Losing The Baby Weight

Goodmorning, gang! Liv and I are now back at my parents house in Washington State. I am still recovering from the food poisoning. Feeling pretty good, just not 100 percent. We head back to Montreal on Monday so hopefully I will be back to normal by then...it is a long travel day with the babe and I am sure I will need all the energy I can get. 
Over the past few months, I have gotten a lot of questions regarding how I lost the baby weight. I felt like I mentioned it a lot in my 'baby updates' but apparently, I did not talk about it enough. So in today's post, I am covering every detail in how I lost the baby weight. Works out nicely with this months theme, National Nutrition Month. 

"It took a year to put on; it will take just as long to get the weight off," "don't worry about the weight, just enjoy the time with your baby," "Give it time and breastfeeding will make the fat melt off." 
If you have had a baby, I am sure you have heard all of this. When all of that is 100 percent correct, the last thing I wanted to do was lose the weight slowly. This may have been partly due to being determined in not losing myself in the baby. So after baby, I was very focused on doing whatever I could to lose the weight and went into it with a detailed plan. I am in no way encouraging losing weight the wrong ways, especially if you are breastfeeding (like I am)  you have to be super conscious about what you are putting into your body and making sure you are getting enough calories. But it is not unrealistic to lose the baby weight in just a few short months.

It took me about three months to lose the 42 pounds I put on during my pregnancy.  want to note that I did this all without a trainer or fancy gym membership. Heck, I didn't even have a babysitter.

I should start off with a little disclaimer. I did work out my entire pregnancy, up until around week 36 and I was working out pretty hard. I also ate healthily through my whole pregnancy...most of the time.  There is no doubt in my mind that this helped me recover very quickly. Just a couple hours after giving birth I was feeling pretty good.

Eating: 
For me, this was the most important thing, and the biggest factor in me losing the baby weight. Towards the end of my pregnancy, I made a meal plan that I could start the day I got home from the hospital. 
I am a member of Tone It Up, and it came in so handy during this time.  Every season they do an eight-week series, within this, they give you an 8-week meal plan and break it up weekly. They make it as simple as possible. They give you not only the meal plan but the recipes AND the grocery list. 
So before I even went into labor, I had all eight-week grocery lists printed out and ready to go. Note, you can totally do this on your own without using Tone It Up, it would just be a little more work.
My mom came to stay with us when I had the baby, so I had planned on just handing over the grocery list and recipes to her the first week, but to my surprise, I felt good after giving birth.  The day after we got home from the hospital (we were in and out of the hospital in under 24 hours) I was at the grocery store and in the kitchen meal prepping. (This also was a great time for Carey to have some alone time with the baby and start settling into his role as dad.) 
As the weeks went by and the baby was awake more often it was a little harder to meal prep and sometimes it took hours longer than it should have, but I got it done every week, and I was doing it alone most of the time. 

Working out:
I am big into working out so I could not wait to get back to it after baby and start feeling like myself.  I started probably around week two postpartum with small squats while soothing the baby and walks around the block. The next week I started working out my upper body with very small weights. I continued on this path the following few weeks. I just listened to my body and if I felt good then the next week I would push it a little harder if I felt like I may have overdone it then I would back off a little the next week. By six weeks I was back to my regular workouts (in my garage while the baby napped) and training for a half marathon. 
I have to admit that I think adrenaline really kicked in around this time which allowed to me keep up my workouts on very little sleep.  Looking back I don't know how I did it, but if for someone reason I couldn't get a workout in during Liv's nap I would go for a workout that night after putting her to sleep. There is no way that would be happening today, once the baby is down I hit the sheets as well.

Extras:
The day after birth I started using a waist trainer. The first few weeks I just used a velcro one from Walmart ( you can get them in the workout section). Once my stomach went down enough then I started using a cinch waist trainer. I used it for a few months until I just got sick of putting it on every day. 

My stomach was back to normal for the most part around month three. I did, however, have a little loose skin around my belly button. I was not surprised by this; my sister has the same thing. It was bugging me though so I wanted to take care of it. I did an 8-session treatment at Skins Clinique in Dix30. I did the Lipomassage and the Venus freeze, and it worked great getting my bellybutton back to pre pregnancy shape! 

Much Love,