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When I first watched this video about why exercise does NOT need to be hard or hurtful to work, I felt like standing up and cheering! As a mom who understands the quest to get your abs back, I nearly destroyed my post-birth body doing too many crunches and crazy workouts. My diastasis was still 3.5 fingers wide two and a half years after having my son! This video shows that all we need for health benefits is about 150 minutes of moderate activity each week. It’s as simple as walking, paying attention to good alignment, playing with our kids, doing a little stretching and strengthening, mopping the floor, and lending a helping hand. Why must we complicate things? Please watch!

Before I became a mother, I thought fitness would be just as easy as it had been for me all my life. “I’ll just put the baby in the stroller and go for a jog!” I wasn’t accounting for a screaming baby half-way down the block, leading to a let-down that would soak through two sports-bras, leading to a quick return back to the house. “I’ll just put the baby in childcare while I teach at the gym.” I wasn’t accounting for baby getting sick, making it impossible to put baby in said child-care. Well, as a fitness expert, I just adapted my workouts to staying home.

Me and my healthy family

But other moms I talked to weren’t so fortunate. They had simply given up on their fitness, saying they would wait until their kids were back in school and they would have more time to work out! They had no desire to watch home fitness videos that left them hurting and bulging more while the instructor – who has never had a child and doesn’t want children – barely broke a sweat. Me, I sweat right along with you. I crack jokes. I involve my kids. I make this about you and your family.

Don’t put yourself on hold until your kids are bigger, or you have more time, or you look good enough to join a gym (backwards), or your husband says you can, or your best friend joins with you. Start taking care of yourself today! Think of the example you are setting. Think of the kind of mother you want your daughter to be. Think of the kind of woman you want your son to marry. Be that woman. Be the healthy, vibrant, energetic, fun-loving girlfriend that your man fell in love with!

Me and my man!

You can set an example of health and get your vibe back with just 30 minutes a day of movement. And it doesn’t have to kill you! I love a good, hard workout like anyone else…okay maybe not everyone likes that sort of thing…but if you’ve just had a baby or you’re just getting back into the swing of exercise 15 years after your last baby, Fit2B Studio is the perfect place to start small. I am working so hard to give moms what they need. You don’t need Jillian Michaels. You need someone you can relate to you, someone who’s been there. Someone who understands the specific needs of a mother’s body, which are VERY different than a pre-baby woman’s body. Email me today at beth@fit2b.us and let me put together a program for you! I promise conversation, connection and steady results – and they will NOT hurt you or make your belly bigger

Right before and right after a new Fit2B Mama gives birth, it seems like everyone tells her to rest and to eat whatever she wants, but is that a healthy fitness standard? I’ve had two kids myself, and I remember the exhaustion and feeling like a perpetual food vacuum. However, I also remember wondering why mothers are told to avoid exercising for six weeks after delivery, but we’re really only given a couple days in the hospital, and then maybe a week with the mother-in-law and the hubby before we’re suddenly expected to carry around an 8 lb baby, do chores, make dinner, run errands, push a stroller in and out of the doctor’s office for several newborn checkups, all on just three hours of sleep!!!!

Me between two Fit2B Mama Friends: One just had a baby. One is nearly ready to deliver.

Women are strong! New moms are strong! Even if you’ve had a c-section or complicated pregnancy/delivery, you can still stake your claim on a healthy Fit2B Mama body right before and right after you have your baby. And here’s how!

1. Don’t let it all hang out -Your abs are tired and stretched beyond capacity, but you can practice pulling your navel back toward your spine and activating your transverse abdominus (TA). Keeping connected to your core before and after delivery is crucial to your ability to recover. If you’re still pregnant, imagine that pulsing your belly inward is hugging the baby. After the baby comes, avoid crunches and full planks and stick with side-lying exercises. If you can’t draw your navel inward without a huge amount of concentration, find a diastasis expert in your area. If you’ve had a c-section or other stitches, rehabilitating your TA can actually help those areas heal faster while flattening your belly too! Visit our Tummy Safe section to learn more!

