Tummy control underwear

I'm not familiar with the garment you refer to, and from your post I'm not getting what it is that you are aiming for by wearing it. Are you trying to look thinner? If you are familiar with Whole Woman posture, then the question would be, does this garment prevent the relaxed belly and proper breathing that is needed to achieve it. Can you give us a little more background on how you are managing your rectocele now? You are still in the pp healing phase, and there is alot you can do about your situation. - Surviving

You can drop the worry stuff with me for a minute. Just on the weight thing. Cut the sugar. Sugar is an empty calorie, it has no nutritional value so cutting the sugar doesn't mean dieting that would affect your dear babe, but dieting that affects only your waist measurement. Also the dreaded mummy tummy does need a bit of shifting so when you diaphragm breath on the out breath bring tummy back in as far as you can. This works the tummy muscles. Do this consciously in rest periods (ten minutes or so) and you will find those muscles tightening and should not affect your prolapse, of course if they do stop straight away, but I found it does not. Also the WWposture, pulling up, stretches the abdomen: all lovely mummy stuff. Good luck.

Pay close attention to fab's description of breathing. Amongst women who are trying to hold their stomachs in, there is a tendency to do this backwards, where you are sucking it in on the in-breath and expanding the chest instead of the belly. A basic principle in prolapse management is to make sure you are expanding the belly on the in-breath. Learning to keep the belly relaxed and the chest pulled up is what made correct breathing happen for me. So please do learn about WW posture, because you are young and this is going to have a positive effect not only on your prolapse but on your hips and spine for life. - Surviving

I know exactly how you feel, I sometimes just don't want to look 6 months pregnant in a dress for an evening but don't think they are great, they hold the stomach in with tight fabric so exactly what whole woman say not to do. I have tried but not sure if physically I feel worse or just worry the whole time it's nt giving my organs room! It's like jeans very uncomfy now a days but you never noticed before!! So best to stay away and the lady who mentioned sugar I think has a point because I struggle with lack of sleep and wanting sugar, also lots of walking thinking of posture and walking is great for weight loss. Take care

Absolutely agree on the sugar, and thanks Fab for reminding us again. I've made a bit of progress in cutting way down on the sugar......baby steps for me! And by the way, check out this NY Times article entitled "Is Alzheimer's Type 3 Diabetes?" Scary stuff, and he is not the first to write about it, but somehow it is just not making the headlines. - Surviving

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/bittman-is-alzheimers-ty...

Strange, I was just reading about this, this morning. Here is a link related to Princess Kate, that I retrieved from a LinkedIn group I am a member of, http://mrptny.wordpress.com/ . While I don't go along with all of Marianne Ryan's ideas, I do think she is spot on, with not encouraging postpartum women to wear shape wear, because she thinks they are all too tight, and actually prevent the abdominal muscles from strengthening, as they do when we do Whole Woman breathing and pull up into Whole Woman posture.

Celebrities go to extremes to make themselves look like they haven't had a baby recently, because image and getting back into the limelight is important to them. It is a fantasy, fed by Photoshop and celebrity itself. Will you *be* a better person, or a better mother, or a better lover, if you squash your belly back and push your pelvic organs back over your vagina. Not likely! I would buy or make some pretty and stylish clothes with looser lines. Everyone knows you have a baby, and where it came from, and probably how it came out. They are as delighted as you are!

Cover the full length mirrors. Draw attention upwards to your face and your no doubt glowing breasts, if you must. Lift your chest. Be the queen, Warriorprincess (sic)! Open up. Grow taller. Your belly will lengthen, tighten, and come in slightly by itself, and will contract and expand, on alternate sides, with every step you take. Instant workout! Get out there with the stroller in your lovely northern summer weather, and walk that Park!

This too will pass. Give it another 18 months before you think you are going to be flabby forever. You won't be! That is how long it takes for pregnancy flab on the inside to pull itself together again. Be patient, and enjoy being a Mum.

Louise

I've only just had time to read your article surviving. I've been having a piece of bacon and tomato for breakfast and looks like I'd best give that up too because of the nitrite. Why is it that the things you love; sugar, bread and now bacon, you shouldn't have? I love my poison type of thing, it is positively perverse. I'm trying to decide what to replace it with. Maybe a lamb cutlet, a bit of kidney, rissole (you can mince your own meat)? Any ideas? I just so love my bacon.

What about Canadian bacon? It is suppose to be lower in fat and sodium.

