Switching to Formula

Hi M., if you keep pumping your body thinks its feeding the baby. just take nice warm showers to let it self let down on its own. buy some nursing pads to help with the leaking but if you are just going to quit thats what i would do.and take some tylenol for the uncomfortableness.it will take about a week for your body to kick in and stop producing milk.but don't use anything manualy to release the milk or it will keep producing. good luck

Part of switching your baby to formula is switching your body to it. You should not go "cold turkey". It can be very painfull for you. You should really only start one bottle of formula at a time to your baby for her to get used to and your body to stop and realize you are not breast feeding any longer. Start in the morning, do the first bottle for a couple of days. Then the next one for a couple of days, and so on till the last one you do is the last feeding at night. This way you wean both your daughter and you off breast feeding without discomfort to you both.

It can take up to a week to stop filling up, I think if you keep pumping your body thinks it still needs to supply. It is painful but let them swell up for a few days, maybe let down a little in the shower, that helped me. But eventually your body will figure out what's going on. After a year or so, I only nursed at naptime and nighttime, and my body didn't feel like it had much, but it did. When we first tried to quit, I got mastitis and had to start again, but the next time worked, even if uncomfortable for a while. Good luck!

you can trick your breasts into thinking that your baby's just not eating as much anymore by pumping only a few times a day, when you just can't bear the pressure anymore. then you can reduce the frequency and your breasts will get the message not to produce so much milk.

i didn't have the patience for that so i went cold turkey. warm showers helped me and i would do some manual extraction in the shower. it's best to do only if you can avoid triggering your letdown since that will just put more milk in your breasts anyway. i was lucky enough not to have a really strong letdown so i got away with squeezing some milk out and getting a little relief.

i'd heard about breast-binding and tried it for a day. it felt better not to have the milk sloshing around but the more i thought about it, i realized that you're trapping milk in your ducts so there is more of a chance that the milk will grow bacteria and you'll get mastitis. now that is painful.

it sounds weird but refrigerated cabbage in your bra feels good. just stick it in there until it warms up and switch it out. you could probably put anything else cold and it would feel good but i thought i read somewhere online that the cabbage is supposed to help stop milk production.

you can eat/drink all the things they tell you inhibit milk production. the only one i can think of at the moment is sage tea.

With my first child she quit me at 6 mo. engorgment is inevitable, but to ease it, where a sports bra, the tighter the better, ibuprofen helps, the advice about not going it cold turkey is right, ease into it. Good luck

You need to stop pumping. When you pump it signals your body to make more.