How I Lost 50 Pounds In 4 Months After Having My Third Baby

Welcome to Mom On Purpose, where it’s all about helping moms overcome challenges and live their best lives. My hope is by being here, you are more inspired to become the mom you are made to be. I’m Natalie, your host, a wife, boy, mom, dog, mama, Chicagoan, and former lawyer turned professionally certified coach. If you’re here to grow, I can help. Let’s go.

Hello, my beautiful friends. Welcome to the podcast. I am so excited to be here with you today because of today’s episode. How I lost 50 pounds in four months after having my third baby. Yes, my friends, the time has come, the baby weight is off. I have lost all of the baby weight. I lost it relatively quickly, I think. And I’m going to share with you all of the things that I did as much as possible in this podcast episode. If you want more of this, you must get the mini course that I created where I deep dive into all of the things in much more detail.

And, you know, I give you a private podcast. I give you PDFs that you can save. And it is content that I created that a lot of people already have. And the feedback that I have been getting is that it is gold. It is so valuable because the way that I teach and coach on weight loss is, with, I don’t know, I think a different style and a different perspective than so many experts out there. And that’s why I like it. I, I, I think it really resonates. But what was really cool and different about this mini course is that I only talk about what I did. So it’s not prescriptive. It’s not necessarily what you should do. And I think because I taught it in that way, I think it was so relatable. And from what I’ve heard, my students and clients have been telling me that they’ve been able to pick up on nuances that they otherwise didn’t know or didn’t think about and definitely didn’t apply.

And it’s just been transformational for helping them lose weight. I have had so many clients go on weight loss journeys recently inside the Mom On Purpose Membership inside the mastermind and inside my private coaching container. And so weight loss has definitely been something that I’ve been, helping my clients with recently. And, they’ve been really successful and I’m super excited for them for that. And I’m super excited. For me, I wanted to take this weight loss goal really seriously. And I did, and I got it done in the first half of the year. And now I want to share with you how I did it because as I alluded to with this mini course, and what I want to emphasize here is that the way that I approach weight loss is so different than most experts out there. And because of that, I think it’s so doable given a very busy full life.

My philosophy with weight loss is simplicity, simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. Make it easy, make it simple. And if you do it, it works. Okay. So before I dive in to all of the goodness that I’m going to share with you about it, if you are interested in that mini course, and you probably want to see my before and after pic, you should just go check it out anyways, even if you’re not interested in the mini course, both the mini course and my before and after pic are on this page. It’s momonpurpose.com/weightloss. It’s all one word, W-E-I-G-H-T-L-O-S-S. And you can get all the information about the mini course there. And also see my before and after photos, lost 50 pounds, feeling great. Cannot tell you how awesome it is to just wear jeans. I didn’t wear jeans during pregnancy. I was just so nauseous and I feel great now and my body is different. Having three kids in three years, my friends, it is interesting the way the body changes and I’m so grateful for that. And also, I’m excited for other journeys that I’m going to go on in the future. I’m on a strength training journey right now. I want to get stronger. I really want this year to just be about me getting in the best shape of my life. And I wanted to lose the weight first and then get in shape. And that’s one distinction that I made and that I always make with respect to weight loss. ’cause you know, obviously I had three kids, so I did this three times in the last three years, and I did it each time was where I focus solely on the weight loss and nothing else. And that requires me to focus and it makes it so much easier instead of, okay, now I’m going to overhaul my eating habits and now I’m going to add in exercising and strength training.

And now all of a sudden there’s all of these components to it. It’s so confusing. And, I just don’t have time for that, right? Like, I don’t want to overhaul and change my whole life just to lose weight. I’m a busy mom. I have three kids, I have a husband, I have a home, I have dogs, and we just have lots going on. I run this amazing business. And so weight loss had to be something that I could do given the demands of my life. And it was, and I share this with you because I want you to have an example of how this can actually be easy. Okay, so with that, I want to start off just talking about what I didn’t do. So I did not work out, okay. And I say this intentionally because one of the most common myths I hear is like, okay, I gotta start working out.

