There is absolutely nothing as awe-inspiring as giving birth and holding your new baby for the first time. Enjoying all the firsts – from the first time you feed them to the first time they sleep in the new bed you’re been preparing for months.
The one first that is definitely not enjoyable is the first time you think “when will I get my body back?”
While losing baby weight might not be at the very top of your list, you’d be surprised how high it will rank, no matter how hard you try not to care. I’m here to tell you that while every woman (and body) is different, you absolutely do not have to live with an extra 20 (or 60) pounds after giving birth for long. If you do the work to have a fit pregnancy and stay in shape while pregnant, your body will generally just do its thing and the weight will melt right off – with a little help.
I will go into each item much more specifically below, but here’s a quick breakdown of my tips for losing baby weight, and how I lost 25lbs in 2 weeks.
Tips for Losing Baby Weight
- Keep your weight gain healthy during pregnancy
- Stay in shape while pregnant
- Base your after pregnancy diet on vegetables
- Eat whole foods, rather than processed meals
- Drinks 10-14 glasses of water per day
- Walk (but don’t run)
- Breastfeed, at least for a while (if you can)
- Wear a girdle
- Set a goal, and stick to it
Post Pregnancy Weight Loss
For starters, you will probably experience the fastest weight loss ever after giving birth (can I get an amen?), because the baby itself takes up a significant amount of weight, as do the extra fluids and blood that your body has been carrying to support the baby.
So, how much weight will you lose right after the baby is born?
Again, that totally depends on you, but you can make a rough guess. Usually you can take the weight of the baby and tack on an extra 5 or so pounds of fluids and blood, and that’s about what you can expect to lose in the day or two after giving birth. If you have a baby that’s a pretty average 7-8 pounds, you’re looking at a total of around 13 pounds in the first 24 to 48 hours. That obviously varies per person, and like I said, that’s just a rough guess.
For me though, that estimate held pretty true for the first few days, and I lost about 12 pounds in the first 48 hours. Over the next week, I lost about 8 more, and in the week after that the remaining 5 came off. I only gained around 22 pounds total while pregnant, so for me, that meant that I lost all the baby weight in the first two weeks: a crazy 25 pounds.
Losing Baby Weight: A How-To
If you’re sitting there rolling your eyes and saying I must be one of those naturally skinny people that just can’t keep weight on, you couldn’t be further from the truth. Many of my family members have struggled with weight, several of them have diabetes and I have also gone through periods where I was on the fuller side.
So what’s the key to losing weight after pregnancy? First of all, its easier to prevent massive weight gain than it is to work it all off, so I was big on staying active and staying in shape while pregnant, which is how I was able to keep my weight gain in the 20s, rather than gaining 40, 50 or 60 pounds, which has happened to a lot of people that I know.
Keep Your Weight Gain Healthy During Pregnancy
This is the part where I give you some tough love: it’s not good for you or your baby to gain an excessive amount of weight while pregnant. In fact, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention found in 2015 that almost half of pregnant women gain too much weight.
While society will tell you to eat all the chocolate and doughnuts that you want because you’re growing a small human (which is a huge responsibility!), your doctor will likely tell you that gaining too much weight while pregnant can lead to a lot of problems, such as having less accurate ultrasound reports, higher blood pressure, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, a large baby, premature labor and birth defects.
Bottom line: if you’re starting out your pregnancy at a healthy weight, try to keep your weight gain between the recommended 25 to 35 pounds. It’s not only healthier for you and your baby, it will also help you lose the baby weight after birth.
Now, let’s get to the key things that helped me with losing weight after pregnancy.
After Pregnancy Diet
Let’s be real, in the first few days and weeks after giving birth you are probably not going to be working out (and if you are then please tell me your secrets, seriously). I’m a pretty avid believer that the diet makes up about 80% of the equation and exercise only 20%, meaning no matter when you’re wanting to lose weight diet is more important, especially when it comes to losing baby weight.
During pregnancy and after, it helps a lot to eat healthy, nutrition-packed foods that keep you full and get you the nutrients needed to help your body heal.
What to Eat For Losing Baby Weight
- Aim to eat whole foods like fruits, vegetables and lentils. They are super easy to cut up and throw into a stir fry or eat fresh.