I quickly googled canadian bacon and the recipes say take a bit of pork loin, wet cure it about four days, throw it on the barbie where the centre comes up to 160 degrees, firm it up in the fridge, slice and then fry for brekkie. Sounds fantastic; easy and clever, no more nitrites and I can still have my bacon. Graceful words cannot express my gratitude.

but just on the smoking aspect. I will have to research that further. I am not sure if the smoke might add things we don't want. Instead of smoking I think I could just do it in the oven, but will let you know what I come up with. The brine of course requires creative thinking to give it a nice taste don't really want to use sugar or maple syrup with the salt, but will have fun working on that. cheers

I always bought it all ready sliced in packages out of the grocery store and fried it in a pan. It kind of reminds me of a drier ham. I don't know what others think of it. I am sure there are organic versions out there. I was eating a lot of it when I was on the South Beach diet, one of my many diet excursions, because it was acceptable. Does turkey bacon have nitrites?

knowing the dangers inherent in curing that's what you did even though the smallgoods manufacturer did botch it from time and time, it was a reasonable risk. In the following articles they are all saying that the cancer scare about nitrate is dubious, but this is before DelaMonte’s research and its implication for Alzheimer’s that surviving led us to.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nitrites
http://culinaryarts.about.com/od/seasoningflavoring/a/nitrates.htm
This following article here says turkey meat has nitrate in it http://voices.yahoo.com/is-processed-turkey-healthy-alternative-4847682...., but is more worried about the amount of sodium and doesn’t know what the other two articles know about organic processed meats using celery salt which is nitrate.
With the obvious dangers of incorrect curing, maybe it would be more sensible to just buy a loin of pork, slice it thinly, freeze it separately in individual daily portions and just take out of the freezer and put into the fridge what you will need the following day, and then add a little table salt (with iodine if you don't have thyroid) when you eat it. There is nothing simple anymore. I feel like making my way to my granddaughter's sand pit.

Canadian bacon? I live in Canada and have never heard the term but all the "Canadian brand" bacon I buy is nitrate free. We can also buy "back bacon" which to me is more like English bacon not the streaky rashers. I also trade my organic raised chickens for local pork and my beef comes from the farm next to mine .

Lol! I swear to you, it says canadian bacon right on the package. That is too funny! We all have different terminology. I think rashers would then be what we call regular bacon in the U.S.
Nikki, sounds like you would be the one to give Fab the best advice on a good bacon replacement.

We, too, avoid buying prepared meats with nitrites. We wanted corned beef and couldn't find any without it, so we found a recipe with instructions for corned beef and amended it to make a pot roast that is a suitable flavor replacement. Anyway, the first time I heard of nitrites was in the late 70's when I heard of allergic reactions to a restaurant salad bar that was spraying fresh veggies with a nitrite solution to keep them looking fresh. Just one more reminder of our chemical body burden, isn't it?

Bebe, speaking of chemical body burden, I got my Nena Baker book. Just getting slowly into it now because I have 2 other books in progress at the moment. - Surviving

I wondered about that. They used to spray the 'fresh' produce especially the salad greens in the supermarkets here as well. It puzzled me at the time as water will make such produce rot and reduce to slime quicker. It now sounds like they were doing the nitrite trick. I think the 'Canadian' in the bacon is the maple syrup added to the wet cure.
It reminds me of years back when my Canadian friend visited a supermarket with me and was astounded at the cans of Canadian salmon. He claimed in Montreal all he could buy in his supermarket was
Australian salmon. Our canned salmon now comes from Thailand. Australian salmon is now mostly fresh or smoked.

Fab, after reading that I had to go to the cabinet and see where my canned salmon is from....Alaska.

Surviving, I found the book easier to read than I expected. I love reading. My most recent book was the textbook from my daughter's German culture class. I'm getting ready to order "The Rise of the Warrior Cop" and a biography of H.H. Holmes, the Chicago World Fair (serial) killer, who visited London for an extensive stay during the Jack the Ripper murders.

Hi Fab

Australian salmon in Canada? I do know there have been arguments around the question of importing red salmon into Australia from Canada. It is a biosecurity issue, something about the risk of importing a particular salmon disease into Australia's farmed red salmon stocks. The other thing is that there is a fish called the Australian salmon, which is not actually a salmon species. It is only good for consumption if bled the minute it is taken off the hook (sorry, animal welfare people). It is a great beach angling fish but not normally eaten because the meat becomes tainted by not bleeding it promptly, and why eat Australian salmon when there are much more yummy fish that we can catch for the table. Sadly it all goes into cat food, which I think is criminal when you consider the beauty of this long, fast schooling fish. No wonder we have had so many shark attacks. Perhaps they are getting hungry cos we steal all the salmon. We can also buy canned pink salmon in Australia. Goodness knows what it really is!

I hope someone is not playing a nasty trick on Canadian fish eaters! Or Australian fish eaters either!