It’s just not true. Now people hear me say this and they think I’m like against working out. I am not against working out. It’s just irrelevant to weight loss. In fact, I actually think it makes it harder to lose weight in my opinion because it, it makes you hungrier basically. And weight loss is all about eating less. So I didn’t want to do that to myself. I just didn’t want to add the complexity to it. And also, I have three small children and I’m working and I’m the childcare. And so to me, adding in workout just wasn’t part of it. And also, as you probably can assume, I chase around my boys. So it’s not like I’m sitting at a desk all day. My body gets a lot of activity without the formal regimen of a workout routine. At least for that period of losing weight, that’s how I viewed it.

And now adding in strength training, that’s like the one thing I’m focusing on now. So before when I was losing the weight, it was okay, I am just focusing on weight loss. I’m not focusing on working out. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it, I’m just sharing with you what I did because it was so simple and so doable and relatively quick. Like I really had it in my mind that I did not want to be “working on” weight loss for a year or years to come. Like I wanted to get this done and have it be behind me. I wanted my brain to be focused on other more important things. Like there’s so many other things that I want to achieve and do. And it’s not to minimize weight loss, but it’s something that in my opinion, you have so much control over compared to other things where you don’t have so much control over.

Like if I’m coaching you on your marriage, you can control how much you show up and how you show up, but there’s always that other person. Or if you want to switch careers, right? It’s up to you. Yes, but there’s always the person who’s hiring you and the company who’s going to say yes or no. Weight loss is, in my opinion, one of the things that you focus on exclusively and get the result. Now, of course I hear you, there are, body challenges and differences and all of those things, but compared to other transformations, in my opinion, it’s something you have the most control over. Even if that’s not like 100% control, it’s still a lot of control. So anyways, back to what I didn’t do. I didn’t work out, obviously I was moving my body ’cause I’m chasing around three young children and I didn’t want to have to think about that.

I also didn’t track calories. This was again, something that I think works for sure, but I’m a big fan of doing something forever. So I don’t want to track calories forever. I want to eat when I’m losing weight in a way that I will continue to eat forever. Now, the caveat to that is, but for a calorie deficit. So when you know, I’m not losing weight, like right now I’m not in a calorie deficit, but the way in which I’m eating is the same way that I ate when I was losing weight. So for example, let’s say you know, you’re going to lose weight and you cut out all fried food, all alcohol, all sugar, and you’re so excited to lose the weight and it works. And then once you lose the weight, you add those things back in and what happens, like you gain it. So I just and again, this is personal.

I don’t like to make changes to my food that I’m not going to make maintain forever or do things that I’m not going to do forever. So I didn’t track calories to me, too much effort. Not something I’m going to do forever. Do I think it works? Absolutely. I didn’t create a food plan. Now this is one of the tools that I teach on weight loss. And I actually really, like, I just have been paying attention to my body for long enough to know that I can lose weight without it. But if I think of having like a tool belt of weight loss tools, creating a food plan is in my tool belt and I had it as a backup, I almost had to start using it. I always tell myself like I’ll lose the weight without it. But then if my weight ever plateaus and or starts going up continuously, then I’m going to use the food plan.

It’s kind of like a tool that I like, but again, it takes more effort and I’m all about losing weight the easiest way. So it’s something that I had in my back pocket but was going to use only if I needed to. And I, I actually didn’t need to, I didn’t say that any foods were off limits. I think one of the worst questions you can ask for weight loss is one of the most common questions. And that question is, “what do I need to eat to lose weight?” It is just the wrong question. You don’t eat food to lose weight. There isn’t like a magic food that creates weight loss. If you understand the human body and you understand how fat is stored for energy and when there’s too much of it on your body, the way that you reduce that is your body needs to burn the fat.

