A baseline questionnaire including socio-demographic characteristics of the households were collected prenatally at the time of the recruitment. The nutrition and health knowledge test was performed for all the participants at the same time. During the puerperium, the trained health staffs made four visits to the households of each participant at 1, 2, 4 and 6 weeks postpartum. During each home visit, a questionnaire was used to interview the women in the intervention and control groups in both areas. The questionnaire included information on their postpartum health behaviors, physical activities and health problems. The women and her infants were examined by the health professional. For the intervention group women in both areas, counseling and advice on postpartum practices were provided. For the participants in two control groups, the health professionals did not interfere with their practices, only routine examinations were provided. All the participants were asked to record consecutive individual 3-day food records of the first week, 2-day the following week, 2-day the fourth week and 2-day the sixth week postpartum. They were instructed on how to estimate food quantities in grams and milliliters at the initial visit. Dietary intakes were assessed by the 9 days food records. The same health staff made the all four-time repeated visits for each participant to minimize between-interviewer variation. The questionnaires including the nutrition and health knowledge test were designed by the scientists of our research team [see Additional file 1]. They were based on a previous research on women's postpartum practices [14]. Before the formal investigation, the questionnaires were pretested and revised repeatedly according to the analysis of the results.