If you could design the ideal way to lose weight, it would probably look a lot like pumping fat and calories directly out of your body. And for some of us, nature has made this entirely possible.
It’s well-documented that breastfeeding requires 400+ calories / day. That’s quite a lot of calories — the equivalent of running a 5k every day. And there’s research showing that breast feeding reduces women’s weight significantly after pregnancy… even 20 years after the fact! So it’s not the case that breastfeeding simply causes women to increase their caloric intake. Lactating women lose weight too.
What’s perhaps less well-known is that you can induce lactation in nearly any woman of reproductive age — even if she hasn’t been pregnant before.
There are two main ways to accomplish this:
- The slower, more natural, way is to stimulate the breasts with simple pumping. After a few weeks, a woman’s body will assume it has a child that needs milk. This process essentially back-triggers the prolactin hormone and causes sustained lactation once it gets started. Some women augment this by taking the herbal supplement Fenugreek which supposedly promotes further milk flow / volume.
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The quicker, more reliable, way to induce lactation is to temporarily manipulate hormone levels. The trick is to get your body to think you’ve just had a baby. This is done by elevating estrogen and progesterone for awhile and then dropping those levels as you boost prolactin — typically by taking a dopamine agonist like domperidone. This sounds pretty extreme… until you remember that lots of women already do most of this with birth control.
Standard birth control is exactly estrogen and progesterone — and it works by tricking your body into thinking you’re constantly pregnant. The only thing someone on birth control would need to do in order to induce lactation is to take 10mg of domperidone for a few days at the end of one of their active-pill cycles and then start pumping.
This diet would probably stack really well with off-label Metformin use too. Metformin can effectively provide another -100 calories / day by preventing the liver from performing too much gluconeogenesis on the food you eat. Realistically though, this would be a much better intervention if it worked like Spanx or Brava — an invisible product that you could wear under your clothing that quietly and discretely pumps milk from your breasts 3-5 times per day. But first, some enterprising women will have to validate that this actually works for non-mothers. There’s no obvious reason it shouldn’t, but it’s also just theory at this point.
So if you want to be part of pioneering science, why not start an n=1 exploratory study by picking up some automatic or manual pumps? If it works, you’ll likely end up a few pounds lighter (except for your slightly larger breasts) and you’ll be constantly buzzing with soothing oxytocin. You’ll also have the unique satisfaction of being able to subtract over 100 calories whenever you’re ready to pump it back out.
25 Responses to “The Lac Diet”
June 20
Laura A. BaurUm, how many breastfeeding women have you talked to? Pumping sucks more than your new baby- and is time intensive. To maintain lactation with any volume, you have to do it 5+ times a day. And it murders your nipples and stretches your breasts. And it makes you hungry anyway. Just go to a friggin gym.
June 20
Laura A. Bauralso- just because it takes extra calories to make milk doesn’t mean you lose weight- it can be that you need to eat MORE than you lose in lactation in order to produce at all. I know several ppl in this position and am not yet certain if I’m one of them.
June 20
Michael AlvaroI love this! To lose weight ladies, get pregnant
June 20
Teresa GonczyMen can induce lactation as well – you gonna give it a try, Louie? 🙂 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-males-can-lactate/
June 20
Artem Lamnin400 calories is about half an hour on the elliptical. Instead of taking a bunch of pills and screwing with your hormone levels and ultimately doing who knows what to your health, why not just go to a gym and change your diet?
June 20
Denise MelchinAgree with Laura here. Most women seem to find pumping quite horrendous. I never had thought about it until my daughter had a sudden decrease in breastfeeding needs, my milk went away suddenly. I asked other women for help and they really, really strongly discouraged pumping. (My daughter wants to breastfeed much more again now and I am a bit angry and sad that I listened to them and feel quite guilty that I was also maybe just a bit too lazy to pump).
June 20
Julia WiseI had to laugh because I was pumping as I read this. It’s really hard to imagine this being the easiest way to lose 400 calories a day. It requires consistency (you can never take a day off), carrying equipment to work, vacations, etc, and takes about 45 minutes a day.
June 20
Louie HelmTeresa: I looked into it! Unfortunately, men can only produce “errant lactation”, and never more than a few drops. Very sad.
June 20
Misha Gurevichwhy do you think spending 30 minutes a day exercising and changing your diet ISN’T doing who knows what to your health?
June 20
Artem LamninBecause improved health outcomes from exercise and dieting are well documented. Show me some double blind 30 year studies or whatever showing how breast pump machines and hormone pills are an awesome way to lose weight.
June 20
Gregory SizemoreIts not just total time spent pumping, its having to do several sessions a day to keep milk from going away. (This is also something that sucks about dairy animals, the frequency and consistency of the time commitment.) Also breasts that are full of milk can be painful and leak.
June 20
Darya GurevichIt is an increase in appetite…you couldn’t defeat it before, now when you are lactating…it Is even harder….and don’t forget those embarrassing leaking nipples….
June 20
Stephanie Aldrich“But first, some enterprising women will have to validate that this actually works for non-mothers. There’s no obvious reason it shouldn’t”
“no obvious reason it shouldn’t”
Hahahahaha okay.