So are there foods that you might choose to eat from a nutritional standpoint that will have an impact on your health in your body? Absolutely. But I was not on a journey to change my eating habits. I was not on a journey to, start eating the most nutritious foods. I wanted this to be a simple way for me to lose weight postpartum. And again, that’s not to say that I didn’t make some food changes, I did, but I didn’t do it from the perspective of what foods are going to help me lose weight. And therefore saying some foods are off limits. I just don’t find that question to be helpful. I don’t think it’s true. I think you can actually eat anything and lose weight. It’s more about the quantity, right? And again, that’s not to say that there isn’t a difference in nutritional value.

1000% there is, and in your energy and all of that, but I’m talking about specifically for weight. I love to focus on one goal at a time. So I am all for getting stronger. I’m all for eating more nutritious foods. I’m all for weight loss. Those are three different things. And I think people combine them. And then that’s when weight loss gets overwhelming. It’s like, okay, how am I supposed to overhaul my eating habits and eat all of these different foods? Then I’m supposed to start working out. And also I’m supposed to go into a calorie deficit and eat less of it. And it’s like way too much for the brain. Most of the women who I’m coaching have full lives, spouses, kids, like there’s a lot going on, and that’s like a huge undertaking. So I was not about that life at all.

So for me, simplicity won. I didn’t put any foods off limits. I told myself I can eat whatever I want, but I need to eat less. So what did I do? I weighed myself daily and I planned to do this forever. I was coaching someone the other day and she was saying how she had lost the weight previously a few years ago and gained it back and we’re talking about how that happened. And she had stopped weighing herself daily. And I said, I think you should weigh yourself daily, forever. She’s like, forever. I’m like, yeah, forever. You know how you, take a shower every day and you probably brush your teeth two or three times a day? Think about weighing yourself as just one thing you do as part of your routine. That’s how I view it. Here’s why I never want to go unconscious.

So I take the morality out of weight. It’s not good or bad. If I am weighing more or less now I want to weigh a certain weight. That’s just because that’s what I want. It’s not like if I gain weight, it’s bad, but I want to know that that’s what I’m doing. So if I’m gaining weight, I’m going to be aware of it. You would never see me just unconsciously gain weight. Meaning like, I’m not going to wake up one day and I have gained 30, 40, 50 pounds. That just would not happen because I stay conscious. Now, I might gain weight. Let’s just say that I go through something in my life, I experience it and it’s, it’s really hard. And I gain weight. I’m going to keep weighing myself every day and say, that’s okay. I’m going to use food. Food is comforting right now. It’s helping me.

So there’s no shame in that. So with my third pregnancy, y’all, it was so hard. It was the hardest pregnancy I had. I don’t know if it was the, you know, low iron. I had anemia. I don’t know if it was just baby number three, who knows relative to my first two and the first two were not a walk in the park either. But it was the hardest. And so I used food to help me feel better. I have no shame about that. I gained 50 pounds in my third pregnancy, 40 pounds in my first and second pregnancy. So this pregnancy I gained 10 more pounds. And I’m not surprised by that. I was actually surprised that it wasn’t even more because I really let myself eat whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. I did it knowing that my body didn’t need that. I just emotionally needed it sometimes. And that was okay with me. Like there, there isn’t morality to it. And I think when you take the morality out of it, getting on the scale every day is not a problem. It’s actually very helpful. So I tracked my weight daily on my weight loss journey. I found it to be extraordinarily helpful. I measured my results every single day.

And that brings me to, one of the most important mindsets. Actually. I’ll just share both two very important mindsets. Every bite counts and I’m losing weight today. So when I was on the scale, and it would either be the same, like a, like a plateau as the day before or a little bit less, I’d be excited. So I associated pleasure with getting on the scale. And then I would tell myself, okay, I’m losing weight today. And I would tell myself every bite counts. And I would have those two mindset mantras that I would say throughout the day. And I would pay attention to my body and my hunger cues. So there’s a tool I teach called The Hunger Scale, where you go from, it’s really from, positive 10 to negative 10 and you want to stay at like a positive two to negative two.

