Taking Off the Baby Weight: Nutrition Guidelines for Women in Confinement

You have to be careful when cutting calories or tweaking your meals in order to lose weight during confinement. Healthy foods are more important than ever to your body while recovering from delivery. This is even truer if you are breastfeeding since your baby will be depending on your nutritious food choices to grow and thrive as well.

It's a little ironic that your baby needs you to eat so they can grow while you are trying not to eat so you can stop growing. A lot of things in life are ironic, but it doesn't get anymore ironic than this for many women battling postpartum baby weight.

The Calorie Game

In order to lose weight you have to cut calories to create a calorie deficit, but this is not healthy while you are breastfeeding. This is what confuses so many women in confinement. The ways that they would typically lose weight or control their weight in the past are suddenly advised against by their confinement nurses and doctors.

Your body will be different after having a baby, so you can't use the same old fad diets and restrictive calorie plans at this point in your life. If you have a nursing baby then you have to think more about their needs than your own desire to fit into your clothing again.

Rather than focusing on weight loss, you should focus on making healthy food choices. This will benefit both you and the new baby.

The Right Choices

The only way to help your baby grown while helping yourself to stop growing is to make better nutritional choices. You have to pick the broccoli over the French fries and the fish over the cheeseburger.

Try to consume your foods in as close to their natural state as possible. This means you would choose whole grain rice and boiled chicken breast over white refined rice with a heavy sauce and beef. You are thinking not only about the calories involved here, but also about the nutrients that these food sources will provide to your body.

You can start the process of getting rid of the baby weight just by making healthy choices and filling your body with nutritious foods. This may not seem like enough and you may feel desperate to get rid of that excess fat, but give it time and be patient. Once you recover fully you can kick up the effort and add exercise to the mix.

Creating Healthy Meals in a Pinch

The problem that many women in confinement face is the lack of time to cook healthy meals. It takes some effort to change from white refined foods to whole grains and to include more fresh fruits and veggies into your daily diet.

If you have a confinement nanny you will have a much easier time making time to cook healthy meals. Your nanny may even be able to help, depending on the contract you have with them. If this is a concern of yours, then you may want to ask about cooking services with your confinement nanny service when working out the terms and pricing for your care.

Another way to eat healthy during confinement is to cook in bulk. Make large portions of healthy food, portion it out into single servings, and then freeze them. You can now pull them out of the freezer and heat them up quickly.