Body After Baby Part 1

Please bear with me. As I write, I have a 6.5 month old grabbing the computer. Therefore, I type quickly.My thoughts may sometimes be scrambled, and there may be spelling errors. No judgment please!

Believe it or not, the road to the recovery of my pre-Henry body actually happened before Henry was even born. Being the research fiend that I am, I spent a good amount of time reading about pregnancy and post-pregnancy fitness. I didn't want to have any "I wish I had known that!" moments.

I started the first few weeks of my first trimester like many pregnant women: afraid to move. I didn't want to jostle my new resident. My common sense and everything that I had read told me that this was silly; he was in there protected by my squishy womb bubble. At around 12 weeks, I let go and fully realized that my nugget was in the Lord's hands. He was knitting him together in my womb, after all. I then got moving.

Because my financial situation did not allow for a gym membership or paying for expensive classes, I really relied on at home exercise.

I started doing this video daily. I also did lots of walking. I can't stress enough how important walking is. Especially when you don't feel like moving, it really energizes you! I also loved Amira's belly dance and yoga video.

Being pregnant also inspired me to eat better than I ever had in the past. I certainly splurged from time to time, but I did not use the pregnant license "I can eat whatever I want".

It should be noted that I did NOT watch my weight gain during pregnancy. I truly believe that you can do everything right and gain a lot of weight. Your body is going to do what it is going to do. You need to trust that. Watching the scale is great in the beginning when you don't gain much weight, but after that it really goes downhill fast.

I ate when I was hungry and attempted to make healthy choices. Due to my serious aversion to meat, I relied on protein shakes and eggs to help fill me up while meeting mine and baby's protein needs.

My favorite pregnancy protein shake (rough measurements):

8 ice cubes

1.5 bananas

1/4 cup almonds

3 TBS peanut butter

1 TBS honey

1/2 cup almond milk or regular milk

1 scoop whey protein


As I neared the end of my pregnancy I continued to walk, do yoga videos and belly dance. I also did pregnancy appropriate ab workouts. This is really important for the success of ab rejuvenation after baby. I loved these videos.

Zoom ahead to Henry's birth, one week postpartum I started wearing The Bellybandit. There are many mixed reviews on the matter of belly binding, but I must say that for me, it worked. I wore it every day for 2 months. On days that I didn't wear it I noticed my belly slowly go back out over the course of a couple days. After weeks of wearing it I noticed my belly eventually didn't go out again and my waist was back to its pre-baby size. Would it have done that with out the binding? Maybe. But it did shrink awfully quickly! I believe that over time it would have done this on its own-but the binding certainly expedited the process.

7 Weeks postpartum:



In my next post (and I PROMISE it will not take so long this time!), I will share my postpartum secrets I used along with the belly binding in the first weeks after baby.