How do you eat to lose your baby weight and your mummy tummy?  Karin, mummy blogger at CafeBebe is a good few months (years… ;)) postpartum, but still has baby weight and mummy tummy she’d like to see less of. And I’m a sucker for one of the sisterhood in tears, so when she came to find me at the CyberMummy conference for a hug and some support because yet another person thought she was pregnant… I had to step in. Postscript early 2011 – she is pregnant again now – congratulations Karin!)

Karin’s mummy tummy is due to a number of factors, almost definitely including  diastasis recti – weak core muscles and a good few layers of fat sitting on top 🙁 There may very well be other factors, including food intolerance or allergy causing excessive bloating, insulin resistance or unbalanced blood sugar levels due to eating habits, lifestyle factors and stress.

Karin is under orders to write down every morsel of food and drop of drink that pass her lips for 2 weeks. As she has already learnt, the very fact of writing it down can be rather effective in itself. Suddenly you’re accountable. ‘Some one’s going to read this. Hell, what if they think I’m a pig? What if they think I haven’t got a clue?’

The writing down bit is a start, even if you’re not going to get a scary personal trainer-type read over it. Try it for yourself! It really makes you think about what you’re eating and may surprise you. Often the number of coffees/ biscuits/pieces of toast/glasses of wine/handful of crisps that creep in whilst not actually counting as ‘meals’ can add up without your realising.

I’ve had one day’s worth form Karin so far, but I’m going to prolong her agony for a couple more days before telling you what she’s eating or giving any advice. I need to know how she eats for a few days (then we can all have a good look ;)) in order to give some meaningful guidance.

If you are following any kind of regime or program of any description, if your nutrition is not being addressed as a priority then you’re not going to get anywhere. You can exercise until you collapse, but you won’t see any improvement if you’re sabotaging all your hard work with crappy eating.

Just so you know, I will NOT be putting Karin on a diet. I don’t do diets. Diets are rubbish and don’t work because if they did there’d only be one diet book instead of thousands. The diet industry makes an utterly scandalous amount of money by convincing us we need to buy their excuses for food. We don’t. Nature makes food quite well by itself thank-you. But I can give you some ideas and guidelines on how to navigate the labels, the claims and the ‘science bits’ that the food industry loves to confuse us with.

This is not a diet, it’s how to eat the MUTU Food way.

2nd postscript early 2011 – this was a pretty fair analysis as it turned out that Karin is actually Coeliac and so completely intolerant to gluten!