- Fill up on green vegetables and make them the building blocks of your meals. Think foods like broccoli, asparagus, brussel sprouts, spinach, snap peas and kale.
- Ward of sweet cravings by eating fruits, especially lower carb fruits like strawberries, blackberries and blueberries.
- Drink LOTS of water. I aimed for 10-14 glasses a day.
This last one, drinking water, is probably my number one tip for how to lose the baby weight. As mentioned previously, your body takes on a lot of extra fluids during pregnancy, and drinking a lot of water seems to help flush them out after giving birth. If you are breastfeeding (which burns a ton of calories by the way), water is especially important, since you are using up your body’s fluids in producing milk. Another upside to drinking lots of water? You feel much fuller than you would otherwise, and you also have something to do to keep you from mindless snacking.
Postpartum Exercise
As I said earlier, don’t plan on exercising after you give birth, at least not until your doctor gives you the green light. However, that doesn’t mean you have to be a couch potato. I found that within a few days to a week after giving birth, I was pretty comfortable walking around, even if it was in a mall or for a short walk outside. I definitely would not recommend pushing it, but listen to your body and if you feel good, be active! There is absolutely nothing wrong with walking a bit or even just climbing up an occasional flight of stairs.
Does Breastfeeding Help With Weight Loss?
If you google that question, you will likely to find about a million different answers. Some women claim it’s a magic key to weight loss, others claim it causes weight gain because it makes you so hungry. If you’re choosing to breastfeed, I hope you make the best choice for you and your baby, not based on what anyone else pushes you to do. Personally, I breastfeed for about a month and then needed to stop, and that decision was the best one for me.
That being said, if you do breastfeed, does it help with weight loss? The short: maybe.
What we do know for a fact, is that breastfeeding burns calories. It’s estimated that you burn about 20 calories per ounce of breastmilk, which means you will likely burn off several hundred calories per day if you choose to go that route. It also depends on how much your baby eats: jack ate a TON, and at one point I was burning almost 1,000 calories per day breastfeeding.
Another major benefit is that breastfeeding releases hormones that help your uterus return to its normal size more quickly, which basically means that your stomach might look like normal a little bit faster if you breastfeed.
Again, I can’t say enough – while there are obviously benefits to breastfeeding, you need to do whatever works best for you and I sincerely hope that your loved ones are supportive of whatever you choose. Women get judged for so much, you just pushed a baby out of your body and are now welcoming it into the world, this is one thing we really just need to skip judgement on.
Losing Baby Weight: Wear A Girdle
Full disclosure, I don’t know if this actually works. What I can tell you is that I chose to wear a girdle – basically a soft corset looking thing that you wrap around your stomach and Velcro together. It helps put pressure on your stomach muscles, and the thought is that it helps support your back and challenge your stomach muscles, helping them return to their original shape faster.
After a lot of back and forth, I did wear a girdle, and I did feel like it helped. I absolutely do not think it helps you lose weight faster, but it did feel like it helped work my core muscles without me really noticing, and I did feel like my stomach went back to normal much faster than I anticipated.
Set A Goal For Losing Baby Weight
If there is one major piece of advice I can leave you with, it is the power of setting goals. I love setting goals. I literally have had lists of goals at basically every stage of my life, and I am a firm believer that if you have something you’re working for and you write it down to remind yourself, you are much more likely to turn that goal into a reality.
I set two major fitness goals for losing baby weight:
- Keep my pregnancy weight gain in a healthy range
- Lose the baby weight within the first month after giving birth
I was able to keep both of those, because I actively made it a priority to pay attention to what I was eating and to remain fit while pregnant.
Again, I obviously think that your health and your baby’s health are so much more important than any kind of fitness goal, but I know that the first few weeks of giving birth are filled with lots of hormones and sleepless nights. For me, I knew that if I was able to take care of myself and lose the baby weight fairly quick, it would be one less thing to worry about and it would help boost my self confidence at a time when hormones are absolutely raging through my body.
I hope this post on losing baby weight and how I lost 25 pounds in two weeks has been helpful to you! Have you tried any of these suggestions? Did they work for you? If you have other tips or helpful tricks, please leave them in the comments, I would love to hear!
