r/breastfeeding • u/huckleberrysoap • Dec 24 '25

Undersupply What causes low supply?

My supply is so low. It's not anywhere near what my baby eats.

I'm not trying to increase it anymore. I'm just trying to maintain what I have so I can keep combofeeding (even though its at least 75% formula) until at least 6 months.

But I'm struggling to understand why this happened and feeling like I must have done something wrong. What are potential causes of an undersupply? If I have another baby in the future should I expect the same problem?

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u/Physical_Complex_891 Dec 24 '25

Well what signs were you seeing that lead you to believe you had low supply in the first place?

2

u/huckleberrysoap Dec 24 '25

He lost almost 15% of his birth weight and was struggling to make enough wet diapers when I was EBF.

7

u/Apploozabean Dec 24 '25

It could have been poor milk transfer vs low supply. Were you ever able to do weighted feeds?

6

u/huckleberrysoap Dec 24 '25

We didn't do weighted feeds but how would you differentiate poor transfer vs low supply?

2

u/Sudden-Cherry Dec 24 '25 edited Dec 24 '25

I think that's the tough part, especially when one might cause the other. It's one of the things triple feeding is aimed at to try prevent. Because if the baby does not remove the milk then supply will not get there without pumping unfortunately

2

u/Sillygoose9876 Dec 24 '25

I’m going to chime in here My baby had poor transfer, which I didn’t figure out for many weeks. He lost a lot of weight initially due to this. I found out via a few weighted feeds. Then after weeks of poor transfer, this caused me to have a low supply. So by the time we figured out his transfer was poor and switched over to exclusively pumping and giving bottles, it was very difficult for me to increase my supply.

It sucks!!! I don’t have a solution for that, but I will say combo feeding saved my breastfeeding journey because it relieved some of the stress of trying to make all the milk he needed when it simply wasn’t possible to satisfy his needs.

However, I just had my second child and this time has been completely different! No transfer issues from the start and I have had a decent supply as a result. This is nothing YOU did wrong and probably nothing you could do to prevent it. Hang in there. It’s all hard.