Welcome to Part 5 of my post-pregnancy weight loss journey! If you haven’t read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, or Part 4 yet, I encourage you to do so before continuing on with this post.
All caught up? Great! Let’s keep going.
The photos and measurements I’m going to be showing in this week’s post were taken 3 months post-delivery.
Here’s a reminder of where I was 1-week post-partum:
Starting weight 152.4 lbs.
Here’s where I am at 3 months post-partum. These photos and measurements were taken on June 25, 2019.
- Weight: 134.9 lbs. (I had lost an additional 8.1 lbs. in one month!)
- Body fat percentage: 31.8%
- Chest measurement (biggest part): 36.5 inches
- Waist measurement (smallest part): 31 inches
- Hip measurement (biggest part): 38 ¼ inches
- Right thigh measurement (biggest part): 24 inches
Total weight loss since starting – 17.5 lbs. Still moving in the right direction!
So what habit did I change this month to continue my weight loss? I focused on my diet – especially increasing my protein intake, specifically at breakfast.
Protein is magical when it comes to weight loss!
Increased protein intake helps you reduce hunger hormones and boost the levels of your satiety hormones (the ones that make you feel full). Feeling more full/less hungry leads to a major reduction in appetite. And if you aren’t hungry, and are good at listening to your body’s cues (such as not eating out of boredom or just because the situation you are in calls for it – like birthday cake at a party), you will automatically eat fewer calories. And fewer calories consumed leads to weight loss.
And if you listen to your body well, that weight loss can be big and it can feel effortless!
I took the time to emphasize protein at every meal in order to keep my appetite controlled and my blood sugar levels steady, but the one meal that I really knew I needed to transform was breakfast.
Throughout my life I’ve always consumed the typical American breakfast – toast, pancakes, waffles, cereal, bagels, etc. These things were fast, easy, and appetizing to me first thing in the morning. The problem with them is that they are all high in carbohydrates (and convert quickly to sugar in your body!) and low in protein. This would cause them to burn through my system quickly, leaving me hungry and looking for a snack by 10 AM daily. Extra snacking leads to more calories, and even more weight gain. This is not the direction I wanted to go!
So I knew I had to revamp my breakfast and find ways to increase my protein consumption, while decreasing my carbohydrate and sugar intake.
The first thing I did was change my thinking about what breakfast is. Breakfast isn’t only allowed to be certain foods. There’s nothing saying that cereal and bagels are designed for breakfast other than years and years of marketing telling us that it should be that way. Breakfast is just another meal. And anything can be eaten at breakfast! If you have leftover salmon from the night before, you can eat that at breakfast. Did you have a chicken casserole? Go ahead and eat that. What about a bowl of soup with nutritious broth, veggies and meat? That’s a great breakfast. It only sounds weird to eat these foods at breakfast, but it’s really not. In different cultures all around the world, these foods are common place on the breakfast menu. Afterall, breakfast is simply another meal of the day.
Secondly, I looked for ways to incorporate more protein in my morning on the days that I do eat the typical American breakfast (my husband still looks at me weird when I eat dinner leftovers in the morning, and he and my son routinely cook pancakes for a weekend breakfast. Just goes to show that you can always change your habits even if you can’t always change those of the people around you!). So how do I routinely get more protein in my breakfast on these days? I’ll give you my secret sauce to how I do this in the near future – I have a free guide I’m preparing specific to this topic that I’ll be releasing soon! (If you want to make sure you know the moment it comes out, be sure enter your email address in the blue box below and you’ll get notified when it’s ready to download!)
Once I upped my protein intake, made sure I was staying well hydrated, and really listened to my body’s hunger cues, the weight just started to fall off. Within a month I had lost 8.1 lbs. – it felt effortless, and I was rarely hungry! Such a change from all the times I had tried to “diet” in the past.
Now this is a “diet” and lifestyle that I’m 100% positive that I can maintain for the long term! And this change helped me break through that 140 lb. barrier I talked about in Part 4 of this series. With that barrier shattered, I’m excited now to see what is in store for my body and my health as my weight loss continues. It’s been so long since I’ve been at a super healthy weight for my body (much less weighing consistently in the low 130s!), I’m not even sure exactly where I’ll end up. But I’m thrilled at where I’m at now, so I have a feeling I’ll be happy with the final results, no matter what that ends up being.
Part 6 of this series will be coming in the next few weeks. In this part, I will be discussing some mindset issues I had to work through which almost caused me to lose all of the fantastic progress I had made!
Until then….
All the best,
Lesley
P.S. Just a reminder that if you want access to the free guide which I’m currently creating about how I added more protein to my daily breakfast, simply enter your email address in the blue box below and you’ll be the first to know when it’s available to download! Protein at breakfast was the gamechanger for me in accelerating my weight loss.
P.P.S. If you have questions, you can check out my health disclaimer.
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