Goodbye to the Glorious 60… Almost.

Throughout my entire pregnancy I ate like a horse on steroids.  Right from the moment I peed on a stick to the moment my water broke (“do I have time for a McFlurry?”) I happily stuffed my face with anything that was put down in front of me. 

To make matters worse, for the last four months of my pregnancy I was on bed rest and aside from the obvious fact that lying on your ass all day will make you fat, I also managed to convince myself that if the baby was going to come early, I should eat as much as possible to make him nice and fat. 

For four straight months, I luxuriated in bed and ate every bon bon and cinnamon bun I could get my hands on.  Practical Joe would literally wake up in the middle of the night with candy wrappers stuck to his back.

In my anorexic years (age 14 to 16) this was my greatest fantasy, so I wasn’t about to pass up the chance to binge – and have an excuse for it! (“My body must really need the extra protein in all the Double Quarter Pounders I’ve been craving.”)

Well the baby didn’t come early and the only one who got fat was me.  I gained a whopping 60 pounds. I call it the Glorious 60, because by the very definition of the word, gaining it was glorious.

For some odd reason I thought that I’d be like Heidi Klum and drop the baby weight the instant I walked out of the hospital.  I had no reason for believing this.  I’m not by any stretch one of those women who we all hate for eating eight jars of Nutella a day and not gaining an ounce of weight (“I have a hyperactive thyroid,” they often complain).  I gain weight at the sight of food, so my beliefs were more like delusions.

Needless to say, I was disappointed to find that the weight didn’t fall off in the first months after Buddha Baby was born.  I was also disappointed to find that pregnancy weight doesn’t feel at all cuter than any other type of weight.

But yesterday, things started looking up.  I stepped on the scale (five months postpartum now) and I only have about seven pounds to go.  I say this not because I think you’ll be interested in that part, but because I wanted to share with you what worked for me. 

I used to track all the food I ate on random scraps of paper that would end up scattered about the house.  (Friends and family would find them and ask me why I was eating so many tablespoons of peanut butter in a day.  “That can’t be healthy,” they would warn.)  Now I track my strange food choices online and in complete privacy. 

I found an awesome website that’s free and helps you lose weight by telling you your daily caloric needs and adding up everything you’ve eaten in a day.  All you have to do is enter your height, current weight, age, and weekly weight loss goal (in the Calorie Goal section), and then enter each food item you eat in the day (in the section called MyPlate).  It also tracks your calories burned when you enter your daily exercise.  And it has on record things like, feeding your child, bathing your child, and driving your vehicle to work – just another reason why I love this website!

Check it out:

http://www.livestrong.com/myplate/

(Disclaimer: I feel like I should tell you that I am in no way professionally affiliated with this website.)

Let me know what you think!

Namaste,