How a Postpartum Nutritionist Can Help You Feel Better
If you are a new mom who is less than 2(ish) years postpartum and dealing with lingering symptoms like exhaustion, mood swings, hair loss, anxiety, hormone drama and night sweats, then working with a postpartum nutritionist might be right for you.
September 23, 2024
Hi! I’m Alison Boden, dietitian for moms and founder of Motherwell Nutrition. If you have been wondering WTF is going on with your postpartum body, and why your doctors aren’t helping you, you’re in the right place!
First a quick rant…
The 6-week postpartum visit is an inadequate measure of a new mom’s recovery progress.
A quick stitches check may tell us how our wounds are healing from birth, but does not give any insight into the bigger picture of postpartum recovery.
Postpartum recovery is largely dependent on the right nutrition in this specific season of life to help facilitate healing, replenishment of depleted nutrients, and hormonal balance. Even if your body is “good to go” from a medical perspective at 6 weeks, there’s more going on under the hood that needs attention.
If you are feeling like your body needs help to feel like you did before pregnancy, a postpartum dietitian nutritionist may be the right provider to meet your needs.
What does a postpartum dietitian nutritionist do?
A registered dietitian nutritionist (RDN for short) uses food, diet, and supplements to help you prevent, manage, or reverse disease. Most people know the power of nutrition for a diagnosis like heart disease or diabetes, but what can nutrition do for a postpartum mom?
So much! Eating right for this season of life is extremely important, because your body has differnet needs now than you had pre-pregnancy. Our big picture goal is to come up with a personalized plan that helps your body get what it needs so you can recover and feel better.
More specifically, a postpartum RDN will -
help with healing
A postpartum dietitian nutritionist will help you with the initial healing from birth, ensuring that you are getting the right nutrients for wound healing. If you had a C-section, your body needs the right nutrients to produce new tissue and muscle fibers so your incision can heal. If you had a vaginal delivery and experienced any tearing, you’ll need need extra healing nutrients as well. No matter how you delivered, the inside of your uterus has a large dinner plate size wound from where the placenta was attached. And if you lost any blood during delivery, your body is hard at work to replace this and needs the right nutrients to make this happen.
help with postpartum depletion
100% of the moms I work with experience nutrient deficiencies after giving birth. Pregnancy, birth, and lactation is an incredibly nutrient demanding experience, and even if you took a prenatal vitamin the odds are that you still are depleted, sometimes years after birth! A postpartum dietitian nutritionist can evaluate your current nutrient status using your lab results and symptoms, and come up with a food and supplement plan to help your body replenish nutrients lost in pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding.
Help with hormones
Your hormones go on a wild ride from pregnancy through the first year or two postpartum. Eating to support these hormonal changes is a key part of any postpartum nutrition plan.
The process looks like this:
We will evaluate your current symptoms, health and family history, and review your lab results.
Together, we’ll collaborate on a food and supplement protocol that is personalized for what your body needs, your goals, and food preferences. This includes meal planning and design, and supplement prescriptions.
We’ll follow up with you to help you implement the personalized postpartum nutrition plan, which may include more meal planning discussions, coaching around barriers and time management.
It’s not just nutrition. You’ll get help on other lifestyle medicine areas like sleep, stress, and exercise.
Over time, we’ll tweak and modify the plan based on how your body is responding. This process is dynamic, not one-size-fits all.
Most importantly, an RDN who specializes in postpartum knows that you are exhausted and have very little time to take care of yourself. Any recommended food or lifestyle changes are always mom friendly.
What kinds of symptoms does a postpartum dietitian nutritionist help with?
The nutrient depletions and hormonal changes after having a baby can cause a perfect storm of symptoms. While you might have heard from your mom friends or even your doctor that these are “just part of motherhood,” that’s actually not true. All of the below can be partially or completely addressed with a postpartum nutrition plan:
Fatigue and exhaustion
Mood changes and stress intolerance
Anxiety
Night sweats
Weight management
Insomnia
Breastfeeding and milk supply
Hair loss
achy joints
brain fog
low immunity
Can a postpartum dietitian nutritionist help with hormones.
Short answer: Hell yes.
Long answer: Your sex hormones after birth look similar to menopausal levels of estrogen and progesterone, which triggers a ton of symptoms from night sweats to anxiety and depression. At the same time, lack of sleep, stress, and nutrient depletions can make both your cortisol and thyroid hormones very unhappy.
While some of this tends to get better with time, waiting around to feel better will only get you so far. Recent research has suggested that it takes the average mom 7 years to feel better after giving birth. This is unacceptable. Who has time to feel like crap for SEVEN YEARS?!
