[quote]mma_girl wrote:
Bron Sapir are you breastfeeding??
I’m almost 7 weeks postpartum with my daughter and also have a 2 year old. But I’m dying to hit the gym again and will be going back as soon as I relocate across country to stay with my mother in law (husband is stationed overseas so I need to stay with her so I don’t burn out!) I have dreams of competing this time but more importantly I just want my dream glutes lol. I’m breastfeeding my daughter though and plan to for a year so I’m not quite sure how to approach working out and eating this time around?
OP how long has it been? As Bron said it’s pretty exhausting especially for a first time mom since it’s a whole learning process. And if she is breast-feeding I can tell you that too is exhausting and takes extra calories and energy. Best to give her some time if she is into working out than she will get back at it soon! Better to listen to your body. After my son it took me 3-4 months (maybe because I had to stop BFing) to get back into it. Also needed to have adequate rest time to recover from workouts so maybe offer up a schedule for her where she can get extra rest for working out. Offering new clothes doesn’t hurt either I know I can’t wait!! [/quote]
Hi! If you can make it for the full year that’s awesome… I breastfed my first for 7 months(I actually did a photo shoot while I was still feeding, he came to the gym and chilled in his carseat to watch and ate in between shooting!) and my youngest was bf up until 5 months (stopped 2 months ago when he got 8 teeth all at once) I trained normally in the gym while breastfeeding, I trained very hard like I’m used to doing and gradually increased the weights back and got back to my pre-pregnancy weights just a few months after…
You really have to go with how to feel, some days are harder than others and your body will tell you when enough is enough. I’ve really learned to decide whether I physically can’t do something or I’m just being “lazy” that day, even if I was tired I would try to gather enough energy to do SOMETHING… even if it was to go outside with the boys for a jog/walk.
Keeping milk supply up is also tricky, I didn’t want to run into that problem so I took some precautions and never had any issues…
Fibrous & complex carb sources(oats for example) are great for keeping your milk supply up. My main carb sources were oats, ezekiel bread and baby rice. I am also prone to anemia so I ate red meat twice a day and consumed a lot of dark green vegetables. As for vitamins, I continued to take my prenatal vitamins, vitamin D, calcium, B complex and folic acid.
Folic acid has many health benefits besides preventing neural tube defects, and there must be a balance of iron, B12 and folic acid in the body(I won’t get into the complexity of this) I noticed that I was bruising easily while I was breastfeeding and when I started the calcium and folic acid in addition to my other daily vitamins this symptom went away within a week.
Breast milk is produced mainly off of fat, therefore people always assume they need to consume a lot of fat to keep milk supply up(as if the bag of chips they eat is going to help their milk supply and goals… No… It’s just temporarily giving their mind a sense of satisfaction)… But the body has so much adequate fat storage from the pregnancy that in fact you can eat a lot less fat as long as its coming from good sources. My daily fat during breastfeeding came from red meat, salmon, 1/2 avocado and some natural peanut butter on my ezekiel bread.