Everything and lots of it! It's easy to feel pressured personally and by others to lose weight and snap back after no time at all, but actually I doubt this is the most healthy thing for most mums. The way I will encourage you to eat will help nourish you and your baby, discourage excess weight gain, and allow your baby to see healthy eating habits.

Your body needs to do what it needs to do and some bodies need to gain weight at this time. If you force your body to lose weight at a time when it can't, you will in the long term most likely end up bigger and battling your weight for longer, with a miserable cycle of deprivation and starvation.

Finding a way of eating that works for you will be in your hands, I don't provide meals plans. Instead I teach people the principles of eating well so they can make informed choices and out together meals that they like, enjoy cooking and that work for them practically.

Breast milk should be a high fat content milk, this helps to keep your baby satisfied and provides essential fats for brain and nerve development. This means that the diet should contain a substantially higher amount of fat than a typical Western diet to avoid mum's stores being depleted. Protein is second to fat in its importance and a variety of flavours from plants, herbs and spices help to introduce your baby to a variety of flavours, getting baby ready to enjoy a varied and full diet once weaned.

Essentially the principles are based on the diet being made of up most of the below foods. You can make anything from stir fires to curries, to roast dinners to tapas.

Eat Mostly:

• Protein (eggs, meats, fish, seafood)
• Fat (olive oil, avocados, fish)
• Plants (veggies and fruits)
• Herbs and spices

With a Smaller Amount of the Below Foods:

• Tree nuts and seeds
• Good quality chocolate (70% with no added milk)

Carbohydrates

Did you know that carbohydrates also include root vegetables like carrots, swede and beetroot? These sources of carbs we digest easily and can use the glucose from them. Carbohydrates form things like bread and cereals we can only gain a certain amount from, leaving lots left over for gut yeast and bacteria to ferment. This creates gas but also feeds them leading to an imbalance in gut bacteria. Gut dysbiosis as this is called, is linked to everything from IBS to behavioural and developmental problems, to migraines and allergies.

As the bulk of the diet is as below, there is still room to have bread, pasta, biscuits whatever your preference sometimes. Most people tolerate these in small amounts. the worst thing we can do for our hath is to worry, but it important to understand that these 'normal' foods should not really be a main part of the human diet.

Toxins

Think about reducing your baby's exposure to toxins through your milk by avoiding artificial sweeteners and flavour enhancers in processed foods and drinks. Chewing gum, squash, fizzy drinks, ready made foods, some takeaways, and crisps are common and often hidden sources of these.

Allergies

There is some understanding generically that eating some foods when breastfeeding increases or decreases the chances of the baby developing an allergy. The general guidance on this changes every 5 minutes because there are many contributing factors, so a black and white answer is difficult. Essentially, eating allergenic foods - meaning foods that are not a natural part of the human diet in pregnancy and breastfeeding will increase the chances of the baby having an issue, especially in combination with reduced diversity of healthy gut bacteria in the mother.

The most allergenic foods include wheat, diary and peanuts. Generally, you shouldn't have to avoid 100% but keeping to minimum should expose baby subtly to these to have enough exposure to know what they are, but not so much exposure they see them as threat. If the mother reacts to these (many people react to these without even knowing as the symptoms can be obscure e.g. migraine or PMS which they may not link to their diet, then the baby may inherit antibodies to these if the mother keeps eating these foods whilst pregnant and breastfeeding.

Peanuts are legumes, not nuts. tree nuts are human foods, legumes are not. Reacting to these is somewhat normal, they do contain a toxin and so an immune response to this is not a surprise. However we do see allergies to human foods like tree nuts, seafood and egg most commonly. This is nothing to do with the food, but down to the host environment and is another topic to discuss altogether.

Vitamin D

Vitamin D - The guidelines are for all women to take Vitamin D whilst breastfeeding. I would add to that that it is important for all women to get enough sunshine in their pregnancy. Because Vitamin D is fat soluble, taking it in tablet form with a meal that contains no fat is useless. I would recommend Biocare's Biomulsion D which is well absorbed.

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