bring it on: fitness after pregnancy

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For the third time in my life, I'm going to attempt to loose weight after being pregnant.  I actually did succeed the last two times, but it took me almost a year and a half to get to my pre-pregnancy starting weight.  Maybe I can make a better go of it this time.

I thought I was starting off on the right foot in the two weeks after birth.  I'd lost 17 pounds of my pregnancy weight. I was only about 10 pounds from my starting weight.  And then I got hungry.  Ravenously hungry.  All day.  Even when I woke up at night, I was hungry. So I ate.  I ate a fair amount of junk food (chips, pizza, easy to prepare packaged foods). And over the past 3 weeks, I've seen my weight creep back up.  Sigh.  An additional 6 pounds. I won't beat myself up too much, though.  It's important, especially in the first weeks to not limit myself (as in dieting or restricting calories) to ensure that I have enough energy for healing and for breastfeeding. However, I think the error was in the type of foods.

Clearly, breastfeeding makes me hungry like none other.  I didn't even feel this hungry when I was pregnant.  But, the excessive eating has to stop.  I watched a bit of a talk show yesterday, and I was reminded that being sleep deprived contributes to weight gain, because we crave fats and carbs.  Guess what?  I'm sleep deprived, and that's totally what I've been craving! 

So, steps in getting back into good shape:

1. get more sleep (ha! right!)
2. keep the junk out of the house
3. squeeze in a few minutes a day on the treadmill - really, even just a few minutes at a time add up!

Those are my baby steps. So what if I added more weight after I had a baby.  I'll be working on changing things.  It may take me a bit longer to get there, but I'll still get there.

I'm looking forward to getting back into running.  I forgot something in my car the other day, so I ran the 40 feet or so to the car.  It felt nice.  I want to go get myself my new shoes.

I also did some minor calculating about breast milk, and I figure that just by making milk, I could get ahead in calorie burn.  I figure if I pump some breastmilk each day, then I could possibly increase the amount of calories my body uses, in addition to what's used to feed Adelle.  There are about 20 calories in each ounce of breastmilk. 3 ounces a day (thus far, that's been easy to get) 5 days a week would be an extra 300 calorie output.

Now, the challenge is that I'm hungry, and I'll likely be hungry even more if I'm putting out more calories.  So, to find balance between my hunger and my actual needs is my goal.

Yay!  I'm so ready to get back to fitness!