HI Cheryl:
Congratulations on the birth of your beautiful daughter!!
I hear you. It is sooo hard to lose the baby weight, esp. if it's been some time since you've had a baby. I also have three kids, all widely spaced. My oldest two are four years apart and and my middle and youngest are six years apart. It took a year to get rid of the weight with baby #1, six months with baby #2, and I've still got four pounds to go from the youngest, and he'll be nine next week!!
So, the first thing I'd do is cut yourself some slack. You're working hard and that is likely to continue.
Doing the basics and getting some sleep are the other things to do. I napped with the baby until he was almost 2 years old, simply because I was not sleeping well at night. (Remember sleep is essential to weight loss!)
Drinking water and eating as well as you can are key. If you are in the habit of finishing your child's food, that would be a good habit to eliminate now. (I only did this with child #3 and it made a difference!)
Perhaps some of these tips will help you:
1. Keep two pitchers of water in the fridge. One is yours, the other is for the rest of the family. Label yours "MOM's." Drink from that pitcher all day and you'll likely get in at least 8 cups of water a day.
2. Similarly, keep full water bottles in the fridge so you can grab one or two whenever you leave the house. These stand nicely in the diaper bag ;-)
3. Carry healthy snacks (pretzels, crackers, apples, raw veggies) whenever leaving the house to avoid drive-thru pitfalls.
4. Have easy to eat healthy food available for everyone, you included. Things like cheese chunks or slices, the water bottles, fresh fruit and veggies that the older children can rinse off and bring to you or help themselves to. This wards off super hunger.
5. If you are nursing, drink water whenever you sit down to feed the baby (and you should be sitting or lying down to feed the baby!).
6. Eat every 3 hours esp. if you are nursing.
Exercise will come. Walk as much as you (perhaps to drop off and pick up the older children from school?). Do some light stretching or post-natal yoga. Consider getting those exercise DVDs that are divided into 10 and 20 minute segments. I really like the easy walks from Leslie Sansone. The easy mile is 20 minutes and the 2 mile is 30 minutes. These can be done in front of the television regardless of weather conditions and with your darling daughter in a front pack/carrier.
Good luck and best wishes.
"You cannot accept another with a hateful heart. You cannot hear the other with a closed mind. You cannot embrace with closed arms. You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist."
--Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi
| current weight: 146.0 |
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