You’ve just had a beautiful baby - congratulations!  Hope everyone turned out healthy and sane after the ordeal.  Everyone is looking great — plus a few pounds.  As happy as you are about having your newborn, you don’t  like all the new pounds he or she brought along with her.  Don’t fret!  While weight loss after a baby does have  a few hurdles to overcome, with the following easy tips you’ll be back in shape in no time at all.

Are you breast feeding? While you’re pregnant, your body was storing up additional fat so you could have the ability to feed your baby by means of breastfeeding.  If you eat a decent amount of food and breasfeed your baby, you’ll begin to see your baby fat disappear from your body.  You want to be careful though as to not starve yourself, you need to make sure you’re receiving adaquete nutrients for both you and your baby.

Slowly begin to exercise again - You don’t want to overdue yourself, but you need to get physical again even if you may not feel like it.  You shouldn’t get on a treadmill and run five miles a week after you give birth, but after about a couple of months or so of having your baby you should start to get outside and walk with the baby, dogs, go for a jog, maybe play some frisbee, etc.  A great, simple exercise is to simply take your new baby on a stroll.  Your body will love it, and so will your baby.

Eat balanced meals - All the advice on losing weight, after pregnancy or not, is to eat right.  Well, you don’t need to go and join a diet program and buy a bunch of expensive health foods — you simply need to eat balanced meals.  That means you need to eat your daily food groups, with a well-balanced diet of meats, dairy, vegetables, etc.  Your body needs all the vitamins and minerals it can get after giving birth, as does your baby — which receives vitamins and minerals through your breast milk.

Get some rest - You need to be active to lose weight, of course, but you need to keep in mind that your body is working overtime to make milk. As it does this, it’s burning calories.  If you couple that with the extra work you’re doing to take care of the baby, as well as your new daily walking routine, you are burning a decent amount of calories.  Because of this, your body is going to be tired and considering it did just go through an extraordinary change (9 months of pregnancy plus birth), you will want to give your body sufficient time to rest and recover.

Solution?  Sleep!

More importantly, just don’t forget the size you were before the baby.  If you were already overweight, it’ll make losing weight a little bit harder — but trust me, you can do it!  And if you were the size you wanted before you gave birth, you can easily lose the 10, 15 or even 20+ pounds you gained during the pregnancy and get back into the shape you want in no time!