So before I get into fitness while pregnant let me speak on my past of being a fitness guru for my entire life…Because I think this plays a big part in me staying fit during pregnancy. One of my first jobs was working at a health club. I’ve always surround myself to be conscious of be health, I’ve stayed active my entire life, whether I was in dance class, to teaching aerobics, to winning my first fitness competition at 18. Yes being a normal woman my body fluctuates like everybody else. My problem areas have always been my butt and my thighs and I never gained weight in my tummy area (Thank God!) The trick to making my butt bigger when I wanted was to eat lots of protein and to do heavy weight training also I never skipped on my mac n cheese and mash potatoes LOL. Now as I explained in my Cocos Workout World app where I break down my normal workout routine (Before being pregnant). I would always set aside at least 3 days a week to go to the gym and on these 3 days I would spend a good 30 minutes at body building concentrating on my lower body(I would take classes like pole fitness to tone my upper body). Now when I say body building, I mean I used heavy weights, I would not play around in the gym. I’m 36 now but when I turned 30 I had to turn up the cardio a bit to lose weight faster, so after using the weights I would hit the treadmill for at least 25 minutes…HARD just to get my cardio in and then I would always finish with a 10 minute stretching routine, this has kept me very flexible for all of these years. On my non gym days I would always like to mix up my routine trying different classes everywhere, like kick boxing, orange fitness, aerial yoga and cross training. As far as my diet goes it was all about protein. Protein shakes, chicken, beans and peanut butter are my favorites. When I eat I try not to eat the whole plate and I try to eat a little throughout the day, that’s one of my biggest down falls I’m busy and sometimes I forget to eat during that time and just skip to my dinner meal. I’m also one of those people that if I eat too early in the morning I get nauseous, I’m not too much of a sweet eater but that had changed when I got pregnant I would always eat something sweet before bed. When I first heard that I was pregnant I put a halt on my gym time in a big way it’s not like that I didn’t care I just didn’t want to jinx my pregnancy by worrying about my body so I stopped everything. Just to keep healthy I did yoga and pilates, (yes these exercise are both very good during your pregnancy). The rule of thumb for anybody if you worked out before pregnancy, you can work out during your pregnancy but if you didn’t normally get your fitness on then you shouldn’t try to attempt to while you’re pregnant. Up until 4 months of pregnancy, which is around 16 weeks, my doctor told me that the baby is sitting very low almost touching my cervix and to refrain from sex or any gym activity until the placenta grows away from the baby. My doctor said my baby was so low that I could squat and it would promote labor, so I got worried after hearing that I really didn’t want to squat out the baby LOL. It was a couple of months later when the placenta moved away after that I got the go ahead to return to the gym but I didn’t return, I wanted to make a healthy baby, my body was the last thing that I cared about so instead of depending on being physical I depended on eating healthy. I always ate pretty healthy before but I took it to another level while being pregnant. Now for starters I craved fruit, especially water melon, I joked that I became a fruitarian during this time even though I ate other foods but it’s pretty much all I wanted to eat. I would go to the grocery store and get the pre-made fruit bowls, I would have one in the morning and one at night, in these fruit bowls would be a mixture of fruit from strawberries, pineapples, watermelon, mango, kiwi, grapes and blueberries. Another craving I had was bubbles… LOL yes I said bubbles, I craved fizz from drinks, my favorite drink during this time was the Shirley Temple. Now you probably heard about me talking about only gaining 13lbs during my whole pregnancy, let me explain, the moment I heard that I was pregnant, I stopped drinking alcohol. I am that girl that always has a glass of wine or a cocktail before I end the day but I completely stopped this and right away I lost 10lbs from that. To start off I weighed 147lbs and dropped 10lbs which make it 137lbs and this is before I started gaining baby weight. On delivery day I weighed 150lbs, I’ve always joked during my pregnancy that Chanel was my human liposuction because she literally sucked the fat out of me. I’m actually more in shape after I gave birth because I paid more attention to being healthy just for her. I wanted there to be no problems so I was super alert of what I was putting into my body like taking vitamins. Every day I took prenatals, multivitamins, calcium, fish oil pills and I called the fish oil pills Chanel’s brain food because that’s what helps the baby’s brain develop.
Another subject that I would like to touch on are my abs. Strong tight abs played a huge role in my whole pregnancy, I didn’t really start showing until the last trimester, really the last month is finally when I popped but not what you’d expect, by my 6th month I was concerned about why I wasn’t showing at all and normally people would think why are you complaining about not getting big but the fact of the matter is that I wanted to have a bump, I wanted to feel pregnant not hide it and it bugged me and it wasn’t like I was doing Ab crunches trying to get rid of the baby bump, heck to me I loved the feeling of being pregnant, I couldn’t wait to show off my tummy. I was also concerned on the subject so I checked in with my Dr about it quite a bit and she told me that when athletes have tight abs, because of the muscles it takes longer for your abs to expand therefore the longer for your bump to show. She also said she just recently had a figure skater as a patient who is also consider an athlete, who was a lot smaller than I was and was also worried about the same issue she never got big baby bump but had a normal size baby and had a quick labor, so I’m living proof that all pregnancies are different, all women have different experiences whether you get a big baby bump or not I’m here to say the stronger your core while pregnant the better chance you’ll have at having a small baby bump. Having tight abs played a huge role during my actual labor, (Which I go into my labor experience full detail in an upcoming blog). In my delivery I pushed Chanel out in 3 pushes all because of having strong abs so my advice to pregnant moms is to work on your Ab before you get pregnant, believe me you’ll be thanking me afterwards because when you have a strong core pushing that baby out will be easy as 1, 2, 3.
