Reply to Myth busting - Having children doesn’t make you gain weight

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[quote=Anonymous]I have for some time felt that the main reason women struggle to return to their pre-pregnancy weight is that many women are dieting and over-exercising to maintain a level of thinness that is not particularly healthy for them.

If you diet/exercise down to a size 4, when you are really naturally somewhere between a 6 and 10, and then have a couple kids, yes of course it will be very hard to get back down to a size 4 because now you have less time and more stress in your life. But if you'd just get comfortable with your perfectly healthy size 8, then I don't think it would seem so challenging to return to that healthy weight post-kids.

I also think this is sometimes exacerbated in women who have kids in their late 30s or early 40s (as many women in the DC area do) whose healthy weight might tick up a bit at this age based on the way weight redistributes as you age. Maybe in your 20s and early 30s you were a natural size 6 who dieted down to a size 2. And then you have a kid at 36 and another at 39, and your healthiest weight has become a size 8. But in your head, you're a size 2. It's just that you were never really a size 2.

Also, no matter your size, pregnancy makes some parts of your body softer, wider, and looser. And the older you are when you have kids, the more true this is. Maybe if I'd had my babies in my early 20s, I wouldn't have this little pregnancy pouch on my tummy. But I had them in my late 30s, so I do, and it's never going away without surgery. I have returned to my pre-pregnancy weight (I was back there by 6 weeks postpartum after both pregnancies) but that doesn't change the fact that I have this little belly, or my ribs and hips are both a bit wider. Those are permanent changes that do impact how many of my clothes fit.

But I didn't diet at all and didn't exercise excessively pre-pregnancy, and as a result, returning to my normal eating habits and very manageable exercise habits post-pregnancy was enough to get me back where I was. And this was despite having PPD and a pregnancy injury that required two different stints in PT to address and still bothers me. [/quote]

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