How to lose your baby weight healthily while breastfeeding
Seeing your belly grow during pregnancy is exciting. But many women fear of not loosing all that weight after giving birth. In this blogpost I share how to lose your baby weight healthily while you are still breastfeeding.
You can do it!
I gained much more weight than recommended for my weight class during pregnancy and I am not alone. Only half of women gain the recommended amount of weight during pregnancy. After birth I started breastfeeding hoping that my pounds would fall off naturally. Well – they didn’t. I started with strength training for my pelvic floor and core muscles and finally did everything I mention in this blogpost. I am now almost 9 months postpartum and have only very little baby weight left. If I can do it – you can do it too mama!
First things first: be kind to yourself
Our body has gone through drastic and quick changes and it is understandable that you miss your pre-pregnancy body. But along with trying to lose your baby weight even if you’re are breastfeeding try also to be kind and loving to yourself. In this blog post I talk all about loving your body after having a baby.
I gained much more weight than recommended during pregnancy and today I want to encourage you that it is possible to lose it again in a healthy way even while breastfeeding. You don’t have to go to the gym 6 times a week of follow any complicated diet. Read along about my tips and encouragement just for you!
Set healthy and realistic goals on how to lose baby weight while breastfeeding
Many women want to lose their baby weight as quickly as possible because they hate their postpartum body. In order to be successful in loosing your baby weight while breastfeeding try to shift your mindset and set healthy goals. Instead of focussing on only loosing weight, ask yourself what else you want to achieve. For me there where three important goals:
- Fitting into my old clothes
- Gaining strength to be able to do the sports I love
- Getting the energy I need to come through my day
Whatever it is for you: set some goals beside only weight loss. Be aware that it will take months to lose that extra cuddle mass, especially if you have a lot of it left. I set myself the goals to lose most of the weight until 9 months postpartum and all of it after I stopped breastfeeding.
Lose baby weight while breastfeeding and gain strength
If you only focus on the numbers on the scale there is one big danger. Throughout pregnancy and while breastfeeding you are very likely to lose muscle mass. When you try to lose weight only through diet you are again very likely to lose muscle mass. Muscle is heavier than fat they say and therefore it might take you longer to lose weight when building muscle but it is worth the wait. Muscle gives you energy and once you have it burns calories even if you don’t move. Therefore it helps you to keep those pounds off in the longrun.
I love this thought when talking about weight loss:
Look into the mirror rather than on a scale.
If you want to change physically you need to look into the mirror. Do you look healthy and happy? Do you look stronger? Those things matter so much more than a number on the scale no one else cares about.
Mind postpartum recovery of pelvic floor and core muscles
Even if you are ‘cleared’ to work out again 6 weeks postpartum you should not train hard. My physiotherapist who is specialized in pregnancy and postpartum care told me that women can handle more exercise during pregnancy than 6 weeks postpartum. Two muscle groups to be mindful of are your pelvic floor and your core muscles.
Your pelvic floor are the muscles that keep the organs in your lower abdomen from dropping out of your vagina and anus. This study shows a significant weakening of the pelvic floor muscles after birth and that it needed more than 12 months to recover back to strength. If you had to push for a longer time or you had a major tear it might be weakened even more. If you return to regular exercise without strengthening those muscles your recovery will take longer as needed and you might have complaints later.
Your core muscles are all muscle layers in your belly and back. There is research showing the drastic changes of the core muscles in pregnancy and postpartum. It shows that there are risks involved when exercising after birth without training those muscles specifically. One complaint of women is lower back pain resulting from no or wrong training after birth.
Therefore it is important to go to a trusted exercise therapist or even follow exercises online if this is no possibility to strengthen those areas first before starting to exercise to lose weight.
My number 1 tip to lose baby weight while breastfeeding: walk!
I didn’t lose any weight until 4 months postpartum when I finally felt strong enough to start with the only kind of exercise I used to lose weight: walking! I started walking for 5-10 minutes first. After a few weeks I walked for 30 minutes or more every day and the pounds just started coming off. I felt stronger and got so much energy through this one simple thing!
There is plenty of research that shows that walking is very effective and burns fat if done regularly. That is a huge encouragement to me. I don’t have to go to the gym of do any exercise I don’t like. Walking is save for women that breastfeed to. No worries about supply or quality of your milk at all. What an amazing news: I just have to walk in order to lose my baby weight while breastfeeding.
Diet while breastfeeding?
There are different opinions on this topic and since I am no nutritionist I don’t even dare to talk about it. If you eat mostly whole foods with lots of veggies, fruit and protein you should be fine. I did try to avoid processed sugars while trying to lose weight simply because of the empty calories they contain. But make sure you eat enough of the healthy stuff rather than cut off the unhealthy. One of my favorite nutritional advice is:
Add to not subtract from <3
What helped you to lose your weight? Let me know in the comments, I would love to read all about it!
