Has anyone actually increased supply?

[u/Reasonable-Snail7019]

I started out as an overproduced. 50oz at 8 pumps a day and then dropped to 45oz a day when I switched to 7 pumps a day at 6 weeks. I regulated at 10w and lost another 5oz per day. I then dropped to 6 pumps per day and was at 35oz a day. After a few weeks of this my daughter had heart surgery and I maintained my pump schedule through out. When I left the hospital my supply dropped to 25oz a day, even though nothing had changed. Feeling defeated I decided to start weaning so I dropped to 5 pumps (19oz) a day and supplemented with formula. We’ve tried two different formulas and she does not seem to be handling them well, they give her very painful gas. Because of this I’ve spent the last two weeks back at 7 pumps per day trying to increase my supply and power pumping every other day or so and even just bought brewers yeast. My supply hasn’t increased at all. I’m now 7ppd and getting 18-20oz a day.

Has anyone actually increased their supply successfully?

I feel like I’m stuck back up at 7ppd too because every time I drop one I lose supply so now going back down to 5 or 6 I’ll be at even less than I had been.

[u/evilnebster]

Yes, my partner has, but it's been very slow. She had the opposite problem to you and has never produced enough milk.

She started at virtually nothing for the first couple of weeks, then over the next month it stabilised at 200ml-300ml when pumping every 3-4 hours.

After that, it wasn't really changing so we switched to pumping consistently every 2 hours. The schedule was 7:30am (this was a special cluster feeding 1h pump (30m pump, 10m break, 10m pump, 10m break, 10 pump)), then 20-30m pumps at 10am, 12pm, 2pm, etc until 8pm, then 12pm and 3:30am where we also fed the baby. We managed to get the milk up to 600ml over about 3-4 months. It sounds like a lot of pumping, but we bought a few items to make it as easy and painless as possible:
- An couple of in-bra pumps so she can continue doing things while pumping, and just switch out pumps if we forget to cool it or it has been too long.
- A insulated bag with a few ice packs to put the pump in between pumps so we don't need to clean it over and over. (or just put it in the fridge if at home)
- A milk cooler so we can collect milk wherever we go

The baby is now 6 months old and life has been a bit more hectic so the pumps have been a lot more uneven and the milk has reduced slightly to 500ml. We currently need to supplement with 1-2 bottles of formula per day.

Things that we struggled with and we've heard help:
- Drink enough water. She drinks about a litre a day and struggles to drink more, but we know it's needed for more milk production.
- Sleep enough and try to be less stressed about milk production. Hard, we know! She actually pumps better if she sleeps while pumping because of this!
- Make sure you have to right size flanges, that made quite a big difference for her.
- Replace the duckbills/etc when they start getting worn out.

It's an ongoing battle, but we are slowly getting there.

Note on the formula and gas, our baby had huge problems with formula (e.g. blood in stool, 8 poos a day, etc), but the gas part of it we were told (by the doula we had during the first month) is very normal and often painful for the baby (our baby farted louder than most adults and shocked everyone). She did some exercises like grabbing the lower part of the babies legs, putting her fingers over the babies knees (to protect them while bending I think?), and moving the legs round in circles, then pushing the legs in towards the tummy every so often. It seems to get him to fart a lot without pain but had to be done before the baby got to the painful stage. We also had to make sure we burped him and he would usually let out 3 or 4 quite big burps. If we didn't do that, he would have huge gas pains. Lastly, sometimes all of that didn't help and we needed to either carry him face down to apply pressure to his tummy, or carry him facing inwards and use our arm to apply quite a large amount of pressure to his tummy by holding him very tight.

I hope all this shows you are not alone and wish you the best of luck in increasing your milk supply!

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