Getting Your Body Back After Baby

As I sit here in bed at 13:06 on a Sunday afternoon, eating three or four dark chocolate truffles (they have expired – mustn’t let them go to waste), I’ve opened up previous blog drafts I considered finishing and posting during the months after Baby K was born – and I’ve come across my post-partum advice on how to lose the baby weight.

Now, you may not think that someone who spends Sunday afternoon sitting in bed in her pyjamas eating chocolate truffles is the ideal person to give advice on losing weight after having a baby. But despite being told again and again that I would “never get my body back” (by well-meaning friends and relatives probably wanting to, as we say in corpo-speak, “set my expectations”), I seem to have bounced back fairly quickly. In fact, it took me exactly two weeks to lose the last baby kilo.

So for anyone out there struggling with postpartum weight loss and wanting to know the secret to success, I have compiled below my various sure-fire action steps. 

7 Things That Will Guarantee You Get Your Body Back After Baby:

1.  Have a really big baby. Then once it’s born, half the weight is already gone. Easy-peasy.

She was sort of on the, you know, large side (this is about one week after birth)

Remain pinioned under your baby as much as possible

2.  Develop a mortal fear of your baby’s cries, so that you are essentially pinioned under your baby in the same position for most hours of the day. That way, you will be unable to eat unless your food is brought to you in a receptacle that can balance on your pile of pillows and burp rags and be eaten with one hand without crumbling or slopping onto the baby’s head – so, crackers and tea biscuits. (Note: this is enhanced by living in a house with stairs, and additionally developing a mortal fear of carrying your baby up and down them. Once you master the sling-over-your-shoulder-with-one-hand-while-frying-an-egg, your diet is doomed.)

3.  Breastfeed. Then make sure you invite over guests, especially older relatives, who are made visibly uncomfortable by seeing you breastfeed in front of them (you will identify this when they turn away/begin to pace in unnecessary circles/leave the room/offer to cover up you and your baby’s head “to protect from draughts”.) By doing this, you will make sure you end up leaving the room to breastfeed in private every time the yummy unhealthy food one normally serves to guests (grilled meats, cake) are placed on the table and devoured in your absence. You will then subsist for the rest of the visit on the slightly brown banana no one wants from the decorative fruit plate.

Think you'll get any of this food? Not when you're sent off to the back room to feed your hungry baby!

Make sure the only clothes you can find are loose and stretchy

4.  Pack all your non-maternity-wear-appropriate clothes into boxes. Do this early in your pregnancy, so you forget how small they are before you stop fitting into them. As an added bonus, have your husband come up with the ingenious idea of putting a heavy set of dressers right in front of them. This way, you will only have access to stretchy, oversized tank tops and leggings for several weeks after giving birth, and will be able to prance in front of your mirror thinking, “I look great!”

The larger your child gets, the more striking will be the results

5.  Pick up your baby every time they cry/don’t cry/look at you/breathe noisily. This is a very efficient arm workout and will get you ripped within two weeks, especially if you follow recommendation #1 (see above).

One of the many positions that gives baby access to your sore abs

6.  Get your child to kick you in the stomach while breastfeeding. (This is especially effective if you have had a cesarean.) You will be inclined to spend these precious half-hour stints of cuddle time pulling your abs in at varying and sometimes improbable angles. Your baby belly will be transformed into a six-pack within a matter of days. 

7.  Exercise, but be wary of yoga. If you practice too much, you will be able to do things like breastfeed while getting dressed/burp your baby while making coffee/swing your baby vigorously back and forth while cutting vegetables with your toes – in which case, your diet will be doomed (see #2). On the other hand, if you can breastfeed/burp/swing your baby while practicing yoga, you’re good to go.

If you catch your five-day-old baby in Downward Dog, it's a sign you've done too much prenatal yoga

Other weight-loss tips:

Always carry baby in a sling. The extra 5kg or so will do your back the world of good. 

Be creative with your use of baby furniture

Buy a really cool pram so you feel compelled to show it off. Cobblestones add an extra bonus.

Buy baby cargo pants. You will be forced to go hiking just to use them.

Use your baby as an exercise coach by propping up in a bouncy seat while you work out. You will notice baby begin to wail any time you stop moving. 

Independence Day (not observed)

11 November, Independence Day - speeches, song, marching about with flags, parades on horseback, an air of ceremony - every year I think, how lovely to experience Polish Independence Day and see what it's all about! And every year, we miss it. (I've missed nine Independence Days now.) It's too cold, or I'm sick, or someone has a birthday party, or I'm working, or we're all set to go out and it starts to rain... well, it is November, after all.

But this year I suppose we could say we had something of the Independence Day spirit. There was marching (we went on a walk in the woods with Munchkin) and parades on horseback (the path we go on through the woods is a horse path, although we didn't technically see any horses) and song (one habitually sings things to a baby), and a flag propped up against a tree in our front garden.

Patriotic marches

You want me to do WHAT?

Other festivities included forcing Madame to try out her new toys. We've borrowed a play mat and a swing from some friends, and with great excitement set her up in each of them (the excitement was ours, not hers.)



She lasted a good half hour on the play mat - provided one of us sat with her, with our heads wedged under the little arcs, in between the dangling toys, so she could reach her hand past the dangling butterflies and dingly birds and stick her fingers up our noses.

OK, I'll bat at the birdie if you do it first

They say it will be fun

And she lasted about twenty minutes in the swing - provided I kept coming to stand in front of her, dangling different toys in front of her hands, which she quickly bypassed, reaching up to my face and sticking her fingers in my nose. So, the takeaway lesson is, as long as you have a nose, you don't need to buy any other toys for your kids.

OK, it's growing on me

Other than that, another Independence Day came and went. Just like every other year. Maybe next year, tenth time lucky?

No time like the present - to start blogging again :D

It's the end of another beautiful, warm November day, and Madame has finally fallen asleep... snuggled up to a teddy bear. (Every night it's a new technique, but hey, it's the result that counts. Although getting the teddy bear out of the crib without waking her up might be a challenge...)

We spent most of the day playing in our garden - Mother-in-law and Sister-in-law came over to help us "clean up" for the winter. Piotrek did one final round of mowing (I was going to let him get away with leaving the shaggy look, but his mom insisted), Mother-in-law burned brambles behind the pond, and Sister-in-law took a pair of clippers to the now-expired flower beds. As for me, I put Munchkin in the wrap and walked her up and down until she finally fell asleep, practicing my squats every now and then while clipping at some bushes or gathering some leaves.

Later on we went to visit some friends and their two-year-old daughter. They have a lovely flat near Bielany (the big white monastery towers on the hill, for those who have glimpsed it), all done up in dark blue and white (obviously, the Best Colours). Madame was not at her happiest perhaps, but managed to sit in my lap and calmly drool over everything for quite some time before her wide-eyed bewilderment turned to crankiness and then to despair. But no worries - once we got home, I bribed her with food, then stuck her in her bed and tried all my tricks (ok - I only have one trick, which is running my hand over her eyebrows and nose), until I settled on the idea of replacing myself with the giant teddy bear. Worked a charm.

Since Madame is now three months old, all our guests Baby-Help Teams are long gone, and we've settled into a sort of daily rhythm ordered chaos, it's probably a good time to re-start the blog. With slightly less panache and shorter posts, but quite possibly hundreds of photos. Here's another one:

We're, like, total BFFs