Having a baby is a joy and a blessing that exceeds all others. Now that your bundle has arrived, and you are fully entrenched in ‘mommy mode’, you are probably now worrying about losing the 10 or 20 pounds that you packed on during your pregnancy. For most of us, taking time every day to go to the gym is just not an option – what, with taking care of a newborn, a home and a husband, who has time for the gym?
Luckily there are small things that will make a big difference in loosing your baby weight.
Let me share the 5 best with you:
1. Eat sensibly and stay active – Fad dieting just doesn’t work. You might lose a few pounds but as soon as you revert back to your old diet, the pounds will come right back. The key to success is to not skip meals to save calories, and eat a well balance diet that contains lots of fresh fruits, vegetables, grains and protein and no fat, sugar or empty calories. Furthermore, you need to stay active to lose weight. The more you move, the better you will feel and the quicker you will drop those unwanted pounds.
2. Follow your baby’s eating habits - Your baby will eat when he is hungry and stop when he is full. This is an excellent example for mom to follow too. Not only will this help you to loose your baby weight fast, but it becomes a lifelong lesson in proper eating habits. Experts say that to recognize fullness, you should eat slowly and pause several times during a meal, to allow your body to signal to you that it is full.
3. Exercise with Baby – Forget the gym, you can exercise at home in short intervals all day long. Carrying around a 10 pound baby is hard work. Make it fun and dance with your baby, do the laundry with your baby in a baby carrier. As your baby begins to age, you can involve your little one in at-home exercises that can be as fun as dancing or as unstructured as hide and seek. If you have stairs in your home, even better! Stair climbing is a great way to increase your heart rate and burn fat.
4. Use a smaller plate – Instead of cutting out food groups and drastically reducing the amount of good foods that you eat, use a smaller plate and eat smaller portions. If you are cautious about your intake of fats and carbohydrates, you will lose weight and keep it off. Fill your plate with healthy vegetables and complex carbohydrates. As a guideline, a serving of meat or pasta should be no larger than the size of your closed fist.
5. Maintain a food journal – Writing down what you eat and when you eat it allows you to see where your trigger points are (times of day when you are more likely to binge eat or crave junk food). It also allows you to see your own successes. This is an excellent way of monitoring your goals and your habits and will further your ability to lose all your post baby weight. A recent study proves that women who kept a food journal lost 80% of their baby weight in a 6-month period, compared to only 44% of women who didn’t keep a food journal.
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