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

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.

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