Lo Bosworth Knew Her Daughter’s Pain Wasn’t Normal. She Kept Looking for Answers
After months of feeding difficulties and unexplained discomfort, Lo Bosworth’s daughter was diagnosed with cow’s milk protein allergy. The first-time mom opens up about the signs she noticed, advocating for answers and the postpartum experience that changed her.
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Lo Bosworth has spent years telling women to trust their bodies. She did not expect that instinct to become the thing that helped her find answers for her daughter.
The founder of Love Wellness and podcast host became a first-time mom seven months ago when she welcomed her daughter, Nelle. Bosworth is now partnering with Pepticate and Neocate, two hypoallergenic infant formula brands, to raise awareness of Cow’s Milk Protein Allergy, or CMPA, after her daughter’s experience with the condition.
What followed Nelle’s birth was months of unexplained distress, repeated pediatrician visits, and a crash course in a condition Bosworth says she had never expected to encounter.
The warning signs started early. At one of Nelle’s first pediatrician visits, Bosworth noticed something small but telling: the scale in one exam room gave a different weight than the scale in another. Bosworth pushed to have her daughter reweighed.
It was a preview of the months ahead.
“We’re gonna have to really be on top of this and understand that our judgment is just as important as the information that we’re getting from these well visits in the early days,” Bosworth tells LA Times Studios exclusively.
Nelle’s symptoms began at around six weeks. At first, they could have looked like ordinary colic: crying, discomfort, and an arched back. But she says something felt different. “She was in so much obvious stress,” she says of Nelle. “She was crying in pain, not crying for hunger or exhaustion. It was very clear to me that something was very wrong.”
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The stakes went beyond crying. Nelle was refusing bottles and wasn’t consistently consuming the amount of food Bosworth understood she needed to gain weight... a piece of infant nutrition that felt especially high-stakes for a first-time mother with no previous child against whom to measure what was normal.
“I have no point of comparison,” Bosworth says. “My baby is in obvious discomfort.”
It took roughly two months from the onset of those symptoms, and Bosworth estimates about eight appointments in total, before the family had an answer. The turning point came when a night nurse who was also a pediatric nurse noticed what appeared to be blood in Nelle’s stool. Bosworth immediately contacted her pediatrician, and Nelle was ultimately diagnosed with CMPA.
Bosworth is careful not to characterize the time it took to reach a diagnosis as a failure of her doctors. In the earliest weeks of a baby’s life, she says, there may not yet be enough information to determine what is causing symptoms that can resemble other common infant issues.
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“You need data points,” she says. “You need a lot of information, and it can take a while ... to get to a CMPA diagnosis.”
For Bosworth, one distinction became particularly important: Nelle’s discomfort wasn’t confined to a predictable period of the day. It persisted. “A CMPA baby is always uncomfortable, like, all day long,” Bosworth says of her own experience. “And that is, like, the point of difference.”
Finding a diagnosis didn’t immediately mean finding a solution. The family cycled through four formulas, Bosworth says, before eventually finding one Nelle could tolerate. Pepticate, one of the brands Bosworth now partners with, was an earlier step before the family ultimately moved to Neocate Syneo.
“It’s been such a shift for our family, having this formula,” she says. “I don’t know what we would do without it. I truly do not.”
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The trial and error extended beyond formula. Bosworth says the family went through seven bottle brands trying to figure out what Nelle would accept, an experience that dismantled some of her assumptions about how much a parent can actually prepare before a baby arrives. “You just don’t know what you don’t know,” she says. “Every baby is different.”
Parents may buy bottles before their baby arrives and assume that particular decision is settled, she says, only to discover their baby doesn’t like them. The same can happen with where they sleep or countless other carefully researched choices. “Turns out they’re all ... their own little people,” she says.
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All of this unfolded while Bosworth was navigating a difficult postpartum recovery of her own. She says she experienced retained placenta that wasn’t discovered until several weeks after giving birth and ultimately took months to resolve. She also struggled with breastfeeding and milk supply while Nelle was having difficulty feeding.
Even after years working in women’s wellness, Bosworth says nothing prepared her for the physical magnitude of postpartum recovery. “The magnitude of the hormone shifts and what that does to your state of mind and to your level of exhaustion, to your body, is just pretty shocking until you live it firsthand,” she says.
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The experience of advocating for Nelle also felt familiar. Bosworth founded Love Wellness after navigating health issues of her own, and she says years of advocating for herself as a woman in medical settings influenced how she approached her daughter’s care. “It was like, oh, it’s happening again,” she says.
There was another decidedly modern wrinkle to the search for answers: before Bosworth knew what CMPA was, the term had already begun appearing in her digital life. “My phone and my algorithm knew it was CMPA before I did,” she says.
Bosworth says her searches about Nelle’s symptoms led her social media algorithm to surface CMPA before the condition was confirmed. She is quick to caution against self-diagnosis and emphasizes that Nelle’s diagnosis ultimately came from her pediatrician. But seeing the term gave her something new to ask about. “Obviously my search queries were leading me in that direction,” she says.
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Seven months into motherhood, Bosworth isn’t particularly interested in another familiar postpartum idea: “getting back” to herself.
She recently started weightlifting for the first time, but she describes the goal not as reclaiming her pre-pregnancy body but as building strength and increasing her energy after pregnancy and postpartum recovery. “I’m not comparing versions because there’s no going back, nor do I want to go back,” she says. “I’m a mom now, I’m a totally different person. I have been restitched into another person, you know what I mean? Like, I’m different.”
Perhaps that’s also why one of Bosworth’s takeaways as a new mom isn’t that parents should somehow know more before their babies arrive. Her experience has taught her almost the opposite. “You just don’t know what you don’t know,” she says. But when a parent senses that something isn’t right, she believes it’s worth continuing to ask questions.
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