Losing the Baby Weight… March 15, 2011

 

Harper is two months old today! It has been two months since I gave birth, and two months since I was last pregnant. After Harper was born, I only had 7 pounds to lose to get back to my pre-prego weight. Now, two months later, I have ten pounds to lose. You can imagine how bummed I was when I realized I was gaining weight, not losing it! After thinking about it though, I was not very surprised.

 

I had gestational diabetes during my pregnancy and was very careful about what I ate. I stopped eating all carbohydrates and dessert and ate a ton of vegetables and protein. Because of this, I did not gain much weight during my pregnancy. After Harper was born, I did not have to watch what I ate anymore, so I started eating carbohydrates and dessert again and stopped eating so much protein. There was a period of a couple weeks where I think I ate dessert everyday! Normally, I would not worry about it too much because I have always been a very active person, but with a new baby, I have no time to work out and I have decided it is time to get serious about losing my baby weight.

 

So I have set a few goals for myself:

 

1. Start doing Cross-Fit in the morning- I need a workout that is intense and will get me results, but with a new baby in the house, I only have about 20 minutes a day to work out. I have never done cross-fit before but it seems like the perfect workout. The workouts are super short but kick your ass! The two websites I am using for my daily workouts are www.crossfit.com and www.crossfitla.com.

2. Walk Chester or swim 5 days a week- This will hopefully be an easy one for me because I have been walking Chester almost daily for a few weeks now. As for swimming, I absolutely love it, but have not had a chance since Harper was born and I am excited to get back into it.

3. Cut way back on sugar and no sugar after dinner unless it is a special occasion or we are having dinner with friends- If you have not been able to tell by my food journals, dessert is a HUGE weakness of mine! I have noticed the more I have it, the more I crave it… the less I have it, the less I crave it. It is time to wean myself off desserts and sugar again. I, however, have to be realistic and realize if there is dessert in front of me, and other people are indulging, I will have a very hard time saying no. So, during times such as dinner with friends or special occasions, I will allow myself to eat that super sugary dessert, but the rest of the time, I will try to refrain.

4. Drink more water and tea-My goal is to aim for three glasses of each a day

5. Plan out meals in advance- Especially dinner. I have been in a dinner “rut” lately and end up throwing something together for convenience or out of laziness because I did not plan ahead and was just not feeling creative. Planning my meals in advance helps me make sure I eat healthy, snack less, and do not get caught eating that last piece of cheesecake because I did not plan out a healthy alternative to eat instead.

6. If I eat a heavy or calorie dense meal, follow it up with a light meal instead of continuing to eat heavy food- This is an important one for me. I often, after eating too much or eating a very calorie-dense meal, will just keep on eating that way the rest of the day because I have already “ruined” my diet for that day. I need to stop doing this, so I am going to try to be better about following a heavy meal with a salad or something very light for the following meal.

7. Weigh myself, but only once a month- I am trying to lose weight, so I have to weigh myself to check if what I am doing is working, but I do not want my focus to be my weight, but rather how I feel. So, I am only going to weigh myself once a month. That way I can track my progress, but the majority of the time I will not be focusing on that number on the scale!

8. Take more naps! And remember that it is okay to take a break every once in awhile- With a new baby, a good nights sleep is a thing of the past for me and I often am very exhausted during the day. I have never been good at napping, but when I am really exhausted I lose all will-power and end up eating things I should not or eating out of stress instead of hunger. It is amazing how much better I feel when I force myself to sit back and just relax during the day when the baby is sleeping, something I need to do more of.

9. Remember that this is not about losing the weight but feeling good about myself- When I eat healthy and exercise I feel great and my goal is to keep feeling great!

 

Now, there are a lot of goals here for me to remember. And losing weight and following goals is much easier said than done. So to help me remember and keep these goals fresh in my mind, these goals are now posted on my computer desktop. So, now, when I go on my computer everyday, they will be right there in front of me!

 

What are your weight loss goals? And what do you do to make sure you follow them?

 

Meet My Little Angel- Harper Ansley Barlow February 2, 2011

 

Sorry for the lack of posts but I have a good excuse! Harper Ansley Barlow joined us on January 15th at 11:23am! We did not get the homebirth we were so much hoping for but our baby was born healthy and perfect so I could not ask for much more!

 

Here is my story:

 

When I reached 38 weeks pregnant my doctor ordered an ultrasound to check the size of the baby. Since I have gestational diabetes there is a risk of having a very large baby so it is routine to check the size once the baby is full term. Well, you can imagine my surprise when I got a call from my doctor later that evening telling me that my baby is measuring three weeks too small and they are concerned that she is not getting enough nutrition from the placenta. My doctors’ recommendation after speaking to the specialist at the hospital is for me to come into the hospital that evening and get induced!

