I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that, three weeks postpartum, I'm already recommitting to the eat-less habits that I cultivated in 2008.
Embarrassed? Well — I keep imagining voices chiding me:
- "It's only been three weeks since you gave birth — wait a few months. Breastfeeding will surely take off some of the pregnancy weight without you having to think about it."
- "You need to eat plenty of good food to nourish yourself and your baby."
- "It takes time, thought, and energy to do all that planning and analyzing — why add more stress right now, while you're still getting used to all the changes?"
- "People won't notice you're heavy again — they'll notice the cute baby on your hip."
This is the sort of thing that I said, or wrote, to a number of new mothers who expressed to me a desire to drop their post-pregnancy weight. Privately I wondered what was the hurry.
Well. The shoe is on the other foot now. It's really remarkable how demoralizing the postpartum body can be! Blah blah blah, perspective, gratefulness, patience. (Platitudes!) I am who I am, and as ever I hate lagging behind the person I want to be.
But! I will follow my own advice anyway — the good part of it.
- Breastfeeding surely will take off some of the weight I've gained without my having to think about it — but I can get back in the habit of thinking about it now, of eating mindfully instead of mindlessly, so that when (if) I do "have to" think about it, it comes naturally to me.
- I surely need to eat plenty of good food to nourish myself and my baby — but I don't need to eat food that doesn't nourish me, and I don't need to overeat even healthful food.
- Indeed some of the things I did to lose weight required time, thought, and energy that I don't have right now — but many of those good habits reduce my stress rather than raise it. I feel less stressed when I am successful, so I deserve to have opportunities for success right away.
- People surely won't notice my weight — but the habits of moderation and mindfulness are worthy for their own sake.
All that being said, I do recognize that I should not lose weight rapidly. For most of 2008 I lost about a pound and a half a week, which is roughly twice as fast as would be healthy for the mother of a newborn nursling. Rather than try to calculate how many calories I need and count them daily, I'll keep an eye on the scale and make corrections as necessary. That's one of the old habits, of course, although now "too fast" would be a bigger problem than "too slow."
So what am I looking at doing now?
- I'm back in the gym three days a week. I'm the type who's always trying to do too much too soon (hard to believe, I know 😉 ), so I swore that until Leo's 6 weeks old I would do nothing but brisk walking around the track. So far, so good.
- Weighing every morning and charting the weight.
- Lots and lots of vegetables at every meal.
- Scheduled snacks, prettily presented on a plate, perhaps prepared in advance.
- Stop after the first helping at meals and take time to evaluate satiety.
- Plenty of fluids.
- Reading about healthy, moderate eating to keep it front and center.
- Noticing my successes, several times a day.
- Responding to my frequent impulses to eat unplanned food or excess quantities with my old mantra: "I don't do that anymore."
None of that is bad for the nursing mother of a three-week-old baby. None of that causes stress. I can do all this right now.
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