How to Lose Post-Pregnancy Weight #SANE

April: Hi, everybody, it’s April Perry and Jonathan Bailor, back with another episode of the SANE Show. Are you ready for our mailbag today, Jonathan?

Jonathan: I’m ready for the mailbag, it’s like Santa Claus.

April:I love collection all these questions for you. Being able to bring them to you and give you a chance to help us to see how eating and living SANEly can help our lives in a variety of situations. Thank you for being willing to answers all these questions. We are going to start with one that I know is common for a huge majority of women, which is SANE weight loss after pregnancy. Pretty much every friend that I have has gone through this challenge, and here is the way this specific question is phrased. How realistic is it to lose weight while eating SANEly after having a baby and also while nursing?

I am visualizing this women who is tired, she has a baby, she is nursing at least six to ten times a day, she is trying to eat as healthy as possible, and maybe the weight is not coming off as quickly as she would like.

Jonathan:The number way to slim down after giving birth to the baby is to minimize the amount of unnecessary weight gained while you are carrying the baby. That applies to many different things including the health of the baby. There is a lot—it’s hard for me to talk about this because I am a guy, all I can do is tell the science. The science is tragic, and it’s incredibly clear that the health of the mother during pregnancy matters a lot to the long-term health of the baby.

I don’t know if it’s Jessica Simpson or whatever Instagram celebrity of the week can be like, Look, I gained 100 pounds while I am pregnant. That is very, very not good for the baby. I am not making any judgment, I am just telling you what the science is. Anything that you can do to maintain a healthy level. Of course, we have to gain weight when an individual is pregnant but to minimize the excessive weight gain during the pregnancy—part of the reason it’s so hard to lose weight after the pregnancy is that weight gain during the pregnancy causes hormonal and metabolic changes that are long lasting. Just like if you were to gain 100 pounds tomorrow, independent of pregnancy, it would be very hard, for the rest of your life, to potentially get back to before you gained 100 pounds.

If you combine metabolic damaging weight gain with the demands that pregnancy puts on a females body, if you put those two things together it really stacks the deck against you. Anything that we can do to avoid excessive weight gain during pregnancy, I think is the number one tool we have to help with anything we want to do after the pregnancy.

April:I am glad that you said that. If I heard you say this when I was pregnant with my first child I would have your head right now. The reason why, is because, I felt totally out of control. I didn’t know what was going on. There was a McDonalds down the street that had two Big Macs for $2 and I was their best customer. It was almost ridiculous because I just felt that all these hormone changes, I was sick, I wasn’t feeling good, and I just said that I am going to eat whatever I want. I don’t care. I just need to eat. I am just so frustrated and I went through a lot, and I gained a lot. I didn’t gain so much, my doctors were not concerned, it wasn’t that bad. I didn’t really think about it.

However when I was pregnant with my second, third, and fourth, I realized how hard it was for me to lose the weight afterwards. I realized how discouraged I was feeling during the pregnancy because I was eating food that was awful for me. I just had a different mindset. I wasn’t beating myself up if I didn’t feel good and I couldn’t eat kale. I couldn’t really eat a lot of salads or vegetables because it made me gag when I was pregnant. What I did was change my mindset and said, What can I do to be as healthy as possible today. That was just my question. As healthy as possible. I gained 20 pounds less my second, third, and fourth than I did for my 1st just by changing that mindset.

Just as the female here who has had four children—I’ve actually had six pregnancies because I lost two, I have gone through this a lot. I know how hard it is. I don’t want you to beat yourself up if you aren’t eating as healthy as you would like. What I will say is that just changing that mindset can be super helpful. I do want to hear a little more too, Jonathan, about—let’s say I have 25 pounds that I need to lose after I have given birth. My body has just changed, I am nursing, and I still have a lot of fluids from giving birth. It’s a big deal. As you think about it, it was nine months getting to the point to have the baby. Nine months to take it off? What would you say to Angela when it’s time for her?

