Losing Pregnancy Weight: How to Lose Weight After Pregnancy

You may notice that you after you have a baby your stomach, and body is still round and plump. This may be of surprise to you especially if you are new to the whole having a kid thing. You may find yourself asking why it takes so long for you to retain your normal shape. A lot of new mother’s do not know that it can take up to a year to recover from having a baby. They don’t take the time to think that the baby was in them for nine months! If you are annoyed with the way your body looks you can learn how to lose weight after pregnancy.

One thing a lot of new mothers think is that they must head right into an exercise program. What they don’t realize is it can be dangerous to you if you exercise right after birth. You must wait a few weeks or months before you can start. You should follow your doctor’s advice on when it is clear to start exercising.

The first thing you want to know when learning how to lose weight after pregnancy is that you must eat healthy. Eating healthy is crucial in almost all weight loss programs. Sometimes you will feel tired and not want to cook anything, so you just get easy to make meals. You should try to avoid this. It may be hard to cook while you have a screaming baby on your hands, but you should try to do this whenever you can. When snacking, drop the bag of chips, or ice cream, and pick up some fruits, vegetables, or yogurt. These are all small things that will keep you healthy and energized.

Breastfeeding is a great way to lose weight after pregnancy. If you breastfeed you are losing an extra 500 calories a day. Of course, you are going to need more calories for yourself to keep up with the demand of energy, but if you can control how much you take in you can lose some weight. Pumping instead of breastfeeding can still help you lose the weight so don’t worry if you don’t want to breastfeed your newborn.

Try to get as much sleep as you can at any time in the day. I know it might be hard because, duh, you have a new child to look after, but your body needs to be refreshed after all of this work. If you lay the newborn down for a nap you should also lay yourself down for a nap. Even getting an extra 45 minutes in during the day is enough repair your body. Doing this decreases the amount of a stress hormone, called cortisol, in your blood, which will make it even harder for you to lose weight.

Once you are cleared to exercise make sure that you start to. This is one of the most important things while trying to lose weight after a pregnancy. Always do small exercises, such as packing the baby in a stroller and walking around the block, or dancing with the baby. When you find the time you can do the more major exercises that will really help you lose the weight. You should be working with three major areas of exercise here. One being core strength. A couple of exercises that you should be doing here are crunches, planks, sit-ups, basically anything that will help you with your abs. The second area is cardio. This is where you want to start doing aerobics activities, like running. Make sure you start out pretty slow and take everything really easy. You will find that you can’t perform at levels you used to be able to, so try to do some low intensity exercises. Get used to working out again before you start turning up the intensity. The last area is strength training. Again, you will want to start out slowly here and then raise the bar. Some exercises you might want to do are pushups, lunges, chair squats, and hip lifts.