somebody then is quite insistent about getting baby latched for you,
and that in itself isn't a problem, you always want to prioritize your health, so if there's a risk
to you or your baby by not having that placenta delivered quickly, we absolutely need to sacrifice
the golden hour for that. What we should be avoiding though is somebody coming along and pushing
your baby onto the breast, manhandling you and kind of forcing that latched to happen because
what that's then doing is it's creating this very first precious important experience of having
something in your mouth which is going to be so important forever, right? Having
things we need to feed, we need to eat, we need to drink, we need to kiss, all these lovely
things. I think first experience of that is having something forced upon you and if your first
experience as a mother is somebody doing this very innate basic, not basic, but kind of this
thing that we really associate with motherhood, doing it for us because we can't do it ourselves,
that's going to knock our confidence. So having this golden hour interrupted, having somebody take
over for you, it's going to set you up immediately for a bit of a harder experience in the days to come.
Some people might not have had that and they're in the first few weeks and months of rest
for you doing anything and it didn't start out like that but all isn't lost is it? If you didn't
experience that uninterrupted first hour. I didn't get that with either of my babies and I went
on to breastfeed them so I'm speaking to you as a lactation consultant, didn't get that experience
and you know clearly still felt passionate enough by breastfeeding that I've gone on to do what I do.
If you don't get it, it's okay, it's not all it's not less lost as you say, you can actually
recreate that golden hour in the days and weeks afterwards by getting somewhere comfy, getting kind
of semi-reclined almost like you are in a hospital bed but perhaps in your own bed at home or even in a
bath and just lay baby on your belly and let them just find their way to your breast and we kind
of sometimes call this re-birthing because it's just going back through those motions that you missed
out on and it's often deeply healing for a lot of people and it can really really help get breastfeeding
back on track. I actually did it with my eldest so I stopped breastfeeding him when he was too
exiled and decided to try again after a couple of weeks break and the first thing that the breastfeeding
counselor I spoke to had me do was get skin to skin semi-reclined with him on my belly and see if
he would breast crawl and he did and he lashed him. He was four or five weeks old at that point
so you do have lots of opportunity and again going back to the message we had earlier with if you
don't get this golden hour that's not because you have failed, it's not because you've done something
wrong, it's because of the system that we live in or there was a medical reason as to why actually
it wasn't a great idea at that time. We needed to prioritise saving you or you know your overall
health over this kind of very nice thing that we can do. Okay so what happens then the next few days
what can we expect from our baby? Yeah so depending on the birth that you've had some babies
will want to wake up and feed a lot, particularly around night two into the early hours of day three
because at about 72 hours after the placenta is delivered your milk will come in with abundance
and what baby's doing is they kind of gearing up for that by doing lots of frequent feeding.
However some babies are sleepy and really hard to wake up and particularly in the first 24 hours
it's actually really important to try and get some breast stimulation in every sort of two to three
hours during the day if you can because even though your baby is actually okay they can often go
24 hours or more and with the reserve that they have and not really need to feed very much we need
to prime the breasts and the breasts need to know that milk is wanted and needed for long-term
milk supplies so we need to get that stimulation in. So if your baby is sleepy and you're struggling
to wake them up start hand expressing on day one day two and then let's start that that production.
Once your milk comes in by my milk coming and your milk's been there with a whole time you had
colostrum that's milk but when we say milk coming in we mean like you wake up one morning and your boobs
are like you know dolly part and you know it's like well where did they come from? From that point on
we would expect a baby to want to feed again around every two to three hours really but or eight to
ten times a day minimum but actually for some babies they may have a period of time of the day where
they want to feed every hour or just beyond the big constantly for three or four hours and that's
also really normal and although it's normal that sort of feeding behavior can often cause anxiety
for parents because they think it's a sign that they're not making enough milk because this baby
is constantly on the breast right just put them down and they want to feed again and this is where
we then want to start looking at perhaps some triaging questions to reassure parents so if your
baby is producing around six nice heavy wet nappies a day my husband my ex has been used to call
them grenades because you know you fold up a little nappies when you could like throw them that kind
of heavy like good heavy nappie nice yellow poo we want to at least two pooes a day once your milk
comes in actually many babies will have a bowel movement every time you breastfeed because breastmilk
is an accident so if they're purring if they're weeding and if they're weeding is following a
lovely curve in their little red book on their health chart and breastfeeding is comfortable for you
and it's whatever they're doing is probably normal if you're having any pain if they're very unsettled
if they're not weeding if they're not purring if they're not gaining weight that's what we say okay
maybe there's a problem here and cluster feeding is such a cool anxiety really is I can imagine
you memories of of dealing with that yeah and I think that this is really interesting because
those of us that tick antenatal classes we might have had a session on breastfeeding I did and I
don't remember anything about it so when I had my baby it was like what am I doing what is going
on I have no idea yeah so I do apologise to anybody that was either in that class or taught that
class they might have gone through it all but I don't remember fully understanding anything about