This is a tool that I did not create. I was trained on it when I got certified as a weight loss coach. And I found it to be really helpful because I think there’s this narrative out there that, being hungry is an emergency and it is bad. And you should never feel hungry. And I don’t know who started this and I don’t know why it exists, but it’s going to be really hard to lose weight if you do not allow yourself mild doable hunger. That’s what I wanted to allow myself to do. That way my body would eat the fat on my body so that I could lose weight. And so if I felt a little bit hungry, I would think of that scale. Drink some water and then check in to see, okay, is this mealtime? Is this when I need to eat? Or is this an opportunity for me to just experience a mild doable hunger?

So weighing myself daily was how I stayed out of forever limbo between three pounds. I coach some clients who are like, I’ve been losing and gaining the same three pounds for the last year. If I was plateauing for more than a week, I would cut calories. And I’m saying cut calories. But what I mean very specifically is just eat less. So if I was looking at a sandwich, I would eat half the sandwich instead of the whole sandwich. Now I am experienced with paying attention to my body. So the hunger that I would feel as I was losing the weight was very mild and doable. It was not on any extremes. I wasn’t skipping meals, I was fueling my body and like really paying attention to it. And this is why one goal is so important. It’s not that weight loss takes more time. It actually takes less time ’cause you’re putting less food in your mouth.

It’s just that the mental energy that goes into it is greater. So if I’m, if I’m working on this and then I’m overhauling my eating habits and cooking all of these new foods, and then I’m working out and doing all of these different things, it’s, it’s a lot for the brain. And I am like, okay, I manage my brain, but I got three little ones at home. I got a full life, I got a coaching practice, I’m going to overdeliver one of my clients, so I need to make this really easy. The way that I did that was just to focus on every bite counts. I’m losing weight today. So I went from that like someday mentality to a today mentality. And I measured my results every day. And I was coaching someone recently and she was talking about wasting food. And this is, this is why I love weight loss because it’s such an opportunity to do mindset work.

What does it mean to waste food? We have been trained and taught and conditioned to believe that wasting food means throwing food away. But I just want to question that because if your body doesn’t need all of the food, let’s say you’re going to eat a sandwich and your body is hungry and your body, let’s say to fuel, it would need about half the sandwich, let’s say, and you eat the whole sandwich, isn’t the second half of the sandwich that you ate that your body doesn’t need, isn’t that wasting the food? It’s just instead of wasting it in the trash, it’s wasting it on your body. So do not be a garbage disposal. My friends do not believe the lie that eating everything on your plate means you’re not wasting food. You’re certainly wasting it. It’s just now it’s wasting on you instead of in the garbage.

Okay? And so you just gotta be careful of your mindset. I don’t have any drama about that, obviously I’m mindful about how much I put on my plate, but if my body needs half of it, I’m going to eat half of it. And I think that’s really important to consider because I think a lot of us were taught be a good girl. Finish everything on your plate, right? And so we attach our worth, we attach being good to finishing what’s on our plate. And that’s just nonsense. That’s perfectionism, good girl syndrome, all the things that I like to coach on. And I think weight loss is like, a gateway, right? It, it opens up all of the mindsets and conditioning that we have around food. And when you can just see food as neutral and you get to decide how much of it that your body actually needs, and if you have too much of it and it gets stored as fat, then you want to let your body go into some mild doable hunger so that it burns some of that fat off.

