After my baby is born, what will happen to the weight I gained during pregnancy? скачать в хорошем качестве

After my baby is born, what will happen to the weight I gained during pregnancy?

The amount of weight that a woman should gain while pregnant is dependent on her pre-pregnancy weight. Let’s say that you are at a normal weight before getting pregnant. You can expect to gain 25-35 pounds over the course of the pregnancy and it’s kind of a mental game. You need to accept that that scale’s going to go up. But it’s helpful to know where the added weight comes from. The typical baby weighs about 6-8 pounds, a placenta’s 1-2 pounds, amniotic fluid maybe 2-3 pounds. Breast tissues proliferates in preparation for nursing a baby, adding a couple of pounds. The uterus grows and that adds 1-2 pounds, then your body accumulates a lot of extra fluid. That can be an extra 3-4 pounds. Then of course your body also stores fat during pregnancy. It does this in order to have a supply to make good milk from after the baby’s born. Immediately after having the baby, if you subtract the baby, the placenta, and the amniotic fluid weight, on average you’re going to lose 9-13 pounds instantly. But you should not go home and weigh yourself. That would be a big mistake because you may weigh just as much as you did before going to the hospital. You get a lot of fluid during the course of labor and delivery and your body holds onto that for a short amount of time. A couple of weeks after the baby’s born you start to shed all of that, along with some of the extra fluid you started to retain during the pregnancy. Weigh yourself about three weeks after having your baby. That will kind of give you an idea of where you’re at. There are a few factors that go into how fast your body will actually shed the extra fat, including diet, exercise, and if you’re breastfeeding or not. Breastfeeding means that you’re giving your baby breast milk. It doesn’t matter if you’re pumping and feeding your baby a bottle of express breast milk or nursing. It’s the fact that your body is making milk and your body draws from those fat stores to make good milk. Lots of women notice that they start to shed the pounds as the months go on while they’re breastfeeding because that supply of fat is dwindling in order to feed the baby. But breastfeeding involves hormones, and weight loss also involves hormones, and some women don’t lose much weight until they stop breastfeeding. Your body’s hormone levels and its affinity to hold onto that extra fat while breastfeeding is out of your control, but two things that you can control are diet and exercise. A woman needs more calories while exclusively nursing a baby than she does while pregnant. You need 400-500 extra calories each day while nursing in order to make sure that you have what you need to make good milk and to make sure that there’s some leftover for your body’s functions as well. So it’s important to eat the right amount of calories and to just think about portion control. If you want to know how many calories you should be eating, use an online calculator to see what your basal metabolic rate is. That will tell you how many calories your body needs at rest to maintain all of its functions and just add about 400 calories on top of that. And make sure that you’re eating good, nutritious calories. Everyone knows that a handful of chips and an apple have about the same caloric value, but the nutritional value is entirely different. So fill your diet full of whole grains, lots of fruits and vegetables, low-fat dairy, lean protein, and healthy fats. Once your doctor gives you the green light to exercise, which is usually 6 weeks after having a vaginal delivery or 8 weeks after having a C-section, you can begin to exercise again. And you want to incorporate 30 minutes of moderately intense exercise on most days of the week to your routine and also intermingle strength training, which will help to build muscle. And the great thing about that is that muscle requires more calories to maintain it, so you actually burn more calories at rest when you have more muscle on your body. By doing these things, you should see the weight come off with time, but have realistic expectations about it and also know that you might get down to your pre-pregnancy weight at some time but your body composition is different, and so you don’t feel like your clothes fit the same. You may still have a little more fat and a little less muscle than you had before pregnancy, so by exercising and eating well, you should boost up that muscle, lose some fat, and you may not see the number on the scale change, but that’s okay. It’s not about the number - it’s about health and well-being. If you have more specific questions about healthy goals for you, talk with your doctor and, based on their knowledge of your circumstances, they’ll be able to give you tailored information and advice in order to help you be successful at achieving your weight loss goals. If you have more questions in the future for me, feel free to ask them on our Facebook page at facebook.com/IntermountainMoms and recommend us to your friends and family too.