New Goal Weight: Strong AF

Calling all Postpartum Mom Beach Bods! To Bare your Brilliant Bathing Suit Summer Style!

We’re safe to strut our stuff and stroll the beach and patrol the pools with our babies just as we are.  How fun is that to just accept and get stoked and get out there to splash and float and laugh?! 

Truly, I just have this one question:

How good are you willing to let you summer life get?!

For me, recently the whispers of my inner mean girl have been louder.  It’s summer time and well the weather is always warm and beach balmy here on Maui, so it’s bathing suit season perpetually.  

I’m sharing the picture above from paddle boarding yesterday and taking my babies around the ocean classroom- we saw a honu and a huge school of spotted rays literally fly from underneath us.  When I first saw this picture, my eyes went straight for my body to criticize my postpartum body and belly.  The very space that housed these two groms on the front and back of the board I adore so much. Everyone knows the low angles aren’t flattering.. but what if I embrace any angle of my body, celebrate it for its power and health, its resiliency and capacity to house these two beautiful beings?  And what if I choose instead gratitude and to instill confidence that I’m exactly where I’m meant to be, that health and wellness is continually available to me, and that I can choose how I speak life and love over my body.  So I’m sharing this photo.  My summer bod.  My postpartum power.  

I’m claiming it and I’ll be out here all summer and year long in my body, at home in my own health, claiming all the prosperity and losing the limiting beliefs, shedding the weight of the stories which have held me back.  And health will continue to flow into my body and life by staying in these high vibes.  

I have shed a lot of “weight” postpartum, and most if not all of it haven’t been pounds on the scale. 

The shedding that has freed me and lightened my soul has been in shedding my limiting beliefs.  Ones that I carried around as benchmarks that I was convinced I would achieve “if only” (one of my now known trigger phrases) I was determined enough to do it.  These would somehow “prove” that I had “made it” and they were something like:

- You need to get back to your prepregnancy weight

- Your goal weight is what you weighed in college: 133 lb

- Your diastasis recti is something you can choose to address through lifestyle interventions: diet and exercise.  You can heal it and then you won’t look “pregnant” to everyone.  You just need to work hard enough to figure it out.

I’ve shed them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t come back around.  Lately they’ve been knocking big time, I’ve just become more aware of them and more tuned into how they impact me.  This is massive growth, as I can confront them head on, instead of having them linger in the whispers I carry around.  And I can learn from them and what they are here to teach me.

After having Camden 4.5+ years ago, I had a significant diastasis recti which is a separation of the abdominal muscles.  I have an umbilical hernia too, and I can fit a few fingers in the abdominal wall defect there.  

I can remember the comments:

- On our first walk postpartum in the community garden outside our Honolulu hale pushing Cam’s stroller a lady asking when I was due and me politely and somewhat sheepishly pointing to the baby in the carriage like, “Oh I just delivered her!”  That one I claimed because I knew my postpartum body needed time and I was proud of my body.

- Going back to the hospital when Cam was just shy of 3 months and being thrust back into hardcore 90 weeks on inpatient service and having a Dad of one of my patient’s ask when I was due.  I learned to use humor to cope and I always felt it was my responsibility somehow to brush it off and do my best to ensure the sender of the comment didn’t feel too bad.  It was that day I learned to maybe wear my scrub bottoms up a little higher and tie them a little  tighter.  I started loving wearing all my yoga pants and leggings higher to hug me in just the right spots and help my diastasis flatten out and distribute a bit more.  

I was never far from a bathing suit because… Hawai’i… and I cherish living here and fully embrace bathing suit life.  

But the comments about when I was due still stung.  

I lost all of my pregnancy weight but my diastasis recti remained in my Fellowship year and in the few years after Camden’s birth.

I felt much better and more purposeful in my pregnancy with Cruz because I love being pregnant and my body was blissfully carrying life.  I also had a reprieve from my diastasis recti and the comments asking about pregnancy… because well, I was pregnant ha!

After Cruz was born, I asked my OB-GYN to do pelvic floor therapy and it was tremendous.  More in the sense of empowering myself and learning to come into harmony with all of our female anatomy, because it’s crazy complex and amazing. I didn’t completely heal my diastasis recti, but I learned to engage my core muscles attached to our pelvic sling and to do Kegels in a way that honors my body.  I have so many thoughts on pelvic floor PT and can highlight that another time from both a Mama and medical point of view.

I completed the MUTU system which is a British originated pelvic floor PT program to empower and help Mamas with diastasis recti and post partum tighten and come into harmony with all of our intricate musculature and alleviate symptoms of incontinence, back pain, etc.  

I started honoring my posture and the way I carried myself. I shed limiting beliefs again…. this time in a much more expansive way.  

I made massive liftestyle changes and have been completely plant based and vegan for the past 18 months.  I also regularly practice intermittent fasting.  And I did not  do to lose weight, but to gain energy, clarity, perspective…. And to feel strong AF.

