Safe Weight Loss After Pregnancy
Losing weight after pregnancy is extremely essential and most women struggle to do so. A common complaint is that women struggle losing weight while pregnant and weight loss after pregnancy takes much more time than desired. Two quick facts to put some myths to rest - losing weight while pregnant is not essential or warranted and if it takes a while losing weight after pregnancy then you should not get anxious, it is only natural.
Now, here are some ways in which you can end up losing weight after pregnancy. In all likelihood, with these simple steps your weight loss after pregnancy goals will likely be pretty quick.
Do not Diet
Do not embark on a strict diet. Your body is not at a stage wherein you could starve yourself or deny yourself the necessary nutrients and calories. Post having a baby, many women suffer from medical problems owing to these efforts. Do not have any stringent diet and definitely don't starve. Dieting would lead the body to cling on to the fat owing to the dearth in consumption of calories and nutrients.
Exercise
Mild exercises work wonders for weight loss after pregnancy. You may want to have a well planned routine but casual walking, jogging and some stretches with cardio exercises can be equally rewarding.
Breastfeed
Breastfeeding contributes a lot to losing weight after pregnancy. Many women these days ponder over breastfeeding but it is the healthiest thing you can do for yourself and for your baby. Breastfeeding would not only help you with weight loss after pregnancy but also ensure you have a much healthier and fitter system post pregnancy.
Eat Small Meals
Hunger prangs are common even after child birth. Snacking cannot be avoided in its entirety but having small meals would be advisable. Rather than restricting yourself to three or four meals a day, it is wise to have seven or eight very small meals. This would trigger metabolism, counter hunger prangs and ensure you are steadily losing weight after pregnancy.
Eat Super Foods
Eating super foods is the best idea. Whole grains, fruits that are not rich in sugar or calories and super foods such as fish are the best and the safest bets.
A nice amalgamation of all these steps above can help you phenomenally with weight loss after pregnancy. Even if you have been overweight before pregnancy, these initiatives will go a long way.
For more articles on weight loss after pregnancy and reviews of a program that helps women lose weight through lifestyle changes NOT dieting please visit Weight Loss After Pregnancy.
Your Pregnancy: Week 26
It’s important to continue with some type of exercise throughout the remainder of the pregnancy to control stress, manage weight gain and keep your muscles strong for the rigors of delivery. Half an hour of activity three or four times a week is plenty, but always check in with your doctor or midwife if you’re having trouble being active.
Your Baby
Your baby might be developing an adorable habit this week: thumb-sucking. While the baby’s hands remain clenched most of the day, he/she might unclench and stick out his/her thumb every now and then. If the baby likes the comfort from sucking, it might just be a well-established habit way before a pacifier is ever seen.
Your baby now has distinct sleeping and waking cycles, as well. You may find a pattern; at certain times of the day she’s very active, somersaulting and boxing, while at other times, she sleeps. In addition, all five senses are now fully developed.
Pick the nursery’s color and have it painted so any fumes or odors are aired out in time for the baby.
If you haven’t taken your “babymoon” vacation with your partner, the best time to do so is in the next week or two before the third trimester hits.
Between now and the next couple of weeks, take the glucose-screening test for gestational diabetes.
Hemorrhoids (varicose veins of the rectum) hurting? Try witch hazel pads, ice packs or a warm bath to ease the stinging. You could also buy a doughnut-shaped pillow if sitting is especially excruciating. It might come in handy after delivery as well.
Advice from Dr. Shari E. Brasner
You
should know that very few pregnancies are entirely problem-free.
Perhaps you were planning on having the ‘perfect’ pregnancy – working
right up until the zero hour, then delivering without any fetal
monitoring or pain relief – but try not to be terribly disappointed if
it doesn’t turn out exactly that way. There’s usually some sort of
problem in a pregnancy, whether it’s a bit of minor spotting early on or
elevated blood pressure or a sudden complication during delivery. It’s
helpful to realize that obstetricians expect these glitches, and that
we’re prepared for them. Complications can be frightening for pregnant
women, but in virtually every case, we doctors have seen them before,
and the majority of the time we know exactly how to treat them.”
Babble recommends Dr. Brasner’s pregnancy book, Advice from a Pregnant Obstetrician.
