Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikebaird/ / CC BY 2.0
Let’s talk about jealousy for a minute…
Do you watch other moms and wonder how the heck they lost all their baby weight seemingly effortlessly. Does it make you wanna barf a little?? I know, it seems like it just falls off everyone else. “I just nursed little Jimmy and the weight disappeared.” Ok, rest assured, if Skinny Minnie moms make you insane (jealousy+bitterness+sleeplessness is an ugly combo), you are not alone.
I’ve told you time and again that tons of moms come to me because they are desperate, frustrated and hopeless about their post baby bodies. You’ve all heard my stories about moms with grade school age kids who are still fighting to lose “baby” weight. I hear ya. It is a tough job (among ALL the other jobs on your plate!)
So I wanted to give you some of the information I give my clients when they first set out to lose baby weight, whether their baby is 8 weeks or 8 years old. Are you ready to take notes?? Here we go:
1. Track your food. You have to be accountable to every bite of food you put in your mouth. This isn’t me trying to make your life harder. This is a proven means of weight loss. Moms who write down what they eat lose more weight and lose it faster. Proven fact. You can do this in a notebook that you keep close by at all times or you can be super fancypants and do it online. There are a ton of sites that allow you to track food. Most of them also have smartphone apps. A favorite among my clients is www.MyFitnessPal.com. The great thing about doing it online, is these programs do a lot of the work for you (give you calories/nutrition info/tracking from day to day/repeat meal entry).
Tracking food keeps you honest. It keeps you accountable. It stops you from making decisions that will only disappoint you in the long run. I can’t tell you how many times I have stopped myself from eating something simply because I did not want to write it down. Writing it down would have been an admission of failure and weakness (I know, I’m a little hard on myself.) But, it’s true. No one wants to write down that doughnut or piece of cake or bag of chips. Even if no one but you will ever see it, you don’t want any proof that it happened. So you don’t eat it, because you don’t need it. You are better without it.
2. Workout Consistently AND Hard. Ok, you don’t have to kill yourself, but you do have to sweat. It doesn’t even have to be for very long. But in order to stimulate your metabolism you MUST workout with some intensity. Reminder, there are only two ways to stimulate your metabolism: 1) EATING and 2) EXERCISE. High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) workouts are PERFECT for moms, because you can pack some major punch into a short amount of time. In fact, I don’t recommend long workout sessions. They are not as effective and you simply don’t have the time for them. Heck, many days I get by on a 20 minute workout sesh. You can too! If I only have 20 minutes in a day to sweat, I WORK it!
20 minutes of full body weight training or HIIT will have a better metabolic benefit than 60 minutes of walking. It will get your heart rate sky high. This will allow you to burn more calories around the clock. Examples of full body weight training exercises are squats, lunges, dead lifts, jump rope, push ups, burpees, pull ups, planks, jumping drills. Doing these types of strength training exercises back to back with little to no rest burns more calories than time spent slogging it out on cardio machines. These exercises also help you build lean muscle mass. Lean muscle mass helps you burn fat and calories round the clock. Lean muscle mass takes up less room than fat. So a 150 lb woman with a decent amount of lean muscle (not body builder muscle!) is going to be noticeably smaller than a 150 pound woman who has very little lean muscle.
As for HIIT training, you will burn more calories during your actual workout than during a traditional, steady state cardio workout. But what’s even better is that it burns more calories in the 24-48 hours after the workout. Performing steady state cardio does NOT do this! If you do steady state cardio on the elliptical for 45 minutes, when you get off the elliptical, your heart rate comes down and you stop burning calories from that workout (you still burn calories from simply being, just not from the workout).
However, in HIIT the high intensity bursts really push the limits of your anaerobic threshold – that feeling when you’re DYING to catch your breath. After a HIIT session you consume significantly more oxygen to return your body to it’s pre-exercise physiological state. This is called EPOC (Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption.) EPOC is what it’s all about my friends!!! If you can increase your EPOC (your oxygen consumption post workout) it’s like you’re still working out when you’re not! After a decent HIIT sesh, you’ll increase your EPOC for 24-48 hours, allowing you burn an additional chunk of calories. MAGIC!
3. Tweak your Diet. There are so many ways to do this, but I’m going to give you the three steps that are most effective and efficient for moms when it comes to shedding fat, getting rid of your baby belly and losing weight permanently.
1)Increase your lean protein and veggies: Add more poultry (chicken breast, turkey breast, ground turkey), lean red meat (bison, lean ground beef, loin or round cuts), pork tenderloin, wild fish to your daily diet. My favorite meatless sources of protein are whey protein shakes, eggs/egg whites, nuts, and PLAIN Greek yogurt.
Add veggies wherever/whenever you can!!! Veggies give you a ton of volume for very few calories. An entire cucumber + red pepper = 70 calories. Compare that to fruit of comparable sizes. An entire banana + apple = 200 calories. Plus, the cuke and pepper will keep you fuller waaaay longer!
Try to add veggies to most meals and snacks. If this is a challenge for you do it in phases. Try one new veggie a week and add it to a few meals. The next week add another. You’ll find that once you start increasing veggie volume, you have less room for starchy things on your plate. Don’t worry, you get plenty of carbs from veggies! You do not need sides of potatoes, rice, bread with your meals (you’re brain is just used to them.) Practice removing these starches for just a few meals a week. Removing starchy sides alone can make a noticeable difference in belly fat loss in just a couple weeks.
2.) Eat 300-400 calories 4-5 times a day. Now this may involve some calorie counting initially. This is not a bad thing. You’ve heard how so many people lose weight on Weight Watchers?? It’s because they count. So, they may not track calories, but they track points. You have to learn what is in an appropriate portion in order to lose weight. That doesn’t mean you have to track calories for the rest of your life. But calculate out about how many calories are in your most frequently consumed meals/snacks. You may be surprised. The average woman should consume about 1500-1800 calories a day for weight loss (smaller women should stay on the lower end of this.)
Many moms come to me and when we calculate their daily caloric intake it’s 2500+ calories a day. Even if this is largely from healthy sources, extra calories will give you extra weight to carry around. Sorry, but it’s the truth! So I URGE you to do some number crunching with your diet. I would say this is the BIGGEST factor in my moms losing weight the fastest.
Eating these smaller meals throughout the day will regulate your blood sugar and keep your energy more consistent. This will also prevent you from overindulging at any meal/snack because you won’t get that ravenous, “I wanna eat my arm”, feeling. Most importantly, many of my clients notice these small meals take away that bloated belly look and feel. Awesome!
3.) Water – drink a lot of it. Be sure to get in half your body weight in ounces of water everyday. For example, a 150 pound woman should consume 75 ounces of water a day. If you’re not a water drinker now, set weekly goals to increase your daily intake over time. Feel free to add slices of lemon, lime, orange, cucumber to your water.
My clients who get in their daily water quota each day notice the following:
Staying fuller longer
Less hungry between meals
More energy
Better workouts
Less bloat
Flatter bellies
Faster weight loss
Less likely to plateau in their weight loss
WOW – these factors are really motivating to get that water in, huh?!?!
I hope these tips inspire your to set some goals and a plan of action for yourself. You have to get a little fired up about all this. You have to be determined to be STRONG and DISCIPLINED. You have to have CONFIDENCE that YOU CAN DO IT. Don’t let your head get in the way. Don’t let past failed attempts get in the way. Put the steps in place and GO FOR IT. BE UNSTOPPABLE!
And be ready for to go shopping, cause you might need some new clothes. The ones you’re wearing right now aren’t going to fit much longer!
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