Jonathan:The most important thing is, again, those expectations. Like you said, 25 pounds—nobody should feel bad about that. That’s fine and reasonable. I do know from first-hand experience from Angela interacting with her friends that some people, however, perceive pregnancy as a now is the time to do crazy dietary things that I would never do before. I would just encourage any of our listeners, for your health and for the health of your baby, if you are consciously choosing to make crazy dietary decisions while you are pregnant because you think that that’s the time to do it. April, not what you were describing. What you were describing was, I know that this is bad but I am going to do it anyway. It was more that you felt out of control. Correct me if I am wrong but you didn’t gain 100 pounds.

April:I think I gained 55 pounds, something like that.

Jonathan:Correct me if I am wrong but I didn’t think you consciously said, Hey, I am in totally control and I am consciously going to choose to eat garbage because I am pregnant and that’s what celebrities do when their pregnant. Now’s my change to eat garbage for nine months.

April:Not at all.

Jonathan:That’s the one thing that I do feel is that we have to be really—just like we say, I am not going to smoke while I am pregnant. I am going to try and not do shots of Jake Daniels while I am pregnant. It’s very important that we protect ourselves and our children before, during, and after pregnancy. That’s very important to me.

If you have 25 pounds to lose, in general, a healthy rate of weight loss, for long-term weight loss, is always between one and one-half pounds per week; of fat loss.

April:What if you are nursing?

Jonathan:I am going to get there. That’s in general. If you are nursing, by definition, we would probably have to knock that number down. If you were losing a quarter pound of fat per week, which would be the slowest end of the spectrum, and you had 25 pounds of fat to lose then it could take you two years to take that weight off. That’s the slowest. If you were doing everything perfect, and you were naturally slim, and you had slim parents, and you weren’t on any antidepressant medication, and everything else was perfect, then losing three-quarters of a pound of fat per week could be doable. Even in that best case scenario, that’s still half a year.

April:Why is it harder one you have had more children or is it just as you are getting older it’s harder? What is it that makes it a little bit more challenging?

Jonathan:There is three things and they all have to do with hormones. One, as you get older your hormones change making it easier to gain fat and more difficult to burn off fat. Two, every time you get pregnant you gain weight, which is healthy and natural, but every time you weight cycle that also changes your hormones. We have talked about yo-yo dieting in the past. You are weight cycling every time you get pregnant; right? Then obviously when you get pregnant it does also have a—you are literally giving part of yourself to another human being. That wears on your body a little.

For example, a five year old can potentially eat in a way that a 50 year old can’t because the five year old’s body has been less worn down by life, let’s just put it that way. Having babies is an incredibly powerful gift where the mother is literally giving some of her life force to other lives, and all of those things put together makes it more difficult to shed fat as you continue to your pregnancies.

April:We can do a whole show just on pregnancy. Let’s kind of build on that a little. Let’s just talk about extending that out to our children. Anything else you want to say on nursing, pregnancy, and weight loss.

Jonathan:The only thing I want to say is that if someone was to get mad at me they probably already would have turned off the show and deleted everything about me but all I want to do is try to communicate science. Here is what happened 100 years ago. The science wasn’t communicated to us and people smoked while they were pregnant. Asking someone to stop smoking, you know, it’s like, I am pregnant, I am stressed out, and smoking helps to calm me down. How dare you tell me to not smoke while I am pregnant. We just wanted to make sure that we are all informed, right?

There have been peered reviewed studies done on—it’s amazing how they set these up, I am just communicating the information here. They will take a mother and a father, not diabetic. Mother is a healthy weight and healthy metabolic system gives birth. Three years later, five years later, mother has diabetes or pre diabetes and she get pregnant, they then observe the baby long-term predisposition of that baby to diabetes, predisposition of that baby to metabolic syndrome, base line hormone levels in that baby, which control that baby’s set point weight for the rest of its life are significantly and negatively impacted by that baby developing in a metabolically damaged uterine environment.

I am not here to pass any judgment on anybody. It is a scientific fact that smoking while you’re pregnant is bad for your baby. It’s a scientific fact that eating process and additive non-food while you are pregnant damages your baby. We are all free individuals and we all have the freedom to choose but I just want you to be fully informed of the science. It’s important because we have been lied to in the past. We have been lied to about smoking. Mother’s in Africa were lied to by Nestle about formula and millions of babies died. Because they didn’t know what they were doing. I just want to make sure that we have the science and I hope that doesn’t make anyone made because I am just trying to get the science out there.

