Your Baby Weighs Eight Pounds, You Put On 50.

You were so conscientious about feeding the little one inside of you, making sure that they have all the nutrition that they need. How did you gain so much weight? I'm personally convinced that being pregnant slows your metabolism! How else could I have put on 80 lbs? I didn't act like my fridge was an all night drive-through. I still went for walks and didn't eat a lot of sweets.

In any event, my 120 pound body, grew to 200 lbs! Still I wasn't worried, I just knew that I would drop that weight as quickly as I put it on right? Wrong! Several months after I had my sweet little baby girl, I was still 185 pounds, and miserable. So I decided to start speed-walking with her in the stroller. It was on one of those walks that I happened across a guy that I went to high school with. He was always the type to say whatever popped into his head. He said to me "I can't believe that you would let yourself go". I couldn't believe that he had the nerve to say that to me, and I thought about it all the way home. Firstly, I was mad at him for being so rude, but then I decided to show him!

So I bought a popular women's magazine, tore out pages with bikini clad women, and taped them inside every cabinet or place I might find food. I enlarged my favorite picture of myself pre-baby and put it on my bathroom mirror. I found a program on television that did aerobics each morning, I just couldn't get into it.
Also, I don't know where these moms find the time to go to a gym, I certainly couldn't. So it was one day on my walk that I stopped at a tag sale and bought an armload of old videos and a stepper. I tried each of these videos, and hated all of them. It was then that I realized that I was not really going to find one that I liked ever, and I picked one out of the lot where the workout really killed me, but the music was ok.

They say that after 21 days doing something, it becomes a habit. This is true in my experience. It was about 3 weeks before I was actually looking forward to my workouts. I would get off that stepper and feel great. After the first three weeks, I finally got up the courage to try the scale. I knew that my clothes were becoming looser, but I didn't think there would have been any significant weight loss.

Fifteen pounds, I had lost that much. Just by watching my snacking, and working out 3-5 times a week. By the time she started crawling, I was down 70 pounds ( I never did get rid of that last 10). This is ok, because I felt great in my jeans and had hoped I'd run into that high school friend again. I didn't but I have never forgotten how his words helped me.

Since then, I had another baby, and have fallen off the weight wagon a few times. It happens. So each time I see my waistline expanding, I get serious, and I buy a new magazine.