Hey, let's not get to perfectionist about what we eat. Food is one of life's pleasures. If we tried hard enough I think we could find a reason, some better than others, for eliminating most things from our diets, except perhaps for organic brown rice. Even that is likely to have a risk of having been contaminated by bacteria. We would then get very thin.

I say, Have a little bacon occasionally. Have a slice of salami. Have a slice of ham. If you can get it from organic, range reared or wild pig, all the better. Just don't eat three rashers every morning. That would be greedy, and you might put on some weight that you don't want to put on. Balance it up with lots of fresh greens and other foods of vegetable origin, or as suggested above, other meats or sources of protein.

We discovered a new, favourite eating out breakfast dish a couple of months ago. It was a bowl of twice-cooked beans in a chillie-spiced tomato sauce, with pulled pork. If you are ever in York, Western Australia, you can buy it at the Jah Roc cafe. I have yet to find it anywhere else. Perhaps I need to come back to the USA and scour the South for it?

Agreed, Louise. My husband is especially susceptible to nitrites and we mostly avoid them, but we eat bacon several times a year as a treat. An old friend told me years ago he had toured a bacon processing facility and would never eat bacon again....but I didn't ask for specifics, because I love bacon.

Talking about new food discoveries, I had an amazing gyro with tzatziki sauce at a shop run by Greek and Albanian gentlemen in Columbus, Ohio, last weekend. It was GREAT! My daughter and son-in-law took us there for their weekend 'cheat'. They are weekday vegans; I think she said they're labeled 'vegan similars'. She is in amazing physical condition, being active during her vitally important formative years with three brothers and having the best appetite of them all. We visited with a trunk full of fresh veggies from the garden for them.

Louise and Bebe, I have been finding trying to find and eat the right foods a very daunting task. If you look up anything on the computer there is always a pro and a con available. I try to see what has scientific evidence behind it, but even find that suspicious at times.
So wonderful about your daughter, Bebe! She sounds like she has it figured out for herself. My daughter has been going through all kinds of different dietary choices, starting with vegetarian, then to vegan, now kind of a paleo thing. She now really thinks organ meats are the true ticket to great health, but she also ordered a bottle of trace minerals to put drops in her water. I am trying to be supportive, but I just can't keep up with the changes. I still truely believe that no matter which type of way you decide to eat, that just cutting out the refined sugar and processed foods is the best thing to do for our bodies, because I know there is junk food in all those diets!
Speaking of cheating, I am mostly a vegetarian, but I sure do like a nice grass fed hamburger on occasion. Yum! Or a bit of fish, and you know, I am still going to go for that ice cream once in awhile!

I thought I would chime in with a comment or two on salmon since I live on the west coast of Canada and salmon /fishing was/is one of our prime industries. Due to over fishing and disease from commerical fish farms the industry is now in trouble. Canadian salmon is still in abundance in our grocery stores but you need to read the label as to where it is from either wild or farmed fish. Any fish from Thailand is a no-no for me. Just watch one of the many youtube videos of the way it is raised and you will never touch any fish product from Thailand again!
One of the nicer things we now have here in some of our local stores is a fish tracking number on each pkg you buy. I can put it in my computer and it will tell me the name of the boat, where it was caught and pkged before being sent to our store.
I am very lucky because I am surrounded by local sources for good healthy food and live on an organic market farm!

They sell gluten free and nitrite free bacon.

Thanks Nikko and Daisy, I haven't found any nitrite (250) free bacon yet. Yes, been worried about the Thai canned fish, but honestly there is little else on the shelves of any of the major supermarkets: we have a duopoly with grocery stores here and the little producer has been squeezed out long ago by demands for cheaper supply. That tracking system you talk about is absolutely amazing. I guess there were good reasons to institute it considering the cost and labour time it would involve. I don't get to organic markets much, but will make the effort because I eat bacon every breakfast. Just have to make sure they are not substituting for the celery salt (claimed natural ingredient) which the article said was actually the same thing. Somewhere else I read said something about if you cook the bacon slowly it was better nitrite wise but I am not clued up enough on science/chemistry/physics or whatever discipline that involves to understand how that would work.

Oh, Aging, I love ice cream too and am cutting way back on it. I find more and more that dairy products make me feel bad. I don't know any other way to put it....just bad. As for trying a lot of different things, herbal supplements have been my favorite. I've finally learned to try samples and check for reactions before I commit to a regimen of any supplement. Some things we keep around to use when we're trying to avoid sinus and ear infections during allergy seasons.

My sons are also learning about nutrition on their own. One, in Japan, is having a great time sampling new cuisine. Another working in the southern heat has researched how to keep hydrated and maintain mineral balance. The one still at home does an extreme workout program and gave me the recipe book that goes with it. (Didn't do him any good, though, giving me the recipes!)

How fortunate