Mom-To-Mom Advice: Provider Anxiety
Pre-parenthood, both members of a couple generally contribute to the financial well-being of the family. The idea of the man as the sole breadwinner and head of the household is, for the most part, a relic. But when there’s a new baby on the way, serious questions about the roles of each partner come up. Who takes care of the kid? Is childcare more than our salaries can stand? How much are diapers anyway? Do we need dental insurance as soon as our kid gets teeth? Even though these questions can be troubling enough for both partners, men may feel particularly anxious that they won’t be able to pull their own weight.
For all of our progress, there is still a lingering sense in our culture that a man is not a “success” if he can’t provide his family with the best of everything. (In same-sex partnerships, one partner may adopt the provider role and feel the same pressures.) A dad may not be expected to change diapers, but he’s still expected to pay the bills. After all, the mother is carrying the baby; shouldn’t he at least be able to carry the rent? It’s apparent from the first time he tells friends the good news and is met with semi-jokes like, “You better get a second job.”
While it may be fine for a single man, or even a couple in love, to live in a tiny house with no real savings, is it OK for a family? As one new dad said to us, “Bringing a child into a world full of war and misery is one thing, but bringing that child into a studio apartment is another.” The solution to financial problems is not always clear or easy, but it is clear that unrealistic ideals don’t help. Like the idea of the perfect mother, the perfect father (who bears the burden of his family’s finances unfailingly and unquestioningly) is a fantasy that can undermine a father’s confidence about his real life role as a parent.
Babble recommends From the Hips, by Rebecca Odes and Ceridwen Morris.
Read more about Week 26 at BabyZone’s Pregnancy Guide!
Your First Pregnancy Vs Subsequent Pregnancies
1. The Learning Curve
First Pregnancy: You read every book known to man about pregnancy, childbirth, childcare, environmental toxins, diet and exercise, etc.
Subsequent Pregnancies: You read People magazine in the spare three minutes you get to yourself each day. Hey, you have to find out what Brad and Angelina are up to somehow. Been there. Read that. Whatever.
2. Extracurricular Activities
First Pregnancy: You practice prenatal yoga and water aerobics and take every childbirth and child-rearing class that is offered.
Subsequent Pregnancies: You don’t have time to think, let alone take a class with a bunch of first-time moms who want to talk about what labor is going to be like. It is going to suck. Then it will be over. The end.
3. Nursery Preparedness
First Pregnancy: Everything in your nursery is washed, organized, perfectly matched and ready for baby by the time you hit 25 weeks.
Subsequent Pregnancies: Baby? Oh, crap. I am having another one of those? In a panic, you start doing last-minute preparations for the baby around 39 weeks.
4. Your Diet
First Pregnancy: You make sure that you eat a perfect, balanced diet so the baby will have every advantage from day one.
Subsequent Pregnancies: You eat spare chicken nuggets off your toddler’s plate while cleaning up after dinner and getting ready for bedtime.
5. Your Social Life
First Pregnancy: You still go out with friends and stay out a little later than you want just so they don’t think that having a baby is going to change you.
Subsequent Pregnancies: Short of them offering you free tickets to lick Gerard Butler’s abs, you tell your friends to go fuck themselves. You’re pregnant.
6. Diagnosing Mystery Ailments
First Pregnancy: If any little thing just doesn’t feel right, you call your OBGYN.
Subsequent Pregnancies: If anything short of a limb falling off happens, you say it will be fine and keep on moving.
7. Talking/Thinking About Baby
First Pregnancy: You think and talk about your pregnancy 24-hours a day. It is the only thing you can think about.
Subsequent Pregnancies: You think about your pregnancy twice the entire time: Once when the stick shows two lines instead of one, and again when your water breaks and it is time to head to the hospital.
8. Weight Gain
First Pregnancy: You worry about proper weight gain and what you are going to look like after the baby comes.
Subsequent Pregnancies: You supersize everything and get dessert after. Fuck it. You’re going to get stretch marks either way. Why not live a little?
9. Fetal Movements
First Pregnancy: Feeling your baby kick will make you stop what you are doing no matter how important it seemed. This is the miracle of life, people!
Subsequent Pregnancies: When your baby kicks, it is still great and all, but if you were on your way to get a donut, you aren’t stopping to embrace it. It will happen again after the donut. Babies like donuts.
10. Baby Expectations
First Pregnancy: You think that your baby will be the second coming of Christ.
