Is Your Baby Gaining Enough Weight?
What to do if your baby is gaining too little weight
If your baby is not gaining weight adequately, it’s important to talk to your pediatrician if you’re breastfeeding to experiment with ways to increase your milk supply–such as drinking fenugreek tea, increasing hydration, possibly using a breast pump to stimulate more milk, working with a lactation specialist to make sure baby’s latch is truly efficient in extracting milk from the breast, etc.
If all avenues have been explored and your baby is still not gaining, we make sure the baby is absorbing nutrition properly and may sometimes need to run some tests to make sure it’s not a medical issue with the baby. If no medical issue is discovered, then it’s a simple matter of providing more calories for the baby by adding a supplemental formula or caloric powder to breast milk (called a breast milk fortifier) to get weight gain back on track.
Meet our expert:
Dr. JJ Levenstein is a board-certified pediatrician and fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics with a thriving private pediatric practice in Encino, Calif. She serves on the clinical staff of two hospitals and has been consistently voted one of the Best Doctors in America® from 2003 through 2010. Drawing from her experience as a pediatrician and mom, Dr. Levenstein serves as president and co-founder of MD Moms , makers of Baby Silk, the first personal care line for babies developed by pediatrician moms.