That is what needs to happen. I also reduced to my carbs. Now, I just kind of did this over time because I was thinking, okay, what’s going to guarantee my results? And so I didn’t say any foods were off limits. I had bread with, I had toast with, avocado sourdough toast with avocado on it almost every day. Avocados are very high in calories, like 300 calories or so. And obviously bread is carbs. So I say that because I wasn’t, totally going off carbs or anything like that. But I did reduce them, I would say. And I really just tried to be mindful of everything I put in my mouth. I would just tell myself, every bite counts. Is this going to be a bite that helps me or hurts me? And I really started to increase my pleasure association with getting on the scale.

I would be so excited. I’d be like, oh my gosh, I could tell today I ate really well. I can’t wait to get on the scale the next morning. A lot of times we dread getting on the scale and we’re not paying attention to how much we’re eating. And I never wanted to do that to myself. I really wanted to, and you can do this intentionally. I really wanted to increase my pleasure association with getting on the scale and be so proud of myself. I’d just be like talking to myself in my house. Like, I’m so proud of myself, I can’t wait to get on scale tomorrow. Like I would make it a big deal that way. That pleasure association with getting on the scale was higher. And then it reinforced being careful, I don’t even want to say careful, like being intentional with what I ate the day before.

What else? I, I stopped eating around, I don’t know, 6:30, 7:30 at night. This again, wasn’t a hard and fast rule, but as I’ve been coaching some of y’all in the Membership and private coaching and in the Mastermind actually, I have a bunch of clients doing weight loss right now, and I’ve noticed that one of the problems that comes up that I didn’t even talk about in the mini course really is nighttime eating. And I didn’t talk about it in the mini course because it was already kind of a part of who I was again, I will say. But for being pregnant, like when I’m pregnant, if it’s 9:00 PM and I’m hungry, I am making a meal because there is no way I could go to bed and not be nauseous all night if I don’t eat. So that’s the exception. But ordinarily when I’m not pregnant, I’m just not a big nighttime eater and I train myself to be like that.

It’s, I find it really hard to lose weight if I’m eating at night. I also find my prefrontal brain is not as good at choosing food to fuel me at night, so I’m more likely to overeat at night. So if you are a big nighttime eater, I definitely think you would need a food plan because of the prefrontal cortex. That’s the only reason for a food plan. It’s just you plan it 24 hours in advance so you’re planning from your highest self. You’re not planning from that primitive brain that’s kind of, always going to want to seek the pleasure and have the french fries and overeat at night and all of those things. And so for me, I wouldn’t eat late at night ever, pretty much. Yeah, I still don’t really eat late at night, ever. What else can I share with you that I think would be helpful?

I think that, I think that I took this goal so seriously that every single weigh in really mattered. So for me, if I was weighing myself and I would’ve plateaued for more than seven days, I would tell myself, okay, I really need to eat less because like I’ve, I’ve reached a new plateau and you know, don’t let eat less sound vague. It’s not vague when you’re going to sit down for a meal instead of eating the whole meal, eat three-fourths of the meal instead of eating the whole meal, eat half the meal. You’ll be amazed at how much you are overeating if you have been in a pattern of weight gain. Like, I didn’t even realize how much I was snacking until I started to lose weight and say, every bite counts. I love that so much. Every bite counts. I’m like, oh my gosh, just like the little bites off my kids’ plates or as I’m cooking or things like that, they all add up.

So when I would tell myself every bite counts, I didn’t do any of that. I focused a lot on hydration and electrolytes. And for my breastfeeding mamas, this is really important. I had a changing table that was gifted to us with my first pregnancy. And I used it for all three to lose weight where I would weigh my son. The changing table is digital, it has a scale in it, and it was connected to my phone. So to make sure that my son was getting enough breast milk, I would weigh him and just like I would weigh myself, and you could tell based on that, number if he was getting enough. And that was just really helpful. And I always say to my breastfeeding mamas, you absolutely can lose the weight. It might be a little bit slower, but it’s not impossible.