Subsequent Pregnancies: You know there is a good chance that your baby will be an asshole that will cry for hours on end for no reason and vomit in your hair right after you finally got a spare minute to wash it.
First Pregnancy: You read every book known to man about pregnancy, childbirth, childcare, environmental toxins, diet and exercise, etc.
Subsequent Pregnancies: You read People magazine in the spare three minutes you get to yourself each day. Hey, you have to find out what Brad and Angelina are up to somehow. Been there. Read that. Whatever.
2. Extracurricular Activities
First Pregnancy: You practice prenatal yoga and water aerobics and take every childbirth and child-rearing class that is offered.
Subsequent Pregnancies: You don’t have time to think, let alone take a class with a bunch of first-time moms who want to talk about what labor is going to be like. It is going to suck. Then it will be over. The end.
3. Nursery Preparedness
First Pregnancy: Everything in your nursery is washed, organized, perfectly matched and ready for baby by the time you hit 25 weeks.
Subsequent Pregnancies: Baby? Oh, crap. I am having another one of those? In a panic, you start doing last-minute preparations for the baby around 39 weeks.
4. Your Diet
First Pregnancy: You make sure that you eat a perfect, balanced diet so the baby will have every advantage from day one.
Subsequent Pregnancies: You eat spare chicken nuggets off your toddler’s plate while cleaning up after dinner and getting ready for bedtime.
5. Your Social Life
First Pregnancy: You still go out with friends and stay out a little later than you want just so they don’t think that having a baby is going to change you.
Subsequent Pregnancies: Short of them offering you free tickets to lick Gerard Butler’s abs, you tell your friends to go fuck themselves. You’re pregnant.
6. Diagnosing Mystery Ailments
First Pregnancy: If any little thing just doesn’t feel right, you call your OBGYN.
Subsequent Pregnancies: If anything short of a limb falling off happens, you say it will be fine and keep on moving.
7. Talking/Thinking About Baby
First Pregnancy: You think and talk about your pregnancy 24-hours a day. It is the only thing you can think about.
Subsequent Pregnancies: You think about your pregnancy twice the entire time: Once when the stick shows two lines instead of one, and again when your water breaks and it is time to head to the hospital.
8. Weight Gain
First Pregnancy: You worry about proper weight gain and what you are going to look like after the baby comes.
Subsequent Pregnancies: You supersize everything and get dessert after. Fuck it. You’re going to get stretch marks either way. Why not live a little?
9. Fetal Movements
First Pregnancy: Feeling your baby kick will make you stop what you are doing no matter how important it seemed. This is the miracle of life, people!
Subsequent Pregnancies: When your baby kicks, it is still great and all, but if you were on your way to get a donut, you aren’t stopping to embrace it. It will happen again after the donut. Babies like donuts.
10. Baby Expectations
First Pregnancy: You think that your baby will be the second coming of Christ.
Subsequent Pregnancies: You know there is a good chance that your baby will be an asshole that will cry for hours on end for no reason and vomit in your hair right after you finally got a spare minute to wash it.
Your Pregnancy or Theirs? How advice can heighten pregnancy stress
I was actually pregnant and drinking coffee when I read this in the PostSecret Twitter feed: “I work at Starbucks. I judge pregnant mothers and decaffeinate their drinks, even though they ask for caffeinated.”
I wasn’t shocked.
At six months pregnant, I had already been judged for eating a ham sandwich, ordering tuna and scarfing down California rolls. Ask any pregnant woman and she’ll tell you similar stories about friends, relatives and strangers chastising her for everything from eating Caesar salad (that dressing may have raw eggs!) to doing yoga (does the baby like being bent?). It’s a phenomenon that is as old as pregnancy itself.
Alice Carpenter, editor of LandofBabies.com, says she sees it all the time and believes the problem is growing worse with the rise of mom blogs and pregnancy websites. “It’s hard to ignore the voice of criticism when it seems to be everywhere and made more vicious by the Internet. Women who would otherwise be surrounded by supportive communities of friends and families are now bombarded by voices telling them what not to do every time they open their browsers.”