April:I think what happens is that you see your friends, or siblings, or parents who eat an inSANE diet and you don’t see their children having specific troubles, or you don’t link it. I think it’s hard to even see because it’s a long-term process you are talking about. Because there are so many factors that you think could go into it but you just don’t realize that. The thing is I wish I had known about SANE before I starting having children because it just would have completely changed what I was eating and what I was doing.

My first pregnancy I was eating Big Macs. I kid you not, I would go get a bag of gumdrops and eat the whole bag while I was sitting at work. Sugar and sweet, I could keep it down and I would feel like I was okay. I would not have done that if I had known about SANE. I would have found something else to eat or have oranges. I did have oranges but I was eating way too much junk. The only child I have who struggled with her weight is my first child, Aaliyah. I am think, Okay, I didn’t eat perfectly through my other pregnancies, I don’t know, but I am just thinking, Wow, if I could go back and try that again. A do over. Fortunately, Aaliyah as gone SANE so she is doing great. But it makes you think as a mother, and I wasn’t doing any of it intentionally so I am not going to blame myself. I am not going to feel guilty about it because I honestly didn’t know. Could I have helped change her trajectory by having this information prior to that?

Jonathan:April, this is a key distinction when you said—this is 100 percent not on you and it’s not for anyone to blame themselves here. Like you said, we are doing the best we can with the information we have been given. I don’t mean to be a conspiracy theory guy here, but I think sometimes—my mother is a great example. My mother is an incredible loving and trusting person and she sort of sometimes thinks that if something is printed on a box of cereal—I don’t know if people are aware of this but there was a time when food manufacturers were marketing—you can actually see these ads if you do a little research—to poor people in third-world countries saying that it is the healthiest thing you can do for your baby is to buy our infant formula. It’s better for your babies than breast milk. To the point where they were shaming these mothers because they didn’t have clean water, they could sanitize things—government organizations had to intervene because babies were dying from malnutrition and these corporations were just like, We are going to keep doing what we are doing. Some of the stuff is horrific and you just need to be informed and then be able to make decisions accordingly.

It’s not your fault in the past. In the 1980s, the 1990s they are like, Oh, sugar, it’s low in fat. Fat is what will kill you so you should actually increase your sugar intake while you are pregnant, right? Because you can’t eat fat. You are doing the best that you can but it is important that we know get the modern science out there.

April:This is exciting. I feel a little better with knowing that there are pregnant women, right now, who are listening who are going to be able to make these informed decisions. You want the best for your baby and you want the best for yourself. If eating health, whole foods can help do that for both of you. Why not? Thank you. Let talk about the kids.

I love the theme of this where we are putting this into the context of nursing mothers, and pregnant women. Let’s talk about the children, SANE kids. I really love this question that came in that said, From what I understand SANE eating is not about weight loss, it’s about health, and weight loss, if need, is a great side effect of SANE. For kids who are growing and not needing to lose weight they would still follow SANE principles in eating? But then she kind of adds a little tag here. A lot of baby food, either store bought or homemade is grain based and has lots of fruit. Why are kids eating SANEly if they don’t need to lose weight? Also, let’s talk about baby food.

Jonathan:The way this question is phrased is really powerful because it says, from what I understand, SANE eating is not about weight loss it’s about health. I love the way this is phrased because it shows a bias or a mindset in our culture that is something, I think, we need to work to correct, which is health is obesity, and overweight, and diabetes, and cancer, and heart decease are deceases. Excessive weight is not a willpower problem, it’s now categorized rightly by the American Medical Association as a metabolic decease. Eating nutrient-dense foods is as much about preventing cancer, as it is about preventing diabetes, as it is about preventing depression, as it is about preventing Alzheimer’s, as it is about preventing weight loss. If you do have diabetes, or you do have early stage dementia, or you do have weight to loss, increasing your health will mitigate those deceases.

Your body does not want to be overweight any more than it wants to have cancer, any more than it wants to have Alzheimer’s, any more than it wants to be diabetic. SANE eating is about health and health equals weight loss. It is not healthy for your body to store excess fat. That is not healthy. Weight loss, just losing weight without thinking about health is not healthy. We have talked about this in previous shows. You can do all sorts of stuff to lose weight but it’s not healthy. There is no it’s about health it not about weight loss, it’s about weight loss it’s not about health. The only think that you can pursue is health. Once you achieve that your weight will normalize forever. If you pursue weight loss the science is clear. You will lose weight and then you will gain it back and more.

