20. Body Trust Through the Lens of Feeding Babies

A little while ago I had been thinking about my different experiences working as a Registered Dietitian. And I can say that the most frustrating area I ever worked was my short time spent as a Lactation Consultant.

Babies are the most intuitive feeders. And breastfeeding can be so easy if one were truly able to surrender to the lead of their baby. But it’s our own expectations and rigidity and food rules that project and get in the way, usually making it a stressful and miserable experience.

I would try to ease mothers’ concerns about their newborn needing to eat every 20-45 minutes by showing them that their baby’s stomach is only the size of a marble. A marble sized stomach will fill very quickly and will also empty very quickly. It’s normal for them to need to feed every 20-45 minutes. It didn't mean they weren't producing enough milk.

It was so frustrating to experience mothers unable to simply accept this as fact. They wanted their baby on a strict schedule eating the same amount at the same time every single day. The lack of trust in one’s body and of their baby’s body was never more apparent in these moments. Mothers would give up, switch to formula and try to shove 4 ounces of formula into a marble sized stomach.

The baby would then spit up most of it and I would sit there and listen to the mother suspect that their baby had a milk-protein allergy. While milk-protein allergies in babies exist, they are actually quite rare. Most of the time it isn’t an allergy. It’s just simply the case that you can not shove 4 ounces of liquid inside of a marble.

I’ve watched mothers waste thousands of dollars on “special” formula because of this suspected allergy when all that needed to happen was slower, reduced, more frequent feedings. I would get told “yeah but it helped reduce the spit up.”

Yes, because babies stomachs grow pretty quickly and in just a few months, they can hold more milk for a longer periods of time. This will happen with breastmilk, regular formula, or super expensive formula.

There’s another point I’d like to make. Let me ask you this...

How many times a day do you pick up a water bottle to take a quick little drink? For the first 6 months of life, breastmilk or formula is everything to a baby. It is their food and their water. Sometimes they don’t want a whole feeding. Sometimes they just want a “sip of water.”

So if you latch your baby and they only take a few sips then unlatch, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you aren’t producing enough milk. They might have just wanted a “sip of water.”

I understand that we live in a world that does not privilege mothers to operate at the whim of their babies. We ourselves are on strict schedules so it’s much easier to have our babies conform to us, than us to them.

All of this to say, my time as a lactation consultant made me realize that the disembodiment of body trust started with the adults. Not the babies. And that’s why I shifted to working with adults and their relationships to food.

In this episode, I dive deeper into body trust through the lens of feeding our babies.

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