Hi Karleen

Yep, that sounds about right to me.  As a rule of thumb, the paeds 
that I used to work with liked a weight gain of roughly 30g/day from 
hospital discharge until 3 months.  This is not absolutely carved in 
stone, of course, but if a healthy baby is breastfeeding well, they 
will gain at least this amount - sometimes as much as 250-400g a 
week.  And if the baby is not breastfeeding well - as evidenced by 
consistently lower gain - then the quicker the reason is identified 
and addressed, then the better it will be for the baby's nutrition 
and the mom's on-going milk supply.  There's always a reason for low 
gain - if you can just find it.  In practice, however, I find so 
often that clinics and health visitors and such will reassure a 
mother that a breastfed baby doesn't need to gain so much, and the 
baby starts falling down the chart - and eventually someone wakes up 
and sees that the baby is really not doing well, and it's often too 
late to kick-start the milk supply again in time to prevent formula 
supplements.  It's just so much easier to take careful anticipatory 
care in the very early weeks and jump in quickly with a little tweak 
before the whole thing turns into a train-smash.

Just my 0.2ml

Pamela (who does a disappointingly large number of analyses of weight 
charts for "exclusively breastfed" babies who are being referred to 
Social Services for very low gain/failure to thrive when it's often 
too late to avoid really necessary large formula supplementation - 
can you tell I feel strongly about this???)

At 14:49 25/06/2013, you wrote:
>Date:    Tue, 25 Jun 2013 18:39:39 +1000
>From:    Karleen Gribble <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: How much weight gain is satisfactory?
>
>I have just been rereading Marianne Neifert's paper on lactational 
>insufficiency. I find it interesting that they determined that a 
>woman was not providing her baby with enough milk if they gained 
>less than 200g a week between weeks 2 and 4 of life. That seems to 
>be too high as a cut off to me. I would be interested in the opinion 
>of Lactnetters.
>Karleen Gribble
>Australia

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