 

I am mortified by this news. This is exactly the opposite of what I want! I tell the doctor I need to discuss it with my husband and I will call him back. After discussing my options with my husband and my midwife, we all decide more information is needed. Ultrasounds that estimate the size of the baby can be unreliable and up until that moment i was told by my doctors and my midwife that everything looks great. The other reason I decide to wait is that I am not dilated at all which means I am not a candidate for induction so my chances of a very long labor leading to a c-section are much higher. I call my doctor and tell him I am not going to get induced yet but I will go in for biweekly non-stress tests (NSTs) and if they show any signs of fetal distress I will get induced immediately. My doctor is not happy about my decision, of course, but it is my decision to make so there is not much he can say about it.

 

The NSTs show that my baby is active with a very strong heart rate. We also repeat the ultrasound the next week and she is still measuring very small. As my due date approaches with still absolutely no signs of impending labor my doctors are slowly able to wear me down and I begin to worry more and more about the health of my baby. At my doctors appointment on Thursday, January 13th, two days before my due date, three different doctors lecture me on how I must do what is best for my baby. They say that because she is full term she will thrive outside of the womb and the best thing is to get her out as soon as possible. The guilt trip wears me down and I go home crying. After talking to my husband and midwife I realize that if I induce and end up needing a c-section but my baby is born healthy, I can forgive myself. If, however, I wait and something happens to my baby, I will never forgive myself. We all decide that for this reason it is best to induce. So I take the day to wrap my head around my decision, clean the house, do some grocery shopping, and bake a vegan cheesecake, then pack my bag and head to the hospital in the evening to get induced.

 

Since I still am not dilated, they decide to start me on Cervadil, a medicine that is placed inside the cervix for 12 hours to help start dilation. They tell me it can take up to three tries and 36 hours to get the cervix dilated! The Cervadil is placed in my cervix at is working! The midwife comes into my room at noon on Friday to check my dilatation and is surprised to find I am 2 cm dilated. The next step is to start Pitocin but because the Cervadil is working so well we decide to wait and see if things will progress naturally.

 

The midwife comes into my room at 8pm Friday night to check me again. I am still having regular contractions about 5 minutes apart but they are not terribly painful yet. However, when the midwife checks me I am only 21/2 cm dilated. The midwife says it is time to start Pitocin, which I am still hoping to avoid so I ask for three more hours. If nothing happens in the next three hours I tell her I will start Pitocin. So, from 8pm to 11pm I walk around the halls, sit on the birthing ball, and do everything I can think of to help my labor along. When the midwife checks me at 11pm I am only 3cm dilated. Feeling defeated, I reluctantly agree to the Pitocin (Now looking back, I wish I had stuck to my instincts and refused the Pitocin).

 

Most people who get Pitocin are started off at level 2. I warn them I am highly sensitive to drugs and my midwife agrees to start me off at level 1. I am glad for this because right away I am hit with intense contractions coming at a minute and a half to two minutes apart! After only about half an hour they take me off the Pitocin because it is causing my contractions to come too close together, but for the rest of the night my contractions continue to increase in pain. The pain is nothing like I have ever felt in my life, it is so intense it feels like for those thirty seconds that the contraction peaks I am going to die. With the help of my husband and an absolutely wonderful godsend of a nurse I am able to deal with the unmanageable pain for about 6 hours. At 5am the nurse comes in to check my dilation and I am at 5. At this point I have been up for two nights straight and I am completely and utterly exhausted. I try to fight it as long as I can but I just keep thinking about how badly I need to sleep. I finally give in and decide to get an epidural.

 

Within 15 minutes of getting the epidural I am fast asleep. I got about three hours of sleep which felt absolutely amazing. At around 8am, as I am deep in my medicated sleep, three  nurses rush into my room and wake me up. They tell me the heart rate of my baby has dropped and they need to move me. So they move me to my left side but the heart rate does not go up. They try the right side but that does not work either. They decide to break my water and put an internal monitor on the baby to get a more reliable reading. Luckily, her heart rate was fine, for some reason the external monitor was not picking it up correctly.

 

Too wired to sleep anymore after that stressful debacle, but still too drugged and numb to move, I lay in bed for another couple hours waiting and waiting. As of 8am Saturday morning I am 7 1/2cm dilated, so I am expecting it to be at least another 5 hours or so before I am fully dilated and need to start pushing. At around 11am my epidural starts wearing off and I start feeling contractions again. They get really intense so I call the nurse and let her know. She says she can “top off” my epidural but she wants to check my dilation to see how far along I am first. To both of our surprise I am fully dilated and the baby is very low. The nurse tells me I am ready to push and rushes off to get the midwife. 23 dizzying minutes and just 6 pushes later, Harper is born.

