How To Lose Your Baby Weight AND Tone Up! @MutuSystem
Losing your baby-weight & your mummy tummy is really determined by the food you eat (& the food you don’t) first & foremost. But once the pounds start to drop off, things can start to get a bit, well, wobbly. Kinda… saggy. Which is where the exercise bit needs to kick in!
Every mum who wants to lose her baby weight will tell you she has no time to exercise. And she’s absolutely right. At least she is when ‘exercising’ translates as: an hour’s workout or class at the gym, with a trip in the car at each end, a shower, a crowded changing room & possibly a creche booking to deal with.
I was a ‘gym bunny’ once – hours of spare time in the evenings or early mornings in shiny gyms on shiny equipment & attending loud, pumping, motivating, choreographed classes.
Then I had babies. The gym membership card gathered dust while the direct debit just made me feel slightly rubbish as each month of non-attendance went by.
I had to change my attitude to exercise if it was ever going to happen. Exercise that drops baby weight (or that could be toddler- or pre-schooler-weight 
) fast is short, sharp & intensive. It’s interval training, body-weight exercise like squats, push ups, lunges & pull-ups with bouts of skipping, burpees or jumping jacks in between.
It’s really not as intimidating as it sounds – it’s knowing a few moves & putting them together, working hard, for 15 minute sessions whenever & wherever you can manage. Watch this postnatal exercise workout video here! Take what you can get get. But take something. 15 minutes is enough time to have a cup of tea & half a packet of digestives. It”s also enough time to do a seriously intensive, effective workout in your own front room or garden. Either choice will impact your ‘mummy tummy’ quite dramatically…
Lots of women worry they’ll get all bulky if they build muscle. You won’t, honest. The ‘bodybuilder look’ doesn’t arrive overnight after a few push ups. It takes hours of weight training, sustained over time, with very heavy weights & a diet that involves lots of shake-type concoctions & very little fun.
On the flip-side, the muscle you will build by doing the interval & body-weight type workouts listed above, is the toned, lean, kind. The kind of muscle that gives your arms shape, rather than wobble & that holds that tummy in. Big muscle groups need lots of energy (ie calories) to exist – a lot more than fat does. Lean muscle burns calories at rest, fat just, well rests.
Losing baby weight requires less (& better quality) calories consumed, consistently, over time. Build some strength & lean muscle in the process & you’ll get the shape you want too, as well as the number on the scales!
By Wendy Powell The Mutu System
