My adventures with a Foremilk/Hindmilk Imbalance

When you start breastfeeding your second baby, you think that it’s going to be like riding a bike – And for the most part it is, until, like in my case, something unexpected happens. This is about how a Foremilk/Hindmilk imbalance rocked the first month or so of breastfeeding Maddie.

As often with babies, the first indicator that anything is wrong is in the poop.

After the meconium had past, I noticed that Maddies bowel movements weren’t the lovely, seedy yellow breastfed poop that L had as a baby. Hers came out frothy, watery and a crazy dark evergreen color. There was a lot of it. She went through the normal 6 wet diapers a day – but it was always accompanied by this strange poo.

After talking with her doctor about it, he told us to keep an eye out and that if it was a shade of green it usually meant it was okay. But, my instincts felt otherwise. She was gaining weight and sleeping well, but then another symptom arose – her bowel movements became quite…ahem…explosive.

She didn’t act like she was in pain, but at night while sleeping next to me in her co-sleeper – her bowel movements would  often wake her, and us, up. Being sound sleepers, this was no easy feat – we often sleep through thunderstorms, dogs barking, trees falling..you get the idea. Though babies are usually gassy little creatures, this didn’t sound normal. Not at all – it sounded like she was a grown woman who had eaten too much cabbage or something — so. darn. loud.

I belong to a great local parenting group on Facebook, a place where I am comfortable asking questions and more often than not I will get informed and educated answers. I knew that a lot of the ladies on the board were involve la leche league leaders – and they were the ones who first suggested that the symptoms sounded like a foremilk/hindmilk imbalance.

What is a foremilk and hindmilk?

Foremilk is the first bit of milk that comes out when breastfeeding – this milk is meant to quench a babies thirst and is often more watery than the hindmilk – which is the creamy, fatty milk that carries a lot of the nutrients and helps the baby gain weight and grow through proper digestion.

I noticed that I was overproducing and that she wasn’t emptying the breast each time. I would switch breasts every time I fed her – feeding her from a different breast than the last session. This is how I did it with L, and never had any problems.  But, what had been happening was that Maddie was getting mostly foremilk – the watery low fat milk – and not enough of hindmilk before getting full and unlatching! This of course didn’t help her digestion system, and caused the explosive poops she was having.

How do you fix a foremilk/hindmilk imbalance?

Since feeding from one side each feeding wasn’t working for me, I put into action the next thing that was suggested to me: block feeding. Block feeding is when you breastfeed from only one side for 6-12 hours at a time. So every time Maddie ate, she ate from the same boob she did before – eating from the right side for 12 hours and then the left for 12 hours. Luckily, within one day of doing this Maddie’s poops turned that yellow color I was talking about, and began to get less and less explosive. I block fed until my supply evened itself out, it took about a week.

Now, 2 months along, we have a regular schedule going and are breastfeeding as normal. Maddie is feeling much better and gaining a ton of weight – 5 pounds in one month!