8 Healthy Ways to Lose Weight After A C-Section Remember: You’re Still Healing by Summer A.H. Christiansen
1. First and Foremost Be Patient
Be patient with your body. Take time to understand what it has gone through and know that your body will forever be ruined. Ruined by the weight you gained eating too many mashed potatoes, McDonald’s soft-serve ice cream cones, and handfuls of chocolate chips. It will be ruined by the stretch marks that run from your pubic region all the way to your breasts. By the thick, red scar that runs across your lower abdomen and the small pooch that hangs over it. Know that no matter how much weight you lose, your eyes will always play an optical illusion with you and you will feel that you are bigger than you are.
However, know that this new body was worth it after a grueling pregnancy and five excruciating days of labor. Know that the medical team slicing open the seven layers of your stomach did an excellent job. Well, except for the student doctor who didn’t get a staple on quite right and will joke about it later during a check-up. Be patient and know that the anger and frustration and memories of pain will fade.
2. Breastfeed – but Don’t Restrict your Calories.
Breastfeeding is a natural way that your body helps you get rid of the baby weight. Before you give birth, listen to all your friends when they tell you that they ate whatever they wanted while they were pregnant and their pregnancy weight just fell off while breastfeeding. Plan on that happening for you and then prepare to be disappointed when it doesn’t. Watch as the scale refuses to move, week after week when you step on it, your postpartum sagging belly hiding the view of your feet when you look down.
Research how to restrict your diet when you need calories to breastfeed. You don’t have the physical energy or time to cook “healthy” meals anymore so you think about going back to Intermittent Fasting, what you did before you got pregnant. You give up on this idea after reading so many posts online explaining that this is an unhealthy thing to do while your body is a vessel used to feed your newborn baby. In these moments, sleep-deprived, overweight, and alone, realize you no longer belong to your body.
3. Don’t Cut Anything Out and Just Eat Smart.
Fail at calorie counting when you are too exhausted to remember to input anything into your phone app in the first place. End up surviving on the foods that are closest to you as you sit, completely stuck, with a babe suckling on your breast, on the soft brown couch that has become your second home.
Enjoy the taste of beer and wine and gin and tonics that you have been deprived of for almost ten months. Delight in the fleeting taste of fresh donuts and take-out food. Live off frozen pizzas and meals that take no effort to make. Keep reminding yourself that this is just a season that will pass and soon you’ll have the time and energy. Get your body back, as if it is something that is lost or on vacation. Remind yourself that you created a full human being in nine months and that the extra fat and skin that hang off you will also take time to disappear. You are a warrior, you tell yourself, as you quickly chug a winter ale during your daughter’s nap time knowing soon you’ll need to breastfeed and don’t want the alcohol in your breast milk.
4. Don’t Forget to Drink Enough Water.
Carry a water bottle wherever you go, but always forget about it and focus on the lukewarm cup of coffee instead that is forever by your side. Limit your caffeine intake, to drink green smoothies and liters of lemon water instead. You nod as you take in this information on the small screen of your phone with your baby propped up on your naked breast and your third cup of coffee this morning in the other hand.
5. Stay Away From Post-Pregnancy Belts and Girdles.
You did not have time to prepare for your c-section. You were hell-bent on having a “natural” vaginal birth, void of any drugs. You had done all the research, twice. Remember, before the miscarriage, you wanted the full doula, birthing center experience. But after, you decided to be as natural as possible while still giving birth at a sterile hospital, devoid of all woo-woo new age granola baloney you previously believed in.
Induced at 41 weeks, your labor lasted five days and ended in the inevitable c-section. Boy, did you go through the drugs! You even received an epidural and a spinal block! You felt no guilt. You wouldn’t have survived without it. Your baby’s small fragile head was stuck inside your pelvis and without modern medicine, you would have both died.
Afterward, all you had were the giant pads and the spray bottles needed to cool down your vagina after pushing a human out of it. Your home, an island off the coast of Alaska, has no same-day shipping, no Targets to walk through. It’s not until months later that you learned these products even existed. The scar that you now carry and the saggy stomach that sits above it could have been, just maybe, a tiny bit smaller.
6. Keep your Core Protected at all Times.
Be careful not to overdo it with your core during any of your intense workouts… of pushing yourself up from the living room couch that sinks down a bit too far. Hold on to your still-healing stapled stomach when you haul yourself out of bed to change a diaper or to sit up and breastfeed. Let out moans of discomfort and pain when you sit down to pee. The nerves near your bladder have been disconnected and stitched back together and you no longer know when you should go to the bathroom.
Be grateful that you had it easier than friends who couldn’t walk by themselves for days. Be grateful that your c-section was not, technically, an emergency, that the doctors could take their time and your baby didn’t suffer. You are among the lucky ones, you think, as you feel the hard ball of scar tissue behind your sore incision.
7. Try your Best to Get Enough Sleep.
Be prepared to accept the fact that you will not get any restful sleep. And that the sleep you do get will be over so quickly, you’ll wonder if it even happened at all. There will be a couple of weeks where you stay up feeding and bouncing your daughter until three in the morning. She will stare at the multi-colored Christmas lights on the fake tree and you will sing quietly to her in the darkness of your small cabin as the dogs snore on the floor next to you. In the morning, when your partner goes off to work, you will feed your baby and fall asleep on the small couch. Her body will be tucked up against your squishy belly and her small head carefully placed on your swollen breasts. You will be grateful for your softness at that moment. How round and gentle and safe you must feel to her.
8. Focus on Stability Exercises.
On weekends, go for slow, tedious walks with your patient partner who holds your hand and smiles down at the sleeping baby. She is strapped against the warm, naked skin of your chest as you make your way through the winter wonderland that is Alaska in December. Spruce trees droop under the weight of the fresh snow and the pink and orange of the alpenglow appear above the mountains that surround your island. Look off into the distance at your dogs running along the rocky edge of the trail. At the huge, cold waves that crash along the shore and feel the fresh wind against your full face. Take a sip of your Americano out of your to-go cup and decide in moments like these that it’s okay to wait a little longer to lose the baby weight.
*Numbered Items of Advice taken from Women’s Health Magazine
Summer A.H. Christiansen is a writer, mother, and lifelong Alaskan residing on the unceded land of T’aaḵu Kwáan and A’akw Kwáan. Her work has been published in Silver Rose Magazine, Tidal Echoes, Alaska Women Speak, and Drizzle Review. She was most recently in the Bell Press anthology, “Rituals.”