A postpartum dietitian will review your hormonal symptoms, labs, diet, stress, and sleep and design a plan for you that will support your hormones coming back to balance much faster.
Read More on the Blog:
Can a postpartum dietitian nutritionist help me lose weight?
Yes… but this may not be our initial focus depending on where you are at in your postpartum recovery.
A postpartum body is generally a depleted body, and if we dive straight into restriction for weight loss, then we risk further depleting you, messing up your hormones and metabolism. This might even cause you to GAIN weight over the longterm.
Bounceback culture is a huge reason for lingering postpartum symptoms that last far beyond what should be normal. Your body has very specific needs during postpartum, and if we skip over the required healing, nutrient replenishing, and hormonal rebuilding then this sets the stage for continued symptoms and drama for potentially years.
We don’t want that, right?!
The good news is we don’t have to choose between feeling good and helping your body reach its ideal weight. These things aren’t mutually exclusive. Eating enough for energy, healing, and hormonal balance also will fuel and repair your metabolism and decrease your cravings.
All of this sets the stage for a healthy postpartum weight loss.
If you are later on in the postpartum process and have already worked on the replenishing and healing piece, then a more targeted mom-friendly weight loss approach is definitely something a postpartum dietitian nutritionist can help you with.
Can a postpartum dietitian nutritionist order labs?
This largely depends on the state where your dietitian nutritionist is licensed, and the experience of who you are working with.
RDNs who practice functional nutrition may order lab kids like hormone tests, nutrient profiles, gut function tests, etc. These tests can tyically be done at home, and give us a complete view of that particular system through the lens of your symptoms and where you are in your postpartum recovery process.
Some RDNs can also order basic lab panels through companies like Labcorp or Quest, which rounds out the data needed to assess the cause of your symptoms. The dietitian nutritionist can also work with your doctor to get the right labs ordered for you.
During your initial assessment, your dietitian nutritionist will provide recommendations on labs and can work with your doctor for insurance coverage.
Read More on the Blog:
what to do when your labs are “normal” but you still feel like trash
How long will it take to feel better?
You’re a mom, so you don’t have time to feel like depleted, hormonal roadkill everyday. The goal of nutrition work for postpartum is to get you feeling better asap so you can have energy to do life.
Your mileage may vary, and your unique timeline is dependent on where we’re starting with, and how quickly we can get you up to speed with your postpartum nutrition plan.
The most dramatic change I see happen in the quickest amount of time is more energy and less anxiety. Often these can start improving in the first week! Along with this will come less brain fog, more energy for exercise followed by focus, sleep, and mood improvements in the first month or so. Things like joint pain, immunity, body composition and hair loss can be more variable, usually taking a few months to start noticing a difference while your body works to rebuild and repair under the surface. Just like your 401k, the benefits start compounding over time.
How much time and energy will this require?
As a new mom, time and energy is a limited resource right? So if working with a postpartum dietitian nutritionist costs you more of this resource, it will hardly feel worth it!
That’s why the big picture focus is on efficiency. How can we use the time that you are already investing into cooking or meal planning for yourself and your family, and make the right tweaks so that you are being nourished in the way your body needs?
Small changes, big impact. You won’t be going on 90 day “clean eating” plans that will cost you a ton of time in the kitchen, and money at Whole Foods. We will start off by assessing what you are currently eating, and make small modifications to meals that just need a little finessing, or larger changes to meals that are not hitting the mark in terms of what your body needs (lunch, I’m looking at you).
The first goal is always to free up your energy and bandwidth, and we can accomplish that with some pretty minimal diet changes in the first week.
Time commitment in terms of meetings with your dietitian nutritionist are typically weekly or biweekly with an option for follow up questions to be addressed via email.
My goal for all of my clients is to feel like the food, nutrition and lifestyle changes create MORE energy and less overwhelm in your day to day rather than a time suck. We work incrementally so that the changes fit right into your daily life and become your new normal, rather than something you always have to be tracking and mustering up all of your willpower for.
Have you worked with a postpartum dietitian nutritionist? What was your experience?
How to work with Alison, functional dietitian specializing in hormone help for mothers:
for more energy and less brain fog? Energize is open for enrollment.
Are you 2 years postpartum or less, and struggling to feel like yourself again? Mother Recover was made for you.
Interested in more of a 1:1 approach, including functional lab testing? Book an appointment
Want the good stuff?
sign up to get weekly postpartum and hormone tips via email.