Delivering a baby is considered a major surgery for asians. Confinement is like recoupment period following a surgery. The main idea is to get plenty of rest with little distraction and nourish your body with nutritional food. Hence confinement lady will be on duty round-the-clock to take care of the infant and cook for a period of one month.
There are many customs and food cooked specifically for confinement. It does vary with the confinement maid you hire. Common dishes / items include pigs trotter, chicken, ginger, herbs, sesame seed oil and rice wine. The whole diet thing is a bit of specialized knowledge and one needs to know how to pair the herbs to accomplish certain purpose e.g. breastmilk production etc. I can't stand pigs trotters nor ginger and instead got plenty of steam fish, chicken cooked in herbal soup, chicken essense (steaming the chicken, collect the drip and mix it up with wine) and logan drink. Friends who visited me on my first confinement commented about the radiance and pinkish glow on my face, which I never had in my entire life. The confinement maid was an excellent cook and knew what she was doing. Unfortunately she retired and the second one was not as good.
The concept of confinement is closely tied to the notion of restorative / therapy diet that is so prevalent to the chinese. There is little information available in English. This I found pertains to Taiwan but the concept is very smiliar. You can read more about it at
http://www.shirleeposner.com/archives/c ... ticles.php
I don't know how helpful it is in helping the woman regain the figure. I have yet to see scientific proof. It may help to some extent as it gives the body a chance for total rest and return to its (or close to) former glory. However, I have also seen women who gain a lot of post-pregnancy weight after their confinement. Genetic plays a part too.
Traditionally these women were cooked for and cared for by their mother or mother-in-law, but nowadays this is not always possible. Enterprises such as the Wellcare Health Co., which sponsored the cookbook, are attempting to fill the niche. You can either stay at one of their clinics, where they will care for you and the baby, or you can opt to have the food delivered to your home every day for a month, at a cost of about NT$70,000. The cookbook was meant for those who wish to follow the practice with home cooking.
With the help of the company director, we cooked, styled, and photographed 64 dishes in three days. Some came from Wellcare¡'s factory near the Qili An MRT Station in Shipai, and some we made from scratch. Featured in many of the dishes were copious amounts of ginger, rice wine, and sesame oil, all of which are considered to be warm foods, along with strange (to me) roots, berries, twigs, and bark.
It is no wonder that Taiwanese mothers recover so well after having a baby. Doing the month includes complete bed rest, round-the-clock help with the baby, and a carefully planned restorative diet. It must work, because new Taiwanese mothers seem to look fabulous, get their pre-baby figure back in record time, and can face the arduous task of parenting from a nurtured beginning. It was clear to me that there had to be something pretty special about Chinese medicinal cuisine, so I did some background reading.
Food therapy for survival
Historians believe that Chinese Food Therapy (CFT) originated around 2000 B.C., but the earliest records that have been found date from 500 B.C. The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine, also known as the Neijing, was written around 300 B.C. and became the CFT bible. It classified foods according to four food groups and five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water), as well as by their basic natures and characteristics. Although modern approaches continue to evolve, the fundamentals have remained much the same.
In the old days, the MIL usually do the confinement but in modern days, people hire the professionals since many, like myself, are quite clueless on what it entails.
heheheh anyways ,do keep that tummy with a corset..it really helps to get that pouch flat..
See even older solutions for the problem. Superstitious bunch you all are I'll say that! 
