PERSONAL HEALTH : Lightweight Plans for New Moms

Most new mothers yearn to lose excess “baby fat” and squeeze back into those jeans, pronto. But how best to do that has sparked woman-to-woman debate for years.

Some claim the pounds will just melt off. Others swear by exercise, breast-feeding or other strategies. Researchers don’t agree either.

Breast-feeding is the way to lose pounds postpartum, says Kathryn Dewey, a professor of nutrition at the University of California, Davis. She followed 87 women, about half of whom breast-fed, for a year after childbirth. Breast-feeding moms lost twice as much weight as those who bottle-fed their infants (10 pounds to 5 pounds).

But another study disagrees.

“We didn’t find breast-feeding beneficial for weight loss,” says Dr. Charles W. Schauberger, an obstetrician/gynecologist in La Crosse, Wis. His team followed 795 women for six months. Two-thirds were breast-feeding at the study’s start; less than a fifth were at six months.

Moms who returned to work soon after childbirth lost more weight, Schauberger found. So did smokers, although he emphasizes it’s not a wise weight-loss strategy. Exercise didn’t seem to help, but Schauberger suspects the women weren’t exercising vigorously enough.

On some points researchers do concur: Time and patience pay off. “The key is the length of breast-feeding,” insists Dewey, who found weight loss accelerating after three months.

Allow six months, Schauberger tells women, to return to pre-pregnancy weight.