My postpartum period for the first 3 months was a nightmare. A really long, really drawn out, terrible awful bad nightmare. I was diagnosed with postpartum depression and post-traumatic stress disorder after Lily's birth. After two failed rounds of progesterone therapy to treat the depression, I ended up in the hospital with suicidal thoughts. Thankfully, I have the most amazing husband in the world who dropped everything to make sure I was taken care of. I was miraculously able to get an appointment to see a psychiatrist two days after my ER visit and got a prescription for anti-depressants. Talk about a effective! They aren't supposed to work right away, but for me they did. Aside from the crazy (CRAZY!) dreams they give me, they are miracle workers. They have made me a functioning human being again. That and my decision to quit my job, work part-time in the evenings and stay home with Lily during the days.
Being able to stay home with Lily and care for the house is the best job I've ever had. Turns out I love doing laundry and cleaning and cooking. I feel so much pride in knowing that what I do matters. I may not be impacting as many people as I was when I worked at Gallup, but the people I am impacting matter so much more to me. I am so, so happy with 98% of my life.
Now that things are back to normal though, I have to face the reality of the situation: I gained a LOT of weight during the pregnancy and it wasn't just "baby weight". I didn't work out and I didn't eat as well as I should have. I craved sweet foods the entire pregnancy and I gave in every time. Willpower was not my strong suit. My first time going shopping postpartum was awful. I ended up sobbing. I had gone from being so proud of where I was and my clothing size to being bigger than I had ever been before. People tell me it's because of the pregnancy and it's okay to gain baby weight, but I know that's not what the problem is. You could barely tell I was pregnant until about 35 weeks when I popped. I only got a handful of stretch marks and most of the weight I gained was not around my belly. So I'm going back to where I was when I started this blog 3 years ago. I'm going to go back through all of the struggles I went through and hopefully drop the weight I gained and more. If I have another baby in the process, I plan to hold myself to a higher standard and do better for the baby in my eating and exercising habits the next time around.
This is what Matt and I are doing so far:
- Exercising every day at 2 pm.
- We've blocked this off on our calendars and will either take a walk, do a body weight program, or do 30 Day Shred.
- Stopping our dining out habit
- This is our worst habit and it is hard to break, but we are giving it our all.
- Creating a meal plan together
- Matt used to create meals on his own, but it led to going out more because I didn't know what was for dinner and a lot of the time we would just decide that we didn't feel like cooking because he or I weren't crazy about that day's menu.
- Eating fruit for sweet cravings
- This will make a huge difference! Summer offers so many great seasonal fruits and we are taking full advantage of this. We have frozen grapes, tons of strawberries, and various other fruits in the house and it really does fulfill the craving!
The last couple days have been great, so hopefully they just continue to go up from here! I can't wait to get healthier (and stay that way)!