 

Looking back at my experience, there are definitely things I would do differently if I could go back and relive the experience. I would definitely have refused the Pitocin because I firmly believe that without the Pitocin I could have gone through the entire labor without the Epidural. Overall, however, I am glad with how everything turned out and so grateful to have such a happy and healthy baby girl!

Gestational Diabetes and the Vegan Diet January 3, 2011

Me at 35 Weeks Pregnant!

 

I have always considered myself a super healthy eater. For one I am vegan so I do not eat any meat, cheese, or dairy. I also try to avoid processed foods as much as possible and I always try to get tons of greens and veggies at every meal. At least, that was how I ate BEFORE I became pregnant. For me, the joys of pregnancy also came with the agony of HORRIBLE morning sickness. For almost three months I was constantly nauseous, throwing up two to three times a day, and absolutely repulsed by the thought of vegetables and fruits. As you can imagine, my diet went from very healthy to eating white bread and top ramen, the only foods I could actually force down. Although if felt like my morning sickness would never end, it did eventually gradually disappear and I was able to introduce more fruits and vegetables into my diet, although to this day salads are still completely repulsing to me (Hopefully my love for salads will come back when I finally have this baby!)

 

Because I have always been such a healthy eater (minus the little hiatus described above!) and I have never suffered from any medical issues, when it came time to do my glucose tolerance test to test for gestational diabetes, it never crossed my mind that I could fail it. When my 1 hour test came back high I figured it was just because they made me drink that disgusting sugar drink and my body was not used to drinking something so sugary and artificial, but then my 3 hour test also came back high.

 

Standard Values that you want to see when taking this test are as follows:

 

Fasting Glucose: <95mg/mL

1 hour post (100g glucose): <180mg/mL

2 hour post (100g glucose): <155mg/mL

3 hour post (100g glucose: <140mg/mL

 

My results were:

 

Fasting Glucose: 76mg/mL

1 hour post (100g glucose): 198mg/mL

2 hour post (100g glucose): 178mg/mL

3 hour post (100g glucose: 120mg/mL

 

As you can see, only two out of my four values were high, but this was enough to cause concern in my doctors. I was put in a special group and ever since 26 weeks into my pregnancy I have had to be on a very special diet, monitor my blood sugar four times a day, see my doctor weekly, and meet with a dietician weekly.

 

I am not sure why I got gestational diabetes, I think it is because of how horribly I ate those three months I was struggling with morning sickness or it could just be genetics. I am not a doctor so I cannot say for sure. Luckily, I have a mild case and have been able to deal with it entirely through changing my diet. Through trial and error I have found what foods I can eat, what foods I need to avoid, and what foods I can eat but only certain times and in moderation.

 

Before I got gestational diabetes my diet consisted of lots of veggies, fruit, whole grains, and legumes. I ate very little tofu, tempeh, seitan, and other vegan “meat alternatives.” One of the major things that my dieticians stressed to me when I got gestational diabetes was the importance of protein in my diet. I need 100g of protein per day while pregnant and although I consider legumes and grains good sources of protein, I found that with gestational diabetes I could no longer eat grains and had to limit the amount of legumes I consumed. So, my diet changed drastically to eating mostly protein (tofu, seitan, tempeh, gardein chicken, vegan protein powder) and vegetables. I had to limit the amount of fruit I ate and had to give up grains and desserts entirely. Here are some of the staples that I consume on a daily basis now to help keep me satisfied, meet my caloric and nutritional needs, and keep my blood sugar down:

 

Fats:

Avocados

Almond Butter

Earth Balance

Mixed nuts

coconut oil

daiya cheese

hummus

 

Vegetables:

 

Lots of green leafy vegetables including spinach, kale, collard greens, beet greens

bell peppers

carrots

mushrooms

Brussels sprouts

cucumber

green beans

beets

broccoli

squash

zucchini

onions

eggplant

 

Vegetables I avoid: Potatoes

 

Protein: 

 

Tofu

Tempeh

Seitan (although it is made of wheat, because of the high protein content it is usually ok)

Field Roast Sausage

Gardein Stuffed Chicken

Gardein Chicken Tenders

Gardein Curry Chicken Salad (From Whole Foods)

Life’s Basics Chocolate Protein Powder

Suwarrior Vanilla Protein Powder

 

Fruits (In moderation, usually only for breakfast):

 

berries

cranberries

banana

oranges

pineapple

apple

 

Carbs:

 

Ezekiel Sprouted grain bread

Ezekiel Sprouted grain English muffin

Sprouted grain tortilla (small)

 

Carbs I avoid: Pretty much everything else including brown rice, quinoa, and pasta make my sugar levels rise to high

 

Dessert: Lintz 90% dark chocolate

 

Here is an example of a few days worth of meals for me:

