QuestionHello
I'm really glad I found you here...
I just gave birth about 7 weeks ago.
I am breastfeeding, but gained over 80 pound (after having 4 kids in 4 years...)
I need to know how or what to do to lose all that weight, without harming my milk's quality or volume.
AnswerHello Kate,
Congratulations with your new gift! You are richly blessed with your children and it is vital that you focus on what this means, because the next bit I have to tell you, you may not like so much...
80 pounds is a lot of extra weight to suddenly find yourself lugging around after only four years, and with running after kids it can get to be quite a haul - or so I speak from a similar experience. The sudden increase also impacts quite dramatically on your overall health, with the bones, muscles and organs not having had enough time to grow gradually accustomed to the excess weight (we all grow heavier, usually with age and after child birth, it makes a Mamma beautiful and genuine!). So I understand fully your need to loose the extra pounds and return to a weight closer to the real you. It will also be important for psycho-emotional reasons, I presume: you are not just a milk machine, after all! But also still a "REAL woman" in her own right
Your Old Self does not have to be smothered by the consequences of childbirth, but it will have changed through it. I believe it will be crucial for you to contemplate this because understanding the cause-effect and purpose-problem of your excess fat will be fundamental to losing it again. And you will! Only not so soon.
It will take at least two years before you have lost a significant amount to go out and get a complete change of wardrobe. But you can start today - and the good news is that feeding the baby (by breast, hooray! I love to hear that) will help! First, it costs lots of fat reserves to build up the milk: so if you start eating very healthy and sensibly (no junk, no sweets, smaller portions you probably know the rough outlines) the baby will help you shed pounds already in the first three (to six?) months you hope to feed(/supplement) her.
But above all, by trying to keep the milk of a tip-top quality you are going to have to watch what you eat anyway. You could over-emphasize this for a bit and try to steer away from foodstuffs you can't quite call natural or "full of life" (tinned stuff, pre-packaged, deep-freeze; the reason being quite simply, that you need to "dynamise" the milk (its all the baby's getting, after all) with all the power you can find: which means eating high-energy food in a very literal sense: that which grew with "live" energy (solar/natural forces) and was not robbed of it again by processing it. When you start looking at food from such a perspective, you are thinking of both you and your baby, which gives you an extra incentive and won't make you feel self-absorbed or "vain", just a really good mum (who is even better for also thinking about her own health and happiness).
You see, dear Kaye, the best advice I can give you right now, is not so much on nutrition and (of course) exercise (I bet your kids give you loads. And keep pushing that pram everywhere you go, it worked miracles for me). The trick is to nurture a heartfelt understanding of and respect for your body; train up your will power in stages, and be creative in developing a wholesome relationship to food. This is what will take you down just the right (slow and steady) road of weight loss PLUS manage to set up healthy nucleus for the whole family.
I wish you all the best, and for any more specific tips or nutritional facts and figures, don't hesitate to contact again.
Enjoy your babies!
Love Evelyn
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