Postpartum weightloss

What do you know about postpartum weightloss? Nine months you live for that one moment. You are bringing a beautiful and hopefully healthy child into the world. The road to it is already a struggle for many women in terms of weight. On average you will gain between 12 and 17 kilos.

You read it right; average! This also means that there are women who gain much more weight and women who barely gain weight during their pregnancy. You would expect the pounds to fly off after delivery. However, has someone ever told you that you can also gain weight after giving birth?

• During my pregnancy I gained about 15 kilos and weighed 84 kilos.
• I had little appetite and my gestational diabetes forced me to make healthy choices.
• After the birth of my son Victor, of course, some weight went off and I dropped back to 73 kilos. And that after a caesarean section and eating a lot of tasty things in the hospital. But then it started…
• …I don’t lose weight after giving birth.

I don’t lose weight after giving birth

The first six weeks after giving birth I could hardly do anything (I had a caesarean section). I was retaining a lot of fluids, could barely walk and move, bad nights, which left me with a huge need for sugar. At that point I slowly gained weight again. After six weeks I was really done with it. At that time I weighed 78 kilos and it was time to exercise again, walk more and stop eating sweets. I had mega muscle pain from exercise and walked 10,000 steps a day and ate healthy….

And then came the most frustrating part; I still gained weight!

In my work as a holistic coach at bbb health boutique Haarlem, I hear myself say this almost every day. Give it time! But gosh it’s frustrating when you’re back in it. Because yes, unfortunately this was the case with my previous delivery. Your hormones are completely out of balance; you are tired, you feel more rushed and frustrated, your period has not started yet or is just starting to get a rhythm again.

In addition, your head acts as a kind of funnel. During the nine months before your delivery, the capacity that your head can process becomes smaller and smaller, and with it your world, to be able to fully focus on the arrival of the baby. The nine months after that, your brain can’t process much at first. Every time you take a small step towards more capacity. First it’s a day with the kids that makes you completely overstimulated, or just drinking a cup of coffee in a cafe. Then an evening with friends where there is a lot of talking, your first working day or working week. You can always handle something more, or not yet!

Give yourself time for postpartum weightloss

I am now two months further. My delivery by cesarean section went smoothly and completely according to plan. Thanks to the method of ‘the happy baby book’, Victor sleeps through from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Hubby has been home for two months and I have even started exercising in the hot cabin. Yet at times I feel very frustrated, overstimulated, over-questioned and unhappy.

It’s nice that my husband supports me in this, says it will be fine and still thinks I’m beautiful. We have a babysitter for the children so that I have some space for myself and each other. In addition, I exercise three times a week at bbb health boutique. During this period I sometimes treat myself to a massage or a sauna visit. I do a braindump to get everything out of my head that keeps me awake or that keeps me busy. In order to give the limited brain capacity that I now have some space. These are all things that help me slowly bring myself back to myself. But give yourself some time!

I regularly remind myself of the law of attraction. If you think about what doesn’t work, then that has the upper hand. So I visualize what I want to look like. And that it will work.