LaEspera.com

By Priscilla Yao

First of all we must dispel the old wives’ tale that when one is expecting a child one must `eat for two’. Your baby will get ample nourishment if you eat normal portions of a well-balanced diet. This should include plenty of protein foods, vitamin foods and milk to drink. Your doctor or your clinic should keep a careful record of your weight while you are expecting a baby, and warn you if you are gaining excessive weight. Pregnancy cravings are a well-known phenomenon and generally fulfill a perfectly natural need, but beware if your craving is for cream doughnuts.

The average mother puts on between 11/2 and 2 stone during the nine months she is carrying her child. When the baby is born she immediately loses about 1 stone (the weight of the child, plus fluids and so forth). During the next three or four weeks she will lose several pounds more, but she may find that she is stuck with about half a stone of post-baby weight. But actually it is no more difficult to lose this `baby-weight’ than any other kind of excess weight. Sorry, you can’t use your little darling as an excuse!

Some mothers conquer the weight problem quite well, but find that they have a soft flabby bulge just below the waistline. This can be helped considerably by exercise, but you must have patience. If you have your baby in hospital you may find that the Physiotherapy Department of that hospital sends round `cruel’ young ladies to make the new mothers do post-natal exercises. We say `cruel’ only because they goad the new mothers into exercising their muscles when really all the mothers want to do is sleep or gloat over their babies! These exercise sessions are really valuable, though, and should be taken advantage of: one woman doctor we know insisted that she should be put in a ward when she had her second baby (instead of a privileged private room), just so that she could more readily join in the post-natal exercises.

The simplest home exercise you can do to tighten up the tummy muscles. Add to this the discipline of pulling your tummy in really tight at odd moments during the day, while you wait for the kettle to boil for example. You can lose that bulge.

You should not attempt to diet until at least six weeks after your baby is born. Check with your doctor (especially if you are breast feeding) before you start to diet; this is a time for individual advice and not for generalizations.

Having a tiny child around often means that there are twice as many mealtimes as before. Take care that this doesn’t lead to too many snack meals for mother as well; it is a temptation to eat up the left-over sandwich and half-eaten chocolate biscuit, but as the kids grow, unless you are strong-willed, so will your waistline!

Priscilla Yao is a cooking lover, who enjoys teaching in the food industry for almost 15 years. Currently she has been involved teaching in Healthy food, the Miracle Diet for Fast Weight Loss, The Completed Low Cholesterol Cook Book, A Simmer Way of Life, The Lazy Lady’s Easy Diets, Fit For Life, Healthy Kids Diets and etc.

You can visit our websites: http://www.all-freehealthyrecipes.com
http://www.agape-cookingthechineseway.com