And these critical voices can make a pregnant woman – who’s already anxious about all the ways in which her body is changing – even more on edge. Dr. Ronald Jaekle, a maternal-fetal medicine expert at the University Hospital in Cincinnati Ohio, says that this anxiety is felt by all the pregnant women who come to see him. “So many pregnant women feel that their body is not their own and struggle with that. They may not say it outright, but I hear it in their concerns.”
New mom Leanne Goolsby said that her bodily anxiety came to a head when she was in her third trimester. “It’s like people forget that there is a woman attached to the belly. All anyone can focus on is the baby. Being pregnant apparently gives people a free pass to comment on your weight and size, touch you, stare at you, laugh at you, and ask totally inappropriate questions.”
But Nat Polzin, mom of three, has no problem judging other pregnant women. In fact, she sees it as her right, in a way. “Pregnant women can be so self-centered. They don’t realize that their actions affect another human being,” she said. “If their child is born with a low birth weight or has problems because of the mother’s decisions, society pays for that. So why is it such a big deal if society has something to say to the pregnant woman chugging coffee at Starbucks?”
Polzin’s sentiments aren’t new, but the supposed effects of certain acts can be comical. A 14th century encyclopedia of medicine says that, “Some have attributed monsters to be being procreated from the corruption of foul and filthy foods that women eat, or want to eat, or that they abhor looking upon just after they have conceived; or [they say] that someone may have tossed something between their teats, such as a cherry, plum, frog, mouse, or other thing that can render infants monstrous.” (Which isn’t so crazy-sounding if you’ve ever been pregnant and Googled phrases like “why does my pee smell different?”)
As if the criticism of others wasn’t enough, expecting mothers typically blame themselves for any hiccup in their pregnancies, regardless if whether it’s in their control. Dr. Jaekle regularly sees women who are in high-risk pregnancies or have children with birth defects, and with very few exceptions they all blame themselves. “They all think it’s their punishment for sin or because they took the wrong type of medicine before they knew they were pregnant.”
And while prenatal care has come a long way, there are still a lot of unknowns about what women are truly able to prevent and what’s genetic. Fetal care experts still argue about the effects of alcohol on an infant, for example. These conflicts, about what’s safe and what’s not make it even more difficult for pregnant women to feel confident in their lifestyle choices.
When Lisa Romeo was pregnant with her second child, she experienced dramatic body temperature shifts that doctors couldn’t explain. She believes that “Pregnancy and all it can possibly do to a woman’s body is still less understood than we’d like to think. No doctor ever came up with a plausible reason why all these things happened to me, when I’d had a completely problem-free pregnancy just three years before.”
To avoid living in a perpetual state of anxiety, Romeo coped with the unknowns by relying on her family’s support and tuning out what other people had to say. During pregnancy, women literally cede their bodies to their children, and in the process of doing so, cede parts of themselves both physically and emotionally. “Once you are a mother,” added Goolsby, “people feel they have the right to judge you and your children in ways they never would have judged you if you were just single.”
So where does this societal need to scrutinize mothers come from? It could be traced back to Western anxiety toward the female body. We both sexualize it and demand that it be covered. We celebrate its forms (“beautiful belly art!”) yet chastise women in low-cut tops (“do these celeb moms dress too young for their age?”). Pregnancy seems to be just an intensified version of what already rumbles through our society, and the chorus of voices who criticize keep a woman from understanding where her autonomy ends and the baby’s begins.
Dr. Jaekle sees this censorship in a less sinister light, however. “It’s a rite of passage. Women experience something transformative, and they view it as their job to usher other women through that same process.” Yet, as I told Dr. Jaekle, if this censure is a rite of passage, it’s a nine-month rush for the worst sorority ever. And my friends who are mothers told me that the chorus only grows louder once the baby is born. Now that my daughter is three months old, I have to agree.
To avoid feeling overwhelmed from information overload, women might consider talking to talk to their doctors in lieu of Googling every question. Alice Carpenter advises that you “Be informed and get someone to advocate on your behalf.” She hired a doula to help her through her pregnancy and delivery and said the experience was invaluable. “Everyone has an opinion about what you should do with your body and your child, but in the end, the most important opinion is your own. It’s important not to lose sight of that.”
Now that I’m on the other side of the journey with a baby of my own, I keep my advice to myself when I hear pregnant women complain. I know they aren’t looking for my opinion – if they wanted it, they’d ask. The best I can offer is solidarity, encouragement and no judgment when they want to drink a bucketful of coffee.
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