Motherhood changes you both inside and out. After you give birth to your baby, your breast shape, clothing size, hip width, and sometimes shoe size might change. Luckily, all these changes are evidence of what your body has achieved.
While adjusting to life as a new mother or with a new baby, it is crucial to remember that your mental state and emotions also keep changing. However, the real query in a new mother’s mind is, just how do I drop this “baby fat” in a healthy way that respects my body?
Table of Contents
How to Get Your Body Back After Pregnancy
Get Started While Pregnant
Don’t wait until after you give birth. It is normal to gain weight while still pregnant. However, that shouldn’t allow you to carelessly indulge and start eating cake for breakfast or rather than have fruits for an afternoon snack, you opt for a family-size bag of chips instead.
Pregnancy comes with cravings; hence it’s not uncommon for you to find yourself indulging from time to time. However, prudence will pay back greatly. Just because you’re pregnant and can get away with food indulgence, doesn’t mean that you should become a couch potato.
While pregnant, watch out for what you eat most of the time and walk around your neighborhood at least once or twice a day, or find family-friendly workouts. Walking during pregnancy helps benefit both you and the baby by getting the blood flowing while getting fresh air as well.
Don’t Wait Too Long After Giving Birth
Once you give birth, an immediate loss of 11-13 lbs occurs. Breastfeeding also helps new mothers lose weight; it uses up to 800 calories a day. Hence, while you allow your body to recuperate, breastfeeding is helping start-off your weight loss process.
However, after you have allowed your body about 4-6 weeks to recuperate, start exercising. You can start with a little weight training; anything you do to get your body moving will go a very long way in helping you cut weight.
You don’t have to buy weights or join a gym; you can bring your baby. Your baby can be weight enough. For instance, you can hold your baby close to your chest and do a few sets of lunges. Or you can lunge behind the baby stroller as you take a walk. You could also lie on your back, hold your infant above your chest and do a few presses toward your ceiling.
Get Plenty of Sleep
When your baby is sleeping, we recommend that you do so as well. Newborn babies have needs that tend to impose strange sleep cycles on the parents, particularly the mother. These sleep cycles can upset your metabolism and make it hard to cut the pregnancy weight.
Hence, sleeping when your little one is sleeping will help you avoid long-term sleep deficits that way heavily on your goal to get your body back. The aim is to keep your energy levels high as well as keep your sugar cravings to keep your energy in check.
Failing to get enough sleep means you won’t have the energy to keep moving through your waking hours, or get in your exercise, or work out.
Create a Regular Exercise Regimen
Getting your body back after pregnancy is a gradual process. However, we recommend starting some simple exercises after 4-6 weeks of postpartum because right after you give birth, there is a gap in your abdominal muscles. This gap is called rectus abdominis diastasis.
However, this gap usually disappears within 4-8 weeks. You should make sure the gap is closed before you start doing belly workouts.
Pelvic tilts with your baby could help you reduce belly fat. Yoga and Pilates will help you gain flexibility and strength. Doing bridge exercises while holding your baby will help strengthen your core muscles and tighten abdominal muscles.
Mothers should also consider buying an exercise ball. An exercise ball is great for tummy exercises after recuperation. There are also aerobic exercises you can do with your baby like biking, swimming, running with a stroller, etc. that will help you keep your heart rate up.
During pregnancy, your torso muscles took a severe beating. Hence, in addition to moderate cardio, make sure that your postpartum workout should focus on building up these muscles. New mothers can hugely benefit from core strengthening.
Recuperate
We advise against going on a diet after you give birth. To get your body back, you have to think about your health first. Allow and give your body time to repair itself. Hence, don’t rush into working out, but also don’t become too relaxed either.
It would be best if you gave your body enough time to recuperate and restore your standard processes. Even though the weight is not falling off as quickly as you would prefer, if you stick to your decision and follow these tips, you will ultimately be pleased with the results eventually.
