I have always recommended that new moms be more concerned with their food intake than worrying about exercising the first 6 months or even 5 years of their children’s life to lose weight.  Obviously exercise is beneficial for many other things, fitness, immune support, stress management, strength and over all well being.  For burning calories however, parenting is the ultimate exercise.  Plan your food wisely and you will be fit as a fiddle.

Recently, my sister and I were in charge of watching my brother and his wife’s new, 2 month old twin girls.   I think we watched them for maybe 5 hours?  I didn’t exercise because I was getting ready for the family to come for the day.  Once they arrived, the time seemed to just fly by, while we were feeding, changing, coddling, rocking and keeping up.  It really was no big deal since we were 3 adults!  My husband came in and held them occasionally because he had the magic touch for  consoling a crying baby.  Once the parents came home, we still wanted to take care of the babies until they left, so maybe in total we took care of them for 6 hours, tops.  They were off, my sister left and by 9:30 I hit the wall and was ready for bed.  I slept like a baby.  My point in all of this is this….On a regular day I struggle to burn 2400 calories with exercise.  I downloaded my armband calorie burn for yesterday and it was just over 3000 calories without exercise and that was just for 6 hours of watching babies for fun!  What is going to happen when they start walking and talking?

I have to mention that my brother and his wife work full time and feed the kids at night so I cannot guess how many calories they are burning.  It really does take a village to raise children so active participants in child rearing, such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, or others that are helping also get in on the calorie burning.  Even if it is only for 6 hours!