How I Lost 35 Pounds After Pregnancy

I gained quite a bit of weight when I was pregnant with my daughter, and I am proud to say that most of it is gone. When Ella was born, she was only 5 lbs 10 oz, so I was pretty surprised that I had gained a total of 37 lbs during my pregnancy. I was expecting her to be a little chunky baby with adorable tire rolls resembling the Michelin tire man, but nope. Somehow my body had been greedy and took all of the late night brownies that I thought were going to be delivered to my daughter via umbilical cord and delivered them right to my thighs.

Likewise, after I gave birth, I was expecting to lose a bunch of weight immediately. Many people had told me that you lose at least 10 lbs during delivery (with the baby and placenta), but that was not my experience. I only came home 4 lbs thinner, and I am sure that the hand and foot catering I received in the hospital did not help. For some reason, I had gained some weight after I gave birth, and I definitely looked a lot puffier for quite awhile afterwards. I'm going to break down how I lost my marshmellow physique into two sections: exercise and diet.

My husband and I had been running together before we got pregnant, and once we found out we were pregnant, we pretty much stopped. I was really afraid that I was going to hurt the baby, so we started walking around the neighborhood for exercise instead. In retrospect, we probably could have kept running, but I was being super careful.

After we had Ella and I could start exercising again, we started running again (in the beginning of January of 2015). At first, it was just running a mile every other day, and walking a couple of miles the days we didn't run. I had not been running in awhile, so I had to slowly build up my stamina. The next month, we had added .5-1 mile onto our run, and kept increasing the distance each month. By May, (6 months after I had Ella and ), I was able to run 4 miles, although we wouldn't go that far every time since C had work that we had to schedule our time around. Usually we were running around 6-10 miles a week, and walking maybe 6-8 miles.

Now that C is in school (he just started dental school this August), we don't have as much time as we'd like to run that frequently, but we do walk a few miles around our neighborhood every chance we get and go hiking somewhat frequently.

Now, as for diet, at first I wasn't very cautious about what I ate. This probably slowed down my weight loss drastically. I had an app that tracked calories and this helped quite a bit, but it was too much work and it was helpful at first, but not worth it to me. Instead, I took the principles that I learned from my calorie counter, and consumed food based on that. For example, I learned to:

- Use measuring cups to measure out my cereal and milk intake. This helped to only eat one serving and not pour myself too much milk.

- Buy almond milk instead of regular milk for cereal. Almond milk has 30 calories vs. regular 1% milk can have up 110 calories for a 1 cup serving. It also has more significantly more calcium than regular milk as well, so it is really good for women looking to prevent osteoporosis. For the first 8 months, I only drank 1% milk, and took calcium supplements since I was cutting back on dairy and this was my only form of calcium.

- Buy foods with less sugar.  I check sugar levels on nutrition labels almost religiously and stay away from anything that has more than 9 g of sugar in it. You would be SURPRISED by how much sugar there is in stuff. Like Dr. Pepper has 40 GRAMS of sugar in it! FORTY! (Not that I drink the stuff, I only drink diet coke if I have a soda, which is pretty rare). But I used to have a yogurt everyday for lunch, and I didn't realize that every time I did I was pumping 26 g of sugar into my bloodstream. I stopped t

- DRINK WATER. It is free, and it doesn't have anything in it that you have to worry about (eg: calories, fat, sugar..). The stuff is amazing!

- Cut back on how much you eat, NOT what you eat! Counting calories made me learn that I can eat more of the good stuff if I eat less of something else. Life is too short to stop eating foods that you enjoy, so eat it! Just don't eat as much of it.

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By exercising and changing various things about my diet, I was able to lose 35 lbs in 10 months. I am so close to reaching my goal of getting back to my pre-pregnancy weight. Once I reach that goal, I want to lose another 20 lbs (hopefully), but I'm going to take that one step at a time. :)