Breastfeeding 3 Babies

It’s the strangest thing. As a Keto coach I feel both not thin enough and not fat enough. I have some imaginary version of what a Keto Coach should be. In my mind, they would be someone who had serious weight struggles or health struggles, and then found Keto, lost the weight, got off the medication, and lived happily ever after. The End.

If my life doesn’t match up to that story (and it doesn’t), I worry that no one would want to listen to what I have to say.

Sometimes I think, “no one wants to hear about the person who was always thin until after her 3rd child when she couldn’t lose the baby weight. About the only interesting thing about that story is that I was breastfeeding 3 babies at the time.”

But you know what? It is an interesting story. It’s worth telling. And it’s mine. So here goes:

Recap

Prevoiusly on Kind Courage Keto: In my post “Losing my Father-in-Law” I told about how I was having some trouble in my pregnancy with my 3rd child, right around the time my father-in-law died from a heart attack at the age of 59. During that year after his father died, my husband started searching for a way to live longer than his father had. But what was Emma doing during that year?

January 2016

The baby was born healthy and close to his due date. He also was born with the ability to hold his head up. (Yes this is baby W from the “ADHD Wall” post.) I was recovering well. In fact, I had lost 25 pounds (11kg) and only had another 5 pounds (2.26 kg) to go. At the time, I joked about already accomplishing my New Year’s resolution. I was just being silly. Losing weight wasn’t really an area that I thought I needed to improve upon.

You see, I thought I would lose the rest of the weight with breastfeeding. It had worked with my other two kids. And … well I wasn’t just nursing one kid … I wasn’t just nursing two kids … I was nursing all three kids!

I had decided to do tandem feeding (a younger one and an older one) when my first two so happened to end up 18 months apart. I was pregnant, my oldest was 9 months old, and I didn’t want to stop nursing him. So, I looked it up on the La Leche League website, found I fit the requirements for safely doing it, got the suport I needed, and went for it.

(note: I stopped breastfeeding when I started to have early contractions. And started again after baby W was born.)

I had every reason to think that the excess weight would be no problem. The problem I was worried about, was that I was struggling to prepare regular meals. I decided that forgetting to feed myself was a bad idea. Routines are hard for me. I was determined that this was the year that I would finally be able to stick to a routine.

I also wanted to get better at cooking. I found a blog that had a lot of budget recipes. I was stepping into Utah Valley Mom-ness and I started making casseroles, and one pot dinners, and pizza crust from scratch. I also thought I could help my kids get in their daily fruit with green smoothies made from pineapple (no added sugar), spinach, and blueberries (to better hide the spinach flavor). I was eating “healthy” things in “moderation”. But I was not losing weight. I wasn’t maintaining. I was gaining.

July 2016: Pokemon Go

So, Pokémon Go launched in July 2016. I loved the show as a kid. If you’re unfamiliar with the phone game: It uses GPS to give you an augmented reality experience. There are features like you have to walk a certain number of kilometers to “hatch eggs”, certain land marks were made into “Poké Stops” which you could “spin” every 5 minutes to get supplies you needed to “catch ’em all”. And I thought, “hey, I’ll get out and walk more, take my kids to the park, good for me, good for my kids. Let’s do this!

After walking 1.3 miles (2km) to the park with a baby carrier strapped to me pusshing a tandem stroller (3 kids remember), I would unload my oldest at the play structure, and keep walking the path around the play structure, at a brisk pace, keeping an eye on my oldest. Then, we would walk the 1.3 miles (2km) home. I did this weekly if not mutiple times a week. I also would walk 4 laps of the loop around my neighborhood (kids in tow) a few times a week. All of this on top of the bending, lifting, and carrying 3 kids who were all in the 90th percentile of weight for their respective ages.

September 2016

How did I fair after 3 months of this exercize routine? I gained 15 pounds (7kg). So, that meant I was only 10 pounds (4.5kg) away from I-have-a-whole-‘nother-human-inside-of-me-and-I’m-ready-to-pop highest weight. I started to feel like maybe, this is just what happens to women when they have their third child. I believed that what I had been told, my metabolism was now and forever slow.

So, I tried to be responsible. I started to try calorie reduction, and limiting portion size, and looking up how much I should be eating on MyPlate (which is tricky because the calculator only accounts for breastfeeding one child). I was doing a better and better job of following the diatary guidelines, and getting worse and worse results.

October 2016

My husband started this strange thing, where he was taking out the carbs in his food and replacing them with fat. He asked me to join him. I said, “No thank you, I’m doing exercize and calorie restriction.” He didn’t argue. He just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Okay, if that’s what you want to do.” And he just kept going.

He was losing weight. This change was working better than any of the other things he had tried. Best of all, he wasn’t hungry. He simply could not overeat. I couldn’t seem to stop myself from eating. But I wasn’t ready to give up all I had known and been taught about nutrition. But then, something happened that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I was having what I thought were “cravings” when I went grocery shopping one day. When I got back home to put the food away, I was blacking out. I laid on the couch for a few hours, while my husband put away the groceries, fed me, and held the crying baby who I could not feed. I felt miserable. I was done with calorie restriction! I was ready for Keto.

To be continued …

Did Emma lose the baby weight? Did she struggle with Keto? How did her husband’s weight loss go? Find out next time on Kind Courage Keto.