In my travels around the world, I have been privileged to observe lots of mothers and babies. The thing that struck me most clearly when I was in South Africa and Kenya, in particular, was how thin the mothers were who had the biggest, most roly-poly babies--at 4 mo, 6 mo, 9 mo, 12 mo, 2 yrs, etc. These children were breastfeeding (most of them through 12 months pretty exclusively so or with tastes of food but not huge meals of same). These women breastfed as their culture told them to and their babies were quite healthy. The mothers were thin for many possible reasons: the food they ate may have had fewer calories than we might have thought appropriate, they did a lot of other work that kept them using the energy they did take in, genetic predisposition to that body type, etc. Who knows? Breastfed children, fed as they need to be fed, grow as they are programmed to grow (which--in some cases--means putting on lots and lots of weight early and literally growing into it.) One of my favorite pictures on my "Breastfeeding babies gallery" in my private office is a little guy who weighed in at birth at 9 lbs; by 2 months, he was 20 lbs [he doubled his weight in less than half the time anticipated]; at 6 months, he was 26 lbs, and at 12 months, 28 lbs. (this was bigger than my son at age 3!). This child literally grew into all the weight he put on earlier. The pictures show him very jowly with lots of rolls at 2 months and progressively "slimmer looking" with each subsequent picture. He walked at the same time my son did (14 months). mailto:[log in to unmask] "We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations." Kathleen G. Auerbach,PhD, IBCLC (Ferndale, WA USA) [log in to unmask] WEB PAGE: http://www.telcomplus.net/kga/lactation.htm LACTNET archives http://library.ummed.edu/lsv/archives/lactnet.html