I find that my clients who are losing weight, who are breastfeeding, they don’t mind that it’s a little bit slower. They just have the false belief that it’s impossible. Same with my clients who are in menopause or perimenopause. There’s a lot of information out there like you are more likely to gain weight. And what I always say, and this goes for my clients too, who are taking medicine where it might make it harder as well to lose weight, what I always say to them is, do you think it’s physically possible for you to lose weight? And the answer has always been yes. So if the answer is yes, then let’s constrain all of that input that says anything to the contrary. And you know yourself best. If it is not a time for you to go on a weight loss journey, don’t do it. If you are just putting this off in perpetuity, it’s like in the background of your mind, please, I am begging you do it.

Now what’s so cool is the newfound confidence that I have gained from doing this and from talking about it and from just coming off like my hardest pregnancy and seeing my body is different, like my stomach is different. That is going to be the next journey, right? It’s like there’s always another journey. Weight loss isn’t everything. Absolutely not. But this is the journey that I just went on and I’m, I’m proud of it and I want to share that with you so you know it is possible. I’m glad I did it and I’m glad I didn’t just drag this out. And I want to encourage you that if this is something you want to do, you should do it now because it’s simple. It’s doable in the way that I teach. And if it’s the right time for you, it’s something that you can get done in a relatively short amount of time.

It does not take a lot of time. It shouldn’t take a lot of time. If the way that you’re doing it right now isn’t working, double down my friend, double, double down. There is a weight loss course. You could get this mini course I do private coaching. There’s tons of ways that you can work with me if you want to, to lose weight. But if nothing else, I want you to know that you 100% can lose the weight and you deserve it if that’s what you want. Again, it’s like losing the weight doesn’t make you any happier. It’s just losing the weight. And it’s cool to have that newfound confidence because something I didn’t even mention in this episode yet is that I significantly reduced the sugar that I was eating. I didn’t make sugar or sweets off limits. I mean, you could eat whatever you want, you can put it on a food plan.

It’s really more about quantity and letting your body feel mild, doable hunger so that you lose weight. I’ve gone through weight loss periods after my first and second where I maintained the same level of sugar. It was just timing for this one. I just felt inspired to eat less sugar slash sweets. I’m kind of using those words interchangeably. And what was so awesome was just challenging my identity that I’ve always had is having a sweet tooth. I’m like having a sweet tooth is a thought. What? It broke my brain, my friends and I do this work. I, I mean I do it literally for a living and I would’ve told you my name is Natalie and I have a sweet tooth. Like as it’s a fact. It is not a fact. It is a belief, it is an identity that I’ve been holding onto and I’m so proud that I don’t have that identity anymore.

I just refuse to label myself as that because I don’t find it helpful. And the newfound confidence that I have with that is insane. It just makes me feel like anything is possible because I truly didn’t believe that it was possible for me to be someone who doesn’t have a sweet tooth. So just things that I’m playing around with now that the weight is off again, I don’t think like weight loss is some secret answer to being happier. I just think that it’s a very specific goal. I set the goal, I achieve the goal. And now there are other things I want to do. I want to, tighten up this stomach. I want to get fit and really strong. And I always play around with my different types of eating habits just for fun and to see what’s possible. I didn’t eat meat for like seven-ish years and now I eat meat again.

And obviously you all know that I don’t drink at all. I haven’t drank in years just because I don’t want to. I always tell myself I can red decide. So it’s really about consciousness and intentionality. And that is the same thing that I think about with respect to food. That’s how I did it for weight. I was being really intentional using the scale as the metric, the measurement daily, eating less, doing mild doable hunger in a way that felt good to me and got me the results that I want. So go to momonpurpose.com/weightloss. See my before and after photo. Get this mini course. If you want to do more work on this, I’m telling you, 10 out of 10 you’re going to get value from it and it’s going to help you on your journey. And that is what this is all about, my friend. Thanks so much for being here and I’ll talk with you next week. Take care.

Thank you for being here and listening. Now, head on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching to learn more about the Mom On Purpose membership, where we take all of this work to the next level.