Things they don’t tell you before you start breastfeeding: how absurdly, mind-bogglingly hungry it makes you. Whenever I’m not feeding Ingrid, I’m feeding myself. I could eat constantly, if I didn’t need my hands for other things occasionally. Now I limit myself to four solid meals a day (porridge for breakfast, two lunches, one dinner), frequently followed by a dessert, plus an unknown number of snacks between meals. Before I learned to breastfeed while lying down, I even ate after each nightly feeding session.

There are no cravings and no preferences. Anything goes, as long as it’s vegetarian and sufficiently calorie-dense. (Soup is bad. Cheesecake is good.) Eric still occasionally asks me whether I would like to eat, or what I would prefer for dinner. The answers are always the same: “Yes!”, and “Anything!”. The bare question is enough to make me hungry enough to really not care about what I’m eating!

Food goes in, milk comes out. I transform adult food into baby food.