And for a while I did.  But I’m real and raw and honest here.  That’s the new version of me I shine out as my Visionary creative self here in Mama Mindset.  I still get out the scale sometimes and feel frustrated and defeated.  Still catch my posture hunching forward and my diastasis recti protruding.  But that’s the catch… I catch myself.  And then I hold space for myself, for my body… my sacred body and the home it gives me and all we have endured together.  And then I choose to switch into celebrating her and honoring her.  Me.  I’m alive and vibrant and healthy.  And I’m mentally more strong AF than ever before.  And that is such a freeing gift available to us all.

In the past few months at the beach I’ve entertained more than a few comments while running after Cam and Cruz how great I look to be having a 3rd one on the way (disclaimer: Not pregnant).  Recently at church, a lovely Mama of 4 commented and asked me when I was due- and I told her I was postpartum- 22 months.  We laughed and I owned it in that conversation, but it still stung truthfully.

This past weekend, we were all outside in the front yard blowing up this splash pad impulse buy JD and I got them at Costco this past weekend, and Camden asked me if I had a baby in my tummy. 

I do a lot of affirmations with Camden around saying “I am strong” “I am brilliant” “I am creative” etc and promoting positive body image. I’m conscious about how I speak about myself with her and how I hold myself in front of a mirror, because in my own transformation I’ve felt the expansive energy… and I want her to grow up speaking life over herself and her body.  

But I noticed how this seemingly innocent comment impacted me.  I ate late night.  I started to feel deflated and discouraged that all of these interventions I’ve undertaken to uplift my health and to promote my body’s healing from the miraculous and wonderful pregnancy journeys I’ve had weren’t “successful” somehow… I began to feel defeated and allow the victim mentality to set in.  

This is a low vibe state that doesn’t serve me or anyone around me.  It isn’t motivating and it isn’t loving.  I know this and I recognize this.  So, for the past few days my inner mean girl has been back.  I didn’t even bother shaving my legs for the beach over the past month because I didn’t feel particularly beautiful… but I also have no problem getting into a bathing suit because I’m not going to miss these memories with JD and my babies.  

So, I’m circling back with all of you in my bathing suit and ongoing postpartum body insecurities which I now choose to feel secure in… to reaffirm that what if our “goal weight” was to be strong AF?!?  Mentally and physically.  To do the things which honor, protect, and uplift our energy.  To make decisions that impact our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health for our highest good… and in turn that of our children and significant others.

Dropping the weight of the “I should be xxx weight” or “I need to work out and get down to xx size or prepregnancy body” because the “shoulds” and “needs” are most definitely NOT on our poolside menu.  They’re not allowed in our refreshing drinks we’re sipping next to the water between refreshing dips. And in full honesty with yourself, is it working for you… is it serving you?!

I’m all for lifestyle interventions with food as medicine, movement as medicine and sleep as medicine.  And I’m currently pouring myself into some digital mini courses for the Mama toolbelt on those topics.

But is your inner mean girl judging you in the mirror- can you get quiet to hear if the whispers are adding or detracting from your life?  What if  the best and most freeing, the most honoring thing you could do to support your one wild and precious, your brilliant life right now was to shed that weight… that of the disapproving looks you give yourself in the mirror or when that button on the pants doesn’t fit…. all the limiting beliefs that are weighing you down?  

Do you smile and thank your body and do a celebratory dance for all that it does to show up for you each and every day when you’re peering down at your toes and those numbers staring back up from the scale… or do you make them mean something about you… something demeaning?  I know I personally haven’t been delivering positive vibes to myself when I’ve stood on the scale recently.  I make the numbers mean something when in reality all they are is neutral numbers 155-ish … just reflecting back up at me.

I believe mirror work is so powerful.  When was the last time you stood in front of a mirror naked and looked at your reflection and marveled at her… told her she was strong and talented, brave and capable, creative and beautiful, brilliant and unique?!  It’s so powerful speaking this into our lives and showing up for ourselves.  I’ve started doing mirror work probably a year ago when one of my mentors suggested it… and I loved it.  I’ve gotten away from it because the merry-go-round of everyday life… but I can see Camden catching me every once in a while gazing in the mirror and smiling in gratitude for her, for me, for my future self and all the joy she brings to this world.  All she has endured.  All the trauma and the triumph.  She is so strong.  

She’s Strong AF.  And that’s my new forever goal weight and the one I’ll measure against the scale of my soul.

Love you Mamas!  Dance your way into those bathing suits and light up the beach and pools this summer with your brilliance and your bodies!  In my Sports Medicine practice and personal experience, I came to regard Mamas as the ultimate athletes.  Wear your weight with pride and with peace, with joy at what you have accomplished and holding space for your continued healing and restoration postpartum. The old has washed away and the new has come and so be it with your new body and wherever it is evolving toward.  Accept and celebrate it.  

And go forth and be Strong AF.  You already are.  You just have to claim it.