This is a difficult post for me to write. On one hand, I’m excited about the journey ahead. On the other hand, this is more transparent than I enjoy being about this particular subject matter.

Before I had children, I had been underweight most of my life and had struggled with digestive health. I had been called “skinny” from the time I was born.

Fast-forward to not quite 11 years ago when I had my first child. About two weeks after he was born, I had shed almost every pound I had gained and was back in my normal clothes. The same thing happened after my second child.

Not so after my third child.

At the time, I blamed the fact that I hadn’t exercised as much during the third pregnancy as I had with the other two. But as time went on, it seemed I would never get my body back.

By the time I got pregnant again, I looked pregnant before anyone else should have been able to detect a pregnancy. When I lost that baby to miscarriage, I no longer had an excuse for how I looked. That miscarriage happened in 2010. It was followed by two more. In the meantime, my exercise routine went in fits and starts. I would exercise, get fit, continue to exercise into the pregnancy, but when the miscarriages occurred, I was exhausted. I didn’t realize at the time I was chronically anemic–just one of the reasons I wasn’t able to carry a baby to full term. In the process of digging to the bottom of the causes of these miscarriages, I received some excellent nutritional counselling, and at that time, I eliminated gluten from my diet.

Things around my middle got better, and again when I went on a candida diet in the fall of 2012, but it seemed no matter what I did, and despite renewing a routine of cardio, weights and pilates, a persistent “muffin top” remained.

Revelations

Recently, I experienced two revelations. First, I encountered Bethany Learn and her exercise program targeting diastasis recti. I had recalled reading about this condition on another blogger’s site, but it never occurred to me that this could be my problem. Her situation seemed extreme, and by this time, I was convinced that age had taken hold and I was giving up on every having the same level of fitness I had enjoyed before Sprout was born. But when I learned about Bethany’s program, and read the symptoms of diastasis recti and the information about how to check yourself for the condition, I realized this was me!

The second revelation is one of the reasons this post is so hard to write. In preparation for my launch on this journey, I knew I needed to take measurements and a “before” picture. Let me get more real than I’m comfortable with here: I am the queen of holding in. People still tell me all the time how skinny I am, although I know better (and so does my daughter, who refers to my middle as my “pillow”). For this picture, however, I literally had to let it all hang out.

But when I did, something surprising happened. While my middle is not what I want it to be, the camera doesn’t lie. The picture is not as bad as my mental image of myself. So it was obvious that I have more than just physical work to do on this issue.

I’ve committed to Beth to journal my journey to better fitness here. As part of the process, I’ll be doing the exercises she offers in her online program, Fit2B, for three months. During that three months, she suggests 10-minute workouts, four to five times per week.

I plan to check in here from time to time, with milestone updates at the six week and three month marks.

Want to join me? Click here for membership information to Beth’s online studio.

{This is a Mom Learns Too post. Sure, your kids have been learning this week,
but what have YOU learned. Link up below!}