When my daughter was born, it took me about 6 months to get my pre-baby body back. But that wasn't good enough for me, I wanted to be BETTER than my pre-baby body, and so I started dieting and exercising like crazy, and by the time she was 10 months old, I looked fabulous! Not only did I have a great, healthy figure, I also took awesome care of myself, you know, I had the perfect hair and makeup, manicured nails and pedis, fantastic clothes, the works. I always prided myself on my appearance and I felt great about myself.
But...things change. When my daughter was 11, I got pregnant with my second child. He was a surprise baby (a happy surprise) and my body was older and pregnancy was a lot more difficult. I was exhausted all the time and never felt like exercising, eating right, doing my hair, nails, or makeup, and I was too fat to fit into cute clothes and basically, I just quit caring about myself. After he was born, I was so busy juggling work and 2 kids and still feeling exhausted all the time, and I feel gross and sluggish and just not pretty anymore.
But that's all about to change. I have decided I am too young and too pretty to look like a frumpy old lady. I want to make my son proud of me like my daughter was always proud of me. And frankly, I want to make his dad proud of me as well. I know he loves me and he would never say anything about how I've let myself go, but it's not fair to him either...the person I am right now is NOT the person I was when we met and he deserves to have his pretty girl back. I asked him last night to give me motivation...and he agreed: when I lose 50 pounds, we will get engaged! It's not as awful as it sounds, we are planning on getting married eventually anyway, but it's a little bit more important to me than it is to him and so he's saying this to me because he knows it will help motivate me along.
I think he thinks I can't do it. But I have a little secret: the summer after my girl was born, I lost 50 pounds in THREE MONTHS!!! I think that's a little unrealistic to expect such a drastic weight loss this time; I am a lot older now and my body has changed. But I am giving myself a goal of 20 weeks...that's 2.5 pounds per week so I think I can do it.
In the meantime, I am going to make a serious effort to do other things to get myself back to fabulous. Try new hair styles, take better care of my skin and nails, stuff like that. I want to see the old me again. She was much more fabulous than the current me.