The days of pursuing weight loss have to go by the waste side. The only thing that exist is enabling your body to be as healthy, and beautiful, and brilliant, and resilient as possible. If you are overweight and you do that your weight will correct itself. If you are diabetic and you do that, Type 2 Diabetic, chances are your need for diabetes medication will drop significantly. If you are highly depressed and you go SANE chances are your mood will get way, way, way better. If a child is overall healthy SANE eating is not going to make them become underweight it’s just going to give them even more energy. It’s just going to help themselves to not mutate even more so they become even less pre-deposed to cancer. Does that distinction make sense?

April: Yes. I think that is helpful to remember because when you see children—I have four children who are completed the right weight for their body size. Aaliyah had been the one who had struggled but three others didn’t. Sometimes it is challenging because, let’s say, I am in an environment where another person, either an adult in their life or a friend, wants to give them inSANE foods and if I say, I don’t want you eating that junk and they say that our children don’t need to lose weight. I think it is hard to link if they eat a bowl of Capitan Crunch are they going to get cancer, or are they going to become diabetic. I feel like that becomes a really hard discussion with parents, or a teacher, or a friend. What do you say to that?

Jonathan:I don’t know what the stat is off the top of my head but I believe it is over 80 percent of people who smoke cigarettes don’t get lung cancer. What does that have to do with anything? The vast, vast, vast majority of people who are heavy cigarette smokers will never get lung cancer. That doesn’t mean we should take decrease the risk we associate with them. There is very little in life—like if you jump off a bridge you will fall, always. However, proximate causes, things happening immediately after we do something, are very rare when it comes to our health. Except for injuries. If you smack yourself in the head with a brick it will immediately do something. But there is little else that you can do, which will show immediate damage or immediate results. Yes, you can smoke cigarettes and there is a very good chance that you will not get lung cancer. In fact, there is a better chance that you won’t get lung cancer than you will get lung cancer. Now, smoking cigarettes radically increases the likelihood that you will get lung cancer but—I don’t know how to explain it other than weight loss, if needed, is a great side effect of SANE. SANE is not a diet. SANE is just sane. If you eat foods that provide you with the most and that is essential for your body to thrive then that’s a good idea.

That’s all I am saying. Eating healthy food is a good idea. We don’t have to do that. We don’t have to drink clean water. We don’t have to breathe in fresh air. You can do whatever you want it’s just a question of probability over the course of your life and are you living the best life you could be. Someday, looking back and having no regrets, thinking like, Oh, had I just done something different maybe my life could have turned out differently.

April:What you just talked about inspires me to have more conversation with my younger children to help them understand what you just explained. When they can see the correlation, they can see what is happening. If I could go into detail, if you do get diabetes here is what you are looking at. Right now, my dad had Type 2 Diabetes and I am taking him on a special walk next week. We are going with Ethan and Alitia. My dad has this goal to walk the whole coast of California and his gone to the very, very south border of California almost to San Francisco over the last 30 years. It’s amazing.

He is in his 80 now so I am taking him and helping him make this walk. I had to learn how to test his blood sugar. How to give him insulin shots. I am a little nerves, to be honest, about going on this trip because I have to make sure I have all of the food that I need for him to be able to make sure that he does not pass out or have some problem. I want my children to see and know this is what it’s like. This is what’s happening. Here’s how your grandpa’s eyesight is being affected. Here’s how his health is being affected and I don’t want you to have that. I love that we know how to help our children prevent it.

Jonathan:It’s just a probability game, like you said, April. I think that the other thing that is important to keep in mind is sometimes we have a mindset in our culture, in large parts the pharmaceutical industry, that if a problem does arise that it’s okay because there is a pill for that and it will be all right. So there is all this sexiness around cures rather than prevention. We talk about its probability. Smoking is a great example. More people who smoke cigarettes will not get lung cancer than who will get lung cancer. Of cigarette smokers, there will be more that do not get lung cancer than who do get lung cancer. However, those who get lung cancer, they have lung cancer. You can’t put the lung cancer genie back in the bottle once it comes out. I think that’s what we really need to watch out for. It doesn’t take multiple accidents with a drunk driver for your life to be negatively impacted. It takes one. Life is very, very fragile, so it is a probability game. We need to do everything that we can to avoid those things, which if they do happen there is kind of no coming back from that. When we can do by eating an abundance of delicious food. Like, let’s just do that.

