10 Pound Challenge from Newlyweds on a Budget (a bit late)

As I have said before, I need to lose baby weight.  A lot of baby weight.  I've lost a lot of weight before, and the way to do it is one pound at a time.  So, even though I knew I needed to lose way more than 10 pounds, I signed up for the 10 Pound Challenge from Newlyweds on a Budget.  Erika, sweet pea that she is, has generously offered a $75 dollar cash prize to be randomly given to someone who has successfully lost 10 pounds by April 6th.

I figured that my starting weight would be 200 lbs +/- 5 lbs, and I was right; I weighed 205 lbs on January 16th. (Why is it that you never seem to hit the low end of your weight estimates unexpectedly?)  The silver lining is, with this much excess weight, and starting from a fitness level of practically zero, 10 pounds should be a snap.

My plan for weight loss:

1) Continue to work out 6x a week.  I've got a friend who also wants to walk, and she is in much better shape than I am, so she is going to kick my booty in gear.  We are set to walk five mornings a week.

2) Make it to the gym 4x a week.  This will be tough, what with the babies and all, but I think I can do it.  I'm only able to swim 15 mins right now, but I plan to add 1 min a week, so by April 6th I 'll be swimming 26 min, which is getting toward respectable.

3) Get back into Judo.  Not this month, but as soon as I have the rest of my workout routine down and am in decent enough shape that I feel confident I won't hurt myself.  I'm thinking the beginning of February.

4) Eat only nutrient-dense foods.  I ought to be doing that anyway; someone with hypothyroidism should not eat chocolate at times when she is tired, as it just exacerbates the problem with a massive sugar crash.  I'm not planning to count calories or restrict my eating in any way, as I don't want to affect my milk production.  An exception is homemade deserts; if someone offers me one, I will have a little piece, but I will not make any for the duration of the challenge.

I think this should easily put me past the 10 pound mark, but I plan to re-evaluate in week 4.  If I haven't lost at least three pounds by then, I'll re-evaluate my plans.

Whatever Works is Good - an update on breastfeeding schedules

Sticking to a strict schedule wasn't much better than letting them set the feeding schedule.  So now we're on a modified schedule, where we try go at least 3 hours, but don't wake the babies up at night to eat.  So it doesn't always work out to 8 times a day, but I figure that, if they are hungry, they will cry.  If they are hungry and cuing for 15 mins, we feed them in between feedings, but that has only happened a few times over the last five days, and usually they fall back asleep after an ounce or two, or 10 minutes or so.  (They are 100% breast milk, but I do express milk so that I can take breaks sometimes.)

Since yesterday, however, the babies have slept more than ever before in their life ... in their car seats.  I don't know why, but our house has looked like this most of the time for the last 24 hours:

I'll take it.  Back to sleep for me!

Scheduling Breastfeeding

I've been doing baby-led nursing for the last month, but I've had to give it up.  I think it's a great idea, and it would totally work if I had only one, but two babies seem to want to nurse at two different times 75% of the time.  Add hour long nursing sessions to that, and pretty soon all I am doing is nursing and sleeping (and not much of that).  I don't even have time to shower or eat anything that requires two hands.  So I've decided to put them on a schedule, in the hopes of salvaging a few hours of non-baby time a day.

I talked to my pediatrician, and she said that the babies need to eat every three hours at this stage.  Twinspiration, which I got from my mother-in-law, suggests 15 minutes of feeding every three hours.  I'm not convinced that my babies can get enough nutrition in that time, though, so I'm doing a modified version of the scheduling plan I found in Secrets of the Baby Whisperer.  Basically it's up to 45 minutes every three hours; I anticipate that I can get about 10 hours of sleep in 1.5-2 hour chunks and about 4 hours of non-baby time if I can get them to sleep on the schedule.

Secrets of the Baby Whisperer is a bit old (2005), but scheduling is really out of fashion right now.  Google scheduling breastfeeding and you will get pages of results on how putting your babies on a schedule will ruin their lives forever.  Of course, ten years ago, failing to put your baby on a schedule would have done the same thing.  I had a good laugh with my monther and my cousin over thanksgiving on a similar topic.  When I was a baby, you put babies on their back for SIDS and that's the recommendation now.  However, in the eighties, when his children were babies, you slept them on their stomachs.  At the end of the day, I'm going to do what works for me and figure that babies just aren't that fragile.  I think everyone would agree that scheduled breastfeeding is better than baby-led formula feeding, and I refuse to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

However, I don't think that Monkey and Football will just fall right into the scheduling thing - I imagine that I'll be soothing hungry and confused babies for the next few days as we all try to figure this out.  Wish me luck!

Lactation Update - Football Nurses!

Apparently Football was just waiting for me to gripe about her on the internet before she nursed, because she decided that nursing was OK again the day after my last post.  And it really was just like flipping a switch - one feeding she was totally uninterested in the breast, and the next feeding she was rooting on my husband's chest while he gave her the bottle, so we tried her on the breast and she nursed like she had never stopped.

So it looks like I can get the Medela Pump In Style Advanced Breast Pump Backpack, which is very nice, since it turns out that my FSA does not cover breastfeeding equipment after all.  I keep procrastinating, though, in part because I worry that she will backslide again, and in part because the baby fund is getting pretty low (more on that in another post) and I hate to deplete it.  The second reason is completely irrational, as I need a breast pump, and it's not as though one is going to fall out of the sky and land on me for free if I procrastinate long enough.

I'm not sure what's "stylish" about this, actually.

I've also managed to get both babies nursing both breasts by using AVENT Nipple Shields on the less favored breast.  They aren't wild about it, and it's messy as all get out, but we're slowly getting the hang of this nursing thing over here.

Now if I could just get my breasts under control.  They have a tendency to ache all the time, and I leak like there is no tomorrow.  When I get up in the morning, I leak so much that my breast milk literally splashes on my feet.  Hopefully my hormones will get this stuff regulated out soon.

My mom thinks the problem may be over-pumping and over-feeding; I generally pump 10-12 oz a 15 min session, 3-5 times a day, in addition to nursing when I am awake.  However, it's not as though this gives me a stash - Monkey and Football eat it ALL.  They will sometimes eat as much as 8 oz each in one bottle session, and they usually nurse for at least 30 mins each.  I am lucky if I have 20 oz in the fridge at any one time.  We've never had breast milk last even 24 hours in the fridge at this point.

The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding says that you should let your babies nurse whenever they like, for as long as they like.  My mother says that I should think about putting them on a schedule so that (a) they won't make me totally crazy and (b) they won't overeat.  They're my first babies so I haven't any real clue.  Anyone have any experience with this?