An Unfit Mother

How to get your Health, Shape and Sanity back after childbirth.

Kate Cook

with Lucy Wyndham-Read

To

My family—Jem and Emma

Contents

Introduction

The preparation bit

The nutrition bit

The exercise and putting it all together bit

The lifestyle bit

The final bit

Resources

Index

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

If you are flicking through this in the bookshop, trying to focus through bleary, non-seeing eyes and feeling like you drank 20 glasses of wine last night, either you have the hangover from hell or you are a new mother. Welcome to the tribe, Sister.

That jolly teacher at the pre-natal class didn’t really tell you about the afterwards, did she? Preparation, preparation, preparation, is all very well but an ounce of theory is worth a tonne of practice—how did you really know what it was actually going to be like? Having a baby seemed like an unreal dream right from the telling your parents bit through to the excitement of shopping for the baby’s room. And the actual birth. Well, it all seemed so sort of remote and kind of easy in theory. Just push something the size of a melon through tiny little hole. Easy.

After all the attention of the actual event and day, and the visits and all the presents, and after all the flowers have died and all the balloons have gone limp, what are you left with? A little bundle of joy, sure—but no instructions of how to operate and boy, do you now know the meaning of tired. The tired that says, ‘So what if all the washing up hasn’t been done for a week?’, and you can’t be bothered to find some clothes, any clothes, let alone matching socks. Instead, you have resorted to going out of the house in your huge grey, elephant-like unsexy sweat pants. ‘Blimey,’ you say, to no one in particular, ‘I am really losing it big time.’ Actually, you might be saying it to yourself and just moving your lips.

Once the really treacle tired bit has passed—and it will, although it may not seem like it just now—it does get easier (proper promise; the night feeding does stop). Then it is about time to start to at least think about reclaiming not only your old body, but also your mind, sanity and the, well, the you part of you.

It feels like that naughty stork dumped the baby and then made off with your old jeans and dumped a much smaller pair that you seem unable to get into. Frankly, this is beginning to depress you. Not only has the stork stolen your jeans but he took away your old life, too. Now don’t get me wrong, you wouldn’t want to go back entirely to the old you, but it would be nice to have something of that old dynamic, non-mummsy self back—the one without the trail of tot-snot down the front.

So who’s actually writing this book?

Fear not—Lucy Wyndham-Read (on exercise) and I, Kate Cook, are the ones applying for the job of getting you to a really fab place with not only your fitness but your nutrition and the whole of your life and thinking! Well, we like to aim high.

I am a nutritional therapist and life coach with bags of experience. I have seen over 4,500 patients face to face, who I hope I have all helped, at least in some way—and hopefully I am about to help you, too. I believe in seeing nutrition and life in general as something that has to be do-able—and it has to be something that fits in with your lifestyle and the fact that you are human. There is the absolutely perfect way of doing all this and then there is the real way, which you are going to apply to all the information in this wonderful, wonderful book. You are not going to do all of it! So don’t feel bad—just try to do some of it. We are not looking for total perfection. You only have to do a bit better than you are now—that’s all.

Lucy is the exercise expert and is fitness trainer to the Stars, but is really down to earth and specialises in the no-workout workout—stuff you can do at home and on the hoof rather than having to do exercises in a gym.

The preparation bit

If you want, you can start to think about your life, nutrition and fitness as soon as you are being wheeled out of the delivery suite. Indeed, the preparation programme is designed for you to start at any time. I introduce you to some good eating habits and Lucy has written some nice ’n easy exercises to get you going. Don’t be tempted to start too soon or your stomach muscles may not be knitted together properly—that will make more sense later and Lucy will tell you about that, too—so check it out before you launch into a thousand press-ups.

The nutrition bit

Change happens over a period of time and if you try to change everything all at once, you might keep it up for a week, but then you will certainly think, ‘Sod it!’ at some point and all the old habits will come roaring back with a vengeance. Think back to how you were at school and how you are now, and of course you have changed and developed, but you haven’t had to really make an effort to change. It has just happened organically as you have learnt new strategies that make life easier.

Nutrition is depicted nowadays on the TV as some kind of really strict, joyless discipline. Horrible. Nutrition should be something that is nurturing and flexible. The ‘I-am-going-to-confiscate-everything-you-ever-liked’ image is not helped by the new fad for the reality show where being really nice to people and being really realistic doesn’t make good TV—the directors want to give you the impression that nutrition is all or nothing. Whacking people with carrots and humiliating the overweight makes everyone squirm and tune in next week, but does it work for ordinary folk? I get truly intimidated plus I hate people being horrible to each other.

The ultra-militant approach to nutrition gives you the fish and not the fishing rod. While your dominatrix is standing there ready to smack you in the face with the wet kipper you can keep it up (with knees knocking), but once she is gone, you sigh a huge breath of relief and are left wondering what to do next. You are locked into a ‘system’ and feel disempowered.

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.

The exercise and putting it all together bit

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.

The lifestyle bit

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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