 

	Day #1	Day #2	Day #3	Day #4
Breakfast	Protein Shake with chocolate protein powder, 1 cup water, 1 handful spinach or kale, 1/2 banana, 1 cup frozen berries	Protein Shake with vanilla protein powder, 1 cup water, 1 handful spinach or kale, ½ banana, ½ cup frozen mango, ½ cup frozen pineapple	Protein Shake with Chocolate protein powder, 1 cup water, 1 handful spinach or kale, ½ banana, ¼ cup pomegranate seeds, 1 cup frozen cranberries	Protein Shake with Chocolate protein powder, ½ can pureed pumpkin, handful spinach or kale, 1 cup almond milk, ½ teaspoon cinnamon and nutmeg, 2 packets stevia
Snack	Miso soup	Sprouted grain Bread with almond butter	Miso soup	Sprouted grain bread with almond butter
Lunch	Sprouted grain English muffin with vegenaise and avocado, carrots and hummus, vanilla protein shake	Sprouted grain tortilla with vegan chicken strips and daiya cheese, carrots and hummus, chocolate protein shake	Minestrone soup, 1 piece sprouted grain bread with vegenaise and avocado, vanilla protein shake	Scrambled tofu and sprouted grain English muffin with earthbalance
Snack	Handful mixed nuts	Veggies with hummus	Handful mixed nuts	Veggies with hummus
Dinner	Vegan chili cooked with canned pumpkin, broccoli, nutritional yeast, tempeh, and daiya cheese	Ratatouille with sausage: sauté mixed veggies (broccoli, carrots, bell pepper, green beans, zucchini, ect.) with nutritional yeast, tomato sauce, and field roast sausage	Salad with spinach, roasted squash, walnuts, dried cranberries and a creamy balsamic dressing, Eggplant parmesan (eggplant baked with tomato sauce and daiya cheese)	Gardein stuffed chicken breast, Roasted Brussels sprouts, roasted squash
Snack	Protein shake and 1 piece sprouted grain bread with almond butter	Apple with almond butter	Protein shake and 1 piece sprouted grain bread with almond butter	Apple with almond butter

 

As you can see, as a diabetic I have to eat a lot of snacks in between my meals so my blood sugar does not drop too low and eat smaller meals during breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so my blood sugar does not get too high. Also, carbs have been replaced by protein and fat and although I eat ALOT more fat now than I used to, I have found that I have not gained a lot of weight. In fact, as of writing this post I am 38 weeks pregnant and have only gained 23 pounds. I find myself eating a lot of the same things but mostly because it tastes good versus lack of options. I do miss carbs and whole grains a lot but the health of my baby is motivation enough for me to keep up my special diet. Snacks are usually the hardest part and I find myself skipping snacks a lot and focusing more on actual meals. You probably also noticed there are no salads in my meal plan; salads are a great option if you have gestational diabetes and are not repulsed by the thought of them!

 

If you have any questions or comments regarding gestational diabetes or my meal plan please feel free to contact me. Although I am happy to dish out my opinion and give advice please remember I am NOT a doctor and what worked for me will not necessarily work for you!

 

P.S. My first meal after the baby is born is going to be vegan pizza!!!

I am, fo' shiz, up the spout. September 9, 2010

Ha ha! The title is a quote from Juno and I think it is hilarious! Just wanted to give you all a quick little overview of what my life has been like lately!

 

Week 4- Pregnancy test came out positive, 5 pregnancy tests later, I finally believed it!

 

Week 6- Morning sickness hit, and hit hard! I was so sick I couldn’t eat. The few things I was able to eat usually came back up. I was nauseous all day and all night and puking at least once a day. This lasted until week 16 when I finally started to feel better.

 

Week 9- My first ultrasound. Seeing my baby for the first time really made this whole pregnancy thing feel real to me. Before this ultrasound I was still in denial about the whole thing. We could even see the heart beating, it was truly amazing.

 

  Week 13- She looks like a baby and not just like a blob! And she’s moving around. It was so freaking cool to see our little baby stretch and move around. She was an active little thing. In the frontal picture she is even waving at us!

 

Week 16- No more morning sickness! Who-hoo! I can eat again. Although I still have a total aversion to salads. Not sure why but it sure makes it hard to be vegan and eat healthy!

 

Week 18- This was the big anatomy ultrasound and the week we found out we were having a girl! Isn’t she beautiful?! And the doctor said she’s absolutely perfect!

 

Week 19- I felt my first flutters! Feeling the baby move is seriously one of the coolest things ever! There is nothing like it! It really makes all the pain and suffering worth it!

 

Week 21- Look at how big my baby belly is getting! Our little girl is growing like mad! And her little kicks get stronger and stronger every day. Eddie even felt her move once!