cluster feeding and what that actually looked like in reality can you when we talk about cluster feeding
what are we talking about oh my gosh again that's a really good point and again I remember
having my firstborn and being like what the f is this because I thought cluster feeding was
I'll have to just be on my baby and it'll be lovely and we just become I've just sat here just
feeding for hours at a time switching boobs it was hell he'd scream at me arch his back he'd scream
I tried to latch him he'd latch for a few seconds pull away cry and then look to feed again he'd
be reading I put him back on the other side this would go on and on and on and as many parents do
I think well this is it I've got no milk in the evening when the milk was dried up actually that
can be cluster feeding this kind of frequent pulling on and off the breast and being very annoyed
in between it's often cluster feeding and again looking at the bigger picture weight gain
nappy at put generally speaking feeds are comfortable the rest of the day is baby quite happy to
breastfeed but you have this period of time typically around 5pm when your partner's just getting
home often well into the evening but babies are just miserable and they they want to feed and they
don't want to feed and you feel like you're going crazy it's awful and for some babies can be
displaying that a bit more than others so you can also get babies that maybe don't do so much
of the screaming and crying it's just they're popping on and off a lot and maybe hitting a lot
so they're their hands and they're quite strong babies I know what they want I don't realize
quite how strong I'm going to end up rude and there's a little thing I'm just going to punch
this food and what they're doing then when they're actually they're stimulating the milk and we
can do that ourselves we can push into a breast tissue with our knuckles or the heel of our hands
to get that milk to very faster but that's what they're doing they're trying to get the milk to
very faster in the same way that if you want to kitten feed it with its mouth you'll see it kind
of doing that kneading with its paws our babies are trying to do the same but just a bit more of a
brutal way and custard feeding is normal we're not entirely sure what's happening with there are
several likely reasons for it one of them being it's increasing milk supply for kind of long term
because frequent breast stimulation is what tells the body to make more milk there's also the theory
that they're kind of tanking up on very small because your breast often feel quite soft during
this time of day as well the milk that is available in there is really high in fat so babies we think
might be going to the breast wanting to have a feed getting quite annoyed that the milk is thrown
quite slowly but when they do get the milk it's super super high in fat they're actually very
filling and very good for them they need a lot of it but they're annoyed about it and then in theory
they sleep a little bit longer perhaps after custard feeding you notice maybe your baby will do a
two or three hours of sleeping so you can maybe get a little bit of sleep as well we also think maybe
some babies are just a bit overstimulated overworld and they don't really know what they're doing
bless them and life is hard you know I can resonate with that you know having a bit of a
tantrum in the evening it's funny isn't it because there'll be people that'll say do you need a
whole podcast about breastfeeding and it's like there are so many aspects to breastfeeding
feed you don't eat having it for the list tantrum feeding on the list like
absolutely a lot of people are going to be on a journey of I need to make more milk I need to
make more milk how do I make more milk we're going to be going online do you can on the search
engine searching how do I make all the lactation cookies how do I add my supply and I never ever
want to make anybody feel like they're they've done ridiculous things because look I have been I've
been given lactation cookies and I did eat them and I did hope and pray that they would that they
would be increasing my milk so I made some yep I can't quite a lot of weight doing that
do you know what they in all seriousness there is there is obviously the there are a lot of people
that say whatever you eat and drink isn't going to affect your milk supply but if eating something
is is making you happier if you believe that having that chocolate bar is you need the calories
just go for it in the early days do you not think absolutely and there are there are some foods which
do have some interesting studies that suggesting might be helpful in some way or another so a lot of
work I do is around no milk supply so I'm never going to be like oh no it's all nonsense because
some of it's quite interesting but going back to your point there if we think about placebo is
placebo is believing that something is working and we then think about oxytocin which is so important
for breastfeeding if eating a bar of chocolate for example just use your example there
makes you think that you're doing something to help your milk supply that's going to make you
feel a bit more relaxed about things but I could help your oxytocin to flow which is going to help
your milk to let down faster which may mean that your baby is happier at the breast so crack on
if you enjoy it if it tastes good it's accessible and affordable go for it maybe don't spend your
money on that tasting cookies the packet of hot lumps would do just fine but whatever it is
that makes you feel that you're helping it's okay placebo isn't a placebo if it works and
if it's working on a psychological level it's still working. Love love love talking to Lucy Ruddle
she's an iBCLC and an author as well mixed up combination feeding by choice or necessity
and breastfeeding myths busting the misinformation harming you your baby and society that's just
two of her books you can find out more about Lucy by heading to our website Lucy Ruddle.co.uk
that link and once to our social media pages are in the show notes for this episode as well
she will be coming on to the podcast again and we can't wait for it there's quite a few topics
that i know Lucy is really really passionate about and i think we might have to look at breastfeeding
myths as one of them because she has come across quite a few strange ones that i definitely think
we should be giving some time to on this podcast and thank you so much for listening i hope you
join us for the next episode of the next feed with me manpreet pinder till next time
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