Postpartum Weight Loss Workouts: Week 4

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Sticking to a diet and exercise routine is extremely difficult, especially when temptation is constant and fatigue is heavy. The diet itself is easy, you just eat particular food. The workouts are challenging but they should at least be somewhat fun, and the endorphins should make you feel good. So it’s not the dieting or the workouts that make weight loss hard. It’s doing it long enough to see results that’s the tricky part.

You’ve got to be committed to the program for the long haul to keep going despite weight loss plateaus (or even gains, yuck!), boredom with food, sabotage from friends and family (lame!), and invitations to social events. So what’s the trick? Pure willpower can only get you so far; even the willpower muscle fatigues with enough stress. What you need to succeed at meaningful, long term weight loss is motivation.

I can tell you right now that I have to really tap into my motivation bank this weekend. Yesterday we drove to our summer home with the babies, our first 15 hour road trip with a 1 month old and a 20 month old. It actually went fantastically (thank goodness!) but it wasn’t fun to be sitting in the back seat with my hard boiled eggs and carrots when normally the gas station stops yield rice crispy squares, chips, and candy!

We are having a big all-weekend-long party with tonnes of family for Baby C’s baptism, so of course that means lots of good food and treats will fill my house starting this afternoon. Yet I will be eating my regularly scheduled, portioned diet food–I have only one cheat meal after all, not an entire cheat weekend! I don’t need to eat to socialize, right?

But even I am not impervious to temptation and these next few days will be challenging. But I won’t falter, I will stick with it!

And here are my 6 tips for staying motivated to stick to a diet:

one: do it for yourself. Make the decision that you want to lose weight and you are GOING to lose weight. Not for your boyfriend, not because everyone else in the office is doing it, not because it’s New Year’s resolution time. Do it because you want it so badly that nothing will stop you. Light the fire under your own ass!!

two: set goals. I talked about this in the Month 1 Diet video. Make short term, long term, and even crazy unrealistic but awesome goals…all being extremely specific and having a precise deadline. Nothing general or wishy-washy.

three: get excited. You can either be miserable on a diet and hate every meal and every workout or you can look on the bright side and be excited about all the good health and aesthetic benefits you are making and how crazy fit you are becoming. Treat each meal like an opportunity to create an amazing body (you are what you eat, after all) and each workout as a test of your next personal best.

four: get educated. The more you immerse yourself in the health and fitness world and read and learn about nutrition and exercise the more you will belong in that world. Before you know it people will be asking you for advice! You won’t just blindly be following some fad 3 week program or detox, you’ll be an expert. There are tonnes of inspiring fitness celebs on social media with great motivational content to follow, too. Surround yourself with positivity and expertise

five: compete. I don’t mean you need to run a marathon or do a bikini competition–unless that’s a goal, of course! What I mean is be the one lady in your group of friends/office staff/neighbourhood that starts a diet and actually achieves their goals. Go ahead and make them envious, let it drive you to do better and better and to keep going when everyone around you is giving in to cravings or giving up altogether.

six: reward yourself. When you achieve a goal, no matter how small, reward yourself because you deserve it! But just not with food, that would be silly. I have my eye on a turquoise turban but it’s just saved in my favourites until I make my first goal. You don’t have to spend money, it could be as simple as “when I lose 3 lb and keep it off for one week I will give my feet a soak and paint my nails turquoise. But until then they are staying pink.”

So the next time you feel like quitting your diet, just remember one or two of these tips and keep going, it’ll all be worth it in the end!  Now here are this week’s videos and PDFs of the workouts:

Week 4 Workout 1, Do it on the Counter Turquoise Toffee

Week 4 Workout 2, Yoga-tta be Kidding Me Turquoise Toffee

My progress so far:

24 hours postpartum: down 16 lbs

6 days postpartum (eliminated sugar but not following the diet yet): down 22 lbs

Diet week 1 (no exercise): no weight loss

Diet week 2 (started exercising at the end of this week, had done 3 workouts): lost 1 lb

Week 3: lost 0.5 lbs

Week 4: gained 1 lbs (darn, but no big deal!)

Week 5: lost 1 lbs

Total weight loss so far: 23.5 lbs

First goal: get to my pre-pregnancy weight, need to lose: 3.5 lbs

Oh! In my diet video I said a goal was to fit into a particular dress for the baptism and just feel good in it. Well, I tried it on and it looked good…real good…too good in fact, a little too sexy for church. So I would say that was a goal reached, woohoo! But the dress I ordered to replace it with was too small and that was really upsetting. Sigh. In the end I found something nice to wear, looked great and felt beautiful, not bad for 5 weeks postpartum! Plus, now I have a new target outfit for my next non-scale goal. So a great start to this diet and workout plan for sure.

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Leggings in Dip Dye Seaweed: Liquido Active

Turquoise Nike Free Run 3.0 sneakers: no longer available but I found similar ones at Nike

BKR 1 Litre glass water bottle in Sunday: BKR

Gaiam Studio Select Dry Grip Yoga Mat: Gaiam