Part I- Chronicles of a post pregnancy recovery

This was my body before my last pregnancy:
 

This was my body during  pregnancy:

 This is my body now:

(picture will be added soon)

152lb exactly 25 over pre-pregnancy weight and a bit over 27% body fat.

My goal in the next six months is to get my body back, to help it recover not only potentially to the weight I was pre-pregnancy, but more importantly to a similar, if not better, level of fitness and health. The plan is seemingly simple: eat well, exercise, rest. The reality of said plan is more complicated as it will necessitate sacrifice, restraint, discipline and prioritization. Additionally, for a plan to become a reality it requires setting realistic, attainable and quantifiable goals with a specific method for attaining these goals. Everybody knows, and many of us say, "if I eat well, and exercise I will be healthier," but our understanding or approach to this health "things" is too often general and undefined, which ultimately leads to degradation of our goals and a return to our baseline behaviors.

So here is my plan month one (which started September 1 and will end October 1, 2011) transition back to proper eating, which I define as Primal. Over the last six weeks of my pregnancy I allowed my eating to degrade, reintroducing the types of sugars and foods that I know to be bad for me. They make me feel sluggish, laden, tired, weak and generally unhealthy. So over the next month, one meal at a time I am working to eliminate those foods from my diet. That will mean that by the end of the month I will not be eating grains, refined sugars or legumes on a regular basis, and should I consume them, they will be a strict exception to my daily diet. A basic rule for me would be 80% Primal 20% cheats, and cheats have to be with quality foods. Making this transition successfully will require paying attention to and trying to understand my cravings so as not to give into them blindly. Knowing why one craves a food allows them to make more mindful and hopefully better choices. It also allows you to gain better understanding of your emotional state, and your needs, which I guess will be a great side benefit of cleaning my diet. I am lucky to be motivatd by my children's health too. The better I eat, the better they eat, whether it be that the foods I am presenting my two and a half year old with are healthier, or that the milk my breastfeeding infant receives is more balanced and nutritionally appropriate for him. Also here to either help or hinder my progress is the fact that this new baby seems to have the same intolerance to cow dairy as my oldest son had, and therefore requires me be much more conscious the foods I ingest.

I have 25 pounds to go. I have a six month goal to get my body fat down to 20%. I am unsure what my fitness goals are since I am not yet working out and have not been able to establish a baseline from which to make progress. Month one: simply improve health through diet. Month two through six:  work on fitness and rest. Lets see what this first month can yield, both in terms of challenges, but also successes, knowing that this not a short term goal, but rather a first step back to the rest of my life.

Part II- Chronicles of a post pregnancy recovery - PB&J

Cravings are one of the barriers to healthy life styles. I am not talking about the kind of craving that has you deciding to grab dessert at the end of a meal. I am referring to the single-minded obsessive craving for a food, the kind that you cannot let go of, even though you want to. That kind of craving is akin to a drug craving. Those are the kind of craving I try to fight. A friend of mine was questioning this the other day - "Now," she said " now is the time to give in," but I disagree. I disagree not because I don't believe in treating myself, but rather because of the nature of the craving. I endorse treating yourself, but I think that eating should be a choice not something I do because I have to, because I cannot stop thinking about a food. This of course is within the context of living in a society where food is readily available, and food obsession is not driven by hunger or famine.

So for the past several days I have been craving a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I have been craving them to the point of thinking about eating one each time I am hungry, or bored, or walk by the pantry, where some wonderful people, knowing my little obsession have purchased some peanut butter, jam and bread for me as a post-partum gift. I cannot at this point allow myself to give in. Not because the PB&J is so awful, I have eaten worse foods than that in the same period of time, but rather I am refraining form giving in because the craving has become an obsession. Obsessions if given in to lead to more obsessions, and less control (trust me I work with obsessive personalities in my practice - regardless of the obsession, the mechanism is the same). I have made a conscious choice to be in control of my health, and that means to be in control of what I eat, whether it be healthy or unhealthy. Thus, no PB&J until I can stop fixating on it.

Clearly I am not the only person who obsesses about these things since there is artwork depicting them.

Part III- Chronicles of a post-pregnancy recovery – First Workout

Aie, aie, aie this was as hard as I thought it would be. I knew that working out would be quite difficult. After having Luca, getting back in shape was hard, but with no real measure of how much I could push myself, it was not as hard as it could have been. Now returning to the gym, I have a true sense of what "pushing myself" means, I have an accurate notion of what I am capable of. Great! This should mean I am in a good place to set realistic and appropriate goals; and I am. What it also means is that I am capable of pushing myself much harder than I did after having Luca.

Armed with this knowledge and understanding I braced myself for my first workout at Elysium. I thought I was pacing myself by choosing a Sunday WOD. After all, community workouts open to anyone who wishes to come in off the street; no experience is required, which means that the workouts are generally neither too complicated nor too involved.  I was wrong because no matter what you have programmed as your workout, what in part determines the difficulty of the exercise is the amount of effort you put into it. I put a lot of effort into this workout; so much so that I felt light headed and wondered whether I would be able to finish.

I did finish it, and at the end realized how minimal my effort was compared to what it would have been 11 months ago. I was able to have this awareness without guilt, without harsh words to myself. Rather, I understood that it would take awhile to reach my goals, and that I should be grateful that my body could perform as well as it already had, and that it had already done quite well given its recent condition. This was one of those "aha moments" because a few years back I would have beat myself up and doubted my worth and ability ... growth is such a wonderful thing!

WOD: 
Team effort (3 person team)
Team must complete a 3000m row. Every member of the team must contribute to the rowing.
While one member rows, one rests and the other does burpees.
Total score is time spent rowing in seconds minus number of burpees completed.

My team came in last we completed 168 burpees and 3000 m in 13 minutes 40 seconds. We came in last because we were the only 3 person team, but our efforts were substantial, and I was proud of our work.

Part IV- OK, I am done with this!