Weighty matters

May 7, 2012

I NEED YOUR HELP! Would you be so kind as to click on the Top Mommy Blogs button to the right? Every day, please!

“I’d kill myself if I was as fat as Marilyn Monroe.”
Elizabeth Hurley

Now we know why Hugh Grant cheated on her with a street prostitute…he was looking for someone with a little more depth and character.

For me, the weight I gained during the pregnancy and trying to take it off (or not so much) afterward is secondary to trying to get and be healthy so I can stay around for the little guy as long as possible. The problem is I’ve never been consistent about exercise and diet. My weight yo-yos and I have clothes in my closet from size 4 through size 14. I consider myself athletic–I participated in sports in high school and college, I still play tennis sort of averagely, I’m a very strong swimmer (not fast but I can swim long distances), I try to stretch and stay limber, but I don’t do any of these things consistently.

So, ~~shockingly~~, at 51 my body didn’t seem to bounce back immediately from the pregnancy and c-section. I knew that it was major surgery, and everyone told me it would “take awhile,” but I didn’t expect it to take as long as it did. Four weeks after F was born, I tried to play tennis for the first time. The phrase “she runs like Betty White” kept going through my head. It honestly felt like someone had sewn a part of someone else’s body onto my lower abdomen and that it might fall off at any minute. I couldn’t move to the ball at all, so D tried his best to hit it right at me. The upside is that now I know what my tennis game is going to look like when I’m 80.

I have absolutely no idea how much weight I gained during the pregnancy. I also have no idea what I weighed the day before I was pregnant. I don’t weigh myself. I don’t think a number means anything; I go by how I feel and how my clothes fit.

Dr. Cleary told me not to gain too much, but that she wasn’t “very strict” about weight gain. I told her I never wanted to hear a specific number, but that she should let me know if she thought I was gaining too much. She never did, so I guess I did pretty well.

Last summer, I was breastfeeding (well, trying to) and it really did burn calories! And being in Pennsylvania where I had my mother’s help all day long allowed me to go out walking a few times a day. Then we came back to NYC in September, and I went back to work. I’m an emotional eater, so being away from the baby at a job that, well, let’s just say, was almost unbearable just did me in. I was eating every hour, just for comfort. I’m not usually a snacker and I let all my typical dietary rules go right out the window. I usually follow a low-carb diet to combat my pre-diabetes, but since I was stressed and miserable most of the time, I could not eat enough junk carbs. Here I am almost a year later, and I put back on all the weight I managed to lose last summer and then some, I think. Sigh.

But anyway, there’s nothing more boring to me than listening to women talk about their weight. I’ll never post about it again, unless of course, I manage to get back into my size 4 clothes and then you will never hear the end of it!