2. Eat Healthy - Go ahead and eat when you feel hungry; you’re nourishing a life! Just make sure that the food you put in your mouth is organic or as close to the earth as possible. Consume at least five to seven fruits and vegetables each and every day and balance your protein and carbohydrates. Indulge your cravings, but do it in a healthy manner. Eating healthy is NOT as expensive as dealing with an unhealthy pregnancy, labor and delivery or higher doctor bills later when you get heart disease. So do yourself and your baby a favor…

3. Keep Going – Current exercise standards – as I learned them while getting a certification in prenatal fitness – state that pregnant women can keep doing whatever they did for six months prior to pregnancy. If you walked, keep walking. If you ran, keep running as long as you feel comfortable. If you lifted weights, keep pumping that iron. In my article “Are you Fit to Labor?” I encourage women to think about this before they conceive, to ask what they want to be able to do during and after pregnancy, and start doing those activities before they get pregnant.

4. Educate Yourself – Congratulate yourself on reading this article, but don’t stop here! Get a good grasp on nutrition, health and fitness so that you can be the best Fit2B Mama for your kids. Every mom and dad has those tough days with little time to think about feeding and exercising our kids, let alone ourselves! So it’s important to be prepared with healthy snacks in the diaper bag and passionate about planning trips to the park.

Fit2B carrying three kids on my back. Tummy pulled in tight!

Having a baby might be an excuse to take it easy, but it’s not an excuse to slack off entirely and turn into a beached whale. You need to be strong for labor, and you need to be strong enough to wrangle your newborn into a sling, nurse in awkward positions, get your babe in and out of the carseat, carry groceries, mop the floor, tackle your toddler before he runs into the street … How will you avoid hurting your back or widening your diastasis while doing all of those tasks and more if you’ve been a couch potato for weeks on end? Do what you can today, so you can do it tomorrow!

It’s been a productive morning, but at a great price to my sanity. Getting it all done is not usually too important to me, but now that we’re half-way through our first year of homeschooling, and I’m not nearly half-done with the curriculum … well, it’s time to get it done. However, as I continued to work with my daughter and son on their ABC’s, I began hearing words in my head for motherhood. It starts out rather negative, but once I get that out, you can see the shift in my focus.

A- apologetic, so many mistakes to apologize for
B- batty, I’m going batty
C- crazy for trying this
D- desperate for some alone time
E- exceptionally talented kids
F- fried, my brains are fried
G- great, as in eight or late or plate and state
H- humbling
I- irritating, whose kids are these?
J- juggling, how many hats can I wear in one day?
K- Kreative
L- limited, it all revolves around what I can do with these urchins
M- Making the most of each moment
N- Needs naps, too!
O- Ostrich, some moms are ostriches. I am not. Sometimes I wish I could feign ignorance.
P- Perfect love casts out all fear
Q- Quintuplets, I could handle this better if there were five of me!
R- Ridiculous mess!
S- Strange the things I do to get a point across. Must I act like a tiger again today?
T- tumbling, agile, rolling on the floor with my littl’uns
U- Uh-Oh! Uh-Oh! Uh-Oh!
V- Very, very what? Very unwilling to quit.
W- Which way is up? What day is it today? Why is my hairbrush in the toilet?
X- Exactly! I am exactly the mom my kids need. They are exactly the kids I need, too
Y- Yuck, I need a hazmat suit.
Z- Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz … I told you I need a nap!

We were able to put my daughter in a lovely private christian preschool last year. But our finances for this year were tapped out by medical expenses. My husband ended up in the hospital overnight for fainting while driving. My daughter had to have surgery to correct her bilateral ureter reflux, and right after that my toddler son got a double inguinal hernia! So we decided to homeschool … just for a year … how hard could kindergarten be?

REALLY HARD!!! I’d really like to make a long list of complaints I have, but I feel so foolish when so many have tried so hard to help us. We have an awesome charter school as part of the Paisley Program, so we didn’t have to buy curriculum. I think the biggest problem I encounter, though, is time management. And I don’t mean just juggling my day, I mean juggling my year.

The kids got sick. We changed curriculums and had to wait for it. My son had surgery. We had to travel. I launched an online fitness studio to make ends meet, because I can’t really teach outside the home right now. The kids got sick again. The holidays came. The kids got the stomach flu! We have relatives visiting …

How do you moms do this!!!???!!! I am tearing my hair out! When we do manage to get a couple days in row of homeschooling done, it’s a constant fight because we’re trying to establish the routine all over again. Did I mention that the lovely calendar I have on my kitchen wall is never up to date (and I personally hate how it clashes with my decor)??? Help Please!