June 20
Brittany GardnerLol. Oh man.
As someone who has been breastfeeding for 6 years straight, I can attest that it’s a great calorie burner but it requires a ton of nutrients as well. I often feel quite run down and depleted if I’m not giving extra attention to eating completely healthy. It also does a number on the breasts. I also pumped and donated for a while, and found pumping to be quite arduous and time consuming. I love breastfeeding for the bonding/health benefits for both myself and the babies, but in the absence of a child to feed… You would probably be better off just eating healthy and exercising. Running a 5k every day is EASY compared to this idea. lol
June 20
Brittany GardnerStill laughing. Will share with my online mom groups for sure 🙂
June 20
Brittany GardnerSome people find it harder to lose weight than others, and that’s true even for breastfeeding women.
June 21
Bernadette YoungAs well as it being implausible to most that expressing breastmilk multiple times a day, the theory here for inducing lactation is bunkum. A contraceptive pill doesn’t simulate pregnancy. It contains some of the same hormones but at vastly different levels. (Ask anyone who’s taken the pill and also experienced first trimester). Rather they are present in a low level that is sufficient to inhibit the hypothalamus from producing the peak of LH required for ovulation. Taking dopamine antagonists for an extended period of time may allow your prolactin levels to rise enough to allow a tiny amount of lactation, but fun side effects could also include sever muscle spasms, psychosis and irreversible Parkinsonism. I’m hopeful nobody would actually find your overall suggestion appealing, but seriously, this is bad biology and potentially dangerous suggestion.
December 2
LisaHi everyone! All I can do is tell you my story. I am a professional newborn care specialist (baby nurse). I have worked with loads of families over the years and found that many of these families looked into wet nurses when the mother wasn’t able to breast feed. I decided a year ago that I wanted to add this service. In order to do this I used an electric pump and it took about 3 months for me to get a good consistent milk supply. I have been working with a family for 8 months and the job contract ends in 4 more months. The I will go back to pumping until I start my next job. My point in all this was that you don’t need to mess with hormones to enable this to happen. If you are consistent and don’t mind wearing nipple protection in your bras oh and don’t forget the Udder cream, I would die without it! I am not saying that doing this for weight loss is good or bad but I can attest it works. I have lost about 100 lbs in 1 year.
June 21
Bernadette YoungAs well as it being implausible to most that expressing breastmilk multiple times a day, the theory here for inducing lactation is bunkum. A contraceptive pill doesn’t simulate pregnancy. It contains some of the same hormones but at vastly different levels. (Ask anyone who’s taken the pill and also experienced first trimester). Rather they are present in a low level that is sufficient to inhibit the hypothalamus from producing the peak of LH required for ovulation. Taking dopamine antagonists for an extended period of time may allow your prolactin levels to rise enough to allow a tiny amount of lactation, but fun side effects could also include sever muscle spasms, psychosis and irreversible Parkinsonism. I’m hopeful nobody would actually find your overall suggestion appealing, but seriously, this is bad biology and potentially dangerous suggestion.
June 21
Louie HelmJust for clarity, I did stipulate that this would really only be a good diet once someone makes a product that goes on underneath clothing and can do something like periodically pump and evaporate milk away. Then it would be a less labor intensive process and wouldn’t disrupt someone’s day as much.
June 21
Louie HelmAlso, I agree that 400 cal / day is a pitifully small amount of exercise. It’s physically attainable for almost anyone. But on the other hand, statistically speaking, 0% of the population does that much.
June 21
Louie HelmIf there were already tit-milk evaporators, way more people would use those instead of exercising.
June 21
Brittany GardnerNo, they wouldn’t. Even if you could evaporate the milk you still need to pump for 20~ minutes every few hours to stimulate and maintain production in the first place. There is a market for breast milk, so going through all that intense effort only to evaporate the fruits of your labor also seems wasteful. Becoming a professional wet nurse would make more sense, sense a baby’s mouth is way more efficient than a pump, but people don’t do that for weight loss either. You grossly underestimate how mentally and physically taxing lactation is.
June 21
Andrew HayExcept that when you increase the energy expenditure of the body, the body isn’t going to just sit around and take the hit. You’ll just get more hungry and eat more. Probably around 400 cals per day more 🙂 A pointless activity, though the milk could be useful for mothers can’t lactate.
June 8
JPThis does work. I’m not for taking special hormones to bring this on, but doing it naturally does work. When I was nursing my newborn son 28 Years ago (!!) I lost tons of weight and ended up at 95 pounds. Too much weight loss and not intended as I was very young and didn’t understand needing to stay at a healthy weight. However, now at 47 years and wanting to shed a few pounds I think this will work as I still feel “the urge” when I hear a baby cry and know that if I persevered I would begin lactating again and lose weight doing this again as I did before – maybe this doesn’t work for everyone. For those that are sedentary and dont have access to exercise facilities this could be an option (also when the Milkman is late on a Saturday morning it could come in handy …….ONLY JOKING, no stupid responses please…..but then again if your cereal isn’t already sweetened….)