Kate Cook - An Unfit Mother - How to get your Health, Shape and Sanity back after Childbirth

This book, then, is about freeing you from the plague of actually dieting for the rest of your life and not just now, but forever. By their very nature, diets mean that you start a diet and then you end a diet, and what do you do when you end the diet? You go back to your old ways and just pile back on the pounds like you always do. I know this because before I was a nutritional therapist, I was trapped into yo-yo dieting and was quite a chunky chipmunk. I looked more like a hamster, actually—a hamster with a fringe. After I learned how to eat I have never, ever dieted ever again. And by the way, I am still a size 10 and not my old size, in case you think I have just stopped caring. Liberation!

So, you just need to know how to eat—and eat this way for life. Full stop. In the food chapter—cunningly called the nutrition bit—I tell you the basics of nutrition so that you know what you are doingon the eating front. Then, in the next chapter—the exercise and putting it all together bit! (see below)—we put all the nutrition info together with Lucy’s exercise stuff so that you have a very practical, ‘What the Hell am I meant to be doing?’ section to work through.

In the nutrition chapter, I have deliberately not gone into long descriptions about how your insulin levels function and how you store glycogen or how cortisol works in relation to your blood sugar—you can get this ad nauseum from other tomes. Nor have I been prescriptive about what you should have to eat every day. Instead, I have made suggestions for you to adapt to what you do like—you have to learn how to be flexible and apply what I am telling you right from the beginning or you will be forever wanting to look over your shoulder to ask me if a certain food is OK or not. You are almost certainly over 21 and vaccinated and I trust you to be able to make up your own mind.

In this part of the Wonder Tome, Lucy has given you a huge amount of choice and flexibility in the exercises but, again, they are not meant to be done to perfection although, of course, if one of the exercises inspires you to do something, then that is fab—our job here is done. The only thing Lucy wants you to do for sure, as much for your sanity as anything else, is to get out there walking on your pram walks—but all that will become clear later. For the keenies who follow all the programme and get fabulous results (including toned butts), that is fine too.

But this chapter is so much more than just a set of exercises. Together, Lucy and I have created a week-by-week breakdown for the first month, explaining how to combine all your new-found knowledge on food, exercise and being kind to yourself. The first week is quite detailed—you should get the hang of it with that—then weeks two, three and four are a little more free-flow. You really will have got the hang of it by then. By month two you will be cruising and to maintain it is easier than you would have thought.

Look out for Lucy’s trainers icon throughout the book when she dispenses sage advice. The owl icon appears when I have something wise to say and helps you differentiate between our voices.

A vital part of getting the you back is to rediscover your self-confidence by being nice to yourself and also realising that people are having the same experiences as you. Some of you will find some parts of being a mum easy and other parts hard, and some of you will find the whole thing hard—it depends on you and your personality and on your little one, too. There are babies that pop out good as gold and others, well, they are a bit more of a challenge. Who knows why that happens? Even one brother can be a little lamb and the other a pickle (polite term). Of course you love them (sometimes not all of the time, but most of the time), but often it is hard not to think of motherhood as an unpaid servant’s role—changing nappies, preparing food (if weaning), being woken up in the night and picking up tiny socks. And then there’s the realisation of responsibility and in this huge new role it is all too easy to lose yourself and who you are. Of course, you are happy to be Mum, but it would be nice to take the badge off and put your feet up at the local day spa and feel, well, human.

So be nice to yourself, don’t give yourself a hard time and do some small things to claw back your confidence and your time—and you .

Retire to the bathroom to read the next chapter. (Tiny knock on the bathroom door, turning to manic hammering with Barbie head.) ‘Mamma? Mamma?

MAAAAMA! MAAAAMA! MA! MA!’

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