Fat Mom to Fit Mom

Every step, every page of your journey is your own– and you should own it! Many times my personal journey has taken detours and turns I had not expected. Going into my last pregnancy at my fittest I had ever been in my life I had a plan to bounce back from pregnancy without skipping a beat. I even announced to some friends that I was going to call it “6 months to a 6-pack after a baby”… yeah, not so much. It’s been 3.5 years now and I am far from a 6-pack or even from where I was before baby. Now, I didn’t fall off the deep end or decide that I’d give up on my goals– instead I have been struggling with much frustration. After my son was born in August of 2011 I felt great and 4 weeks post baby I started with light yoga and walking and graduated up to more once I got cleared by my doctor. And while at my clearance appointment 6 weeks after baby my doctor suggest I go back onto the Mirena IUD, since that’s what I had before my pregnancy, I thought nothing of it and gave my approval and in it went. The last time I had lost the majority of my weight I had gotten the Mirena, it was between my kids and never had noticed any issues. And it wasn’t until after my son’s 3rd birthday that I started to reflect on my frustrations and I started to put things together…

My son was 12 weeks old when I had the opportunity to take a full time position, which was a blessing to my family at the time and I felt called to take it and so I did. The weight wasn’t coming off the way I was expecting– it must be my schedule I thought, so I kept pressing on. Soon I started to experience hip pain, my pregnancy must have messed up my hips I assumed. You hear some moms assign different ailments to each pregnancy and I thought, well I guess my son did a number on my hips, I kept pressing on. Soon after my feet were killing me, it was painful to step out of bed in the morning and walking upstairs at the end of the day left me looking like I was 95 years old. I had always had “bad feet” and I assumed that the pregnancy had made them worse. 18 months of plantar fasciitis is what I had lived through– exercise would make it worse… right? So I dialed down the exercise. Not seeing the weight move, but instead move UP made clean eating depressing. I’d lead groups of 50+ through clean eating challenges, through workout programs and I felt like a fat loser with the fit version of me lost inside, confused and broken. I decided I needed to exercise for my sanity, pushed through the pain and realized that for me, the more I moved, the more my plantar fasciitis felt better– after 18 months of wobbling the pain faded the more I moved and stretched– PiYo workouts were a godsend for this.

nearly 3 & 1/2 years later the weight still not gone, efforts seem to be going no where. Depression constantly stealing my joy and making me feel like a failure…. and I truly felt as if I was a failure and I wore it– in the form of the fat that had accumulated and not moved off. This lead me to investigate and do some research on the ONLY other variable I could think of… the Mirena IUD…. but why? I hadn’t had any issues before…. but again, I never had one in RIGHT after I delivered a baby and had some extra fluff to work off… could it be what’s keeping me? but how?

I’m no expert, but the more I searched online and read of other’s experienced sounded all too familiar– weight not budging no matter how great the efforts, hip pain, plantar fasciitis, and my newest symptom– lower back pain. In layman’s terms the Mirena was causing inflammation which was throwing my body off balance, it was messing with my hormonal balance causing depression and my metabolism to basically work against me. Many woman gained anywhere from 10-65 lbs while I didn’t gain a ton– I was grateful that my fight and all my effort had kept me at a standstill instead of putting MORE on. I was so relieved to have an answer– so out came the Mirena as soon as I could get an appt, in late January. Immediately I felt my energy back, I felt like myself! My hip pain, GONE! and my lower back was left weak. I quickly turned to a 3-day cleanse I had fallen in love with– the 3-day Refresh. While many woman I met had waited MONTHS or even YEARS before their hormones were back in balance and experienced their first cycle post Mirena removal– mine came 2 weeks later and regularly ever since. I am so happy to have such a great tool to help my body and I do feel that my daily intake of Shakeology had a huge part in that too… but NOW I am ready to kick this into high gear. But instead of hitting my workout programs hard, start lifting heavy and going at my clean eating in beast mode– I want to Reset my body– like an in depth tune-up 🙂 that’s why today marks my day 1 of the Ultimate Reset. More on what exactly the Ultimate Reset is and about my journey with it! Today is day 1 of 21!

Click here if you want to read more about it!