April:Okay. Last question on this. I think this is making so much sense and I love it. Quick question that someone asked about the baby food. So we start our babies, usually with oatmeal and rice cereal, pears, apples, peaches. Is that okay? Is there something else we should be doing? What will you be doing?

Jonathan:I’m definitely going to rock the Vitamix hard when we have a baby. I think the most important thing to keep in mind—babies and also much older adults, like hardcore protein, is something that is more difficult to digest. The one thing to keep in mind is the overarching rule is if you ever feel like you have to feed your baby something to be healthy and that food wasn’t consumed by people for 98 percent of humanities existence, then by definition, that cannot be required for your baby to be healthy.

For example, fruits would be—I would never feed my child grains, ever, personally. I would focus on starchy tubers if I needed to, for example, sweet potatoes, yams, turnips, things like that. Making my own baby food like peas, carrots, fruits are great. Yeah, you do easily digest the sugar, and let’s not down play fats. The vast majority of calories provided to a baby from mother milk is coming from healthy fat. If you actually look at the macronutrient breakdown in mother’s milk it is the typical percent of calories from fat that we often times recommend in the SANE lifestyle. Fat is the natural source of energy for the body. What I mean by natural source of energy is when your body needs to store energy so that it can burn it easily later. Well, how does it store it, it stores it has fat. I think that is the biggest thing that we have been told, that fat is bad for us. If we think fat is analogous to toxic cigarette smoke, which is the way saturated fat had been portrayed for 20 years. They were like, Well, what else are we going to feed our baby. But fat isn’t bad for us so that unlocks a whole other set of foods that we can potentially introduce. Like nut butter or things along those lines.

April:I can already picture a whole section of the SANE store that’s all baby food. Prepared by Jonathan Bailor. I think it’s awesome. Okay. So we have had a really good discussion talking about pregnancy weight, talking about nursing, talking about what we’re feeding our kids and why we are helping them to be SANE, and how we are helping them to make sure that our babies become SANE as well. I think this is a really pivotal and essential episode because this, honestly, is what the next generation is going to be fed and raised on. I feel such a desire to help empower mothers and fathers with this information because moms and dads working together to make sure that the next generation is healthy, that’s how we stop this diabetes epidemic in life. That’s how we stop all of these challenges coming because of obesity. I feel like the next action for me is to assess my current situation, not that I am pregnant but I do have two daughters who, at some point, most likely will be pregnant and will be having children. This is a time for me to assess the situation and decide what information my children need to know. What can I do to make their lives healthier because this is an investment in them that is going to carry on, not only for their future, but for their children and the rest of my posterity?

Jonathan:The next action for me, April, I think the conversation about children, I think the conversation about pregnancy, for me at least, personifies why I am so anti calorie focus because when we think about cigarette smoking, or alcohol, or prescription medication while pregnant or as they relate to children. There is all these flashing red signs and we take certain steps. Maybe the reason we don’t treat food the same way is because we don’t think about it like food, we think about it like calories. If we knew that there are chemicals and other substances in things that food manufactures call food, which have much impact on our heath and the health of our not yet born children, and already born children, as prescription medications, cigarettes, and alcohol, and how we perceive those and then what we do as a result would probably change.

My next action is, please, as much as you can try to break free from that food equals calories and more food equals information. Everything that you put into your body has deep, long-lasting impact on your body. Whether it is prescription medications, whether it’s tabacco, whether it’s cigarettes, or whether it is something that is sold at the grocery store. It’s all going into your body and your body is sacred and please treat it that way.

April:Love it. Thank you for joining us today at the SANE Show. We hope that if you have children in your life, or friends who are having children, or if you have decided to help strengthen the next generation, please share this episode. Please help get this information out there. Thank you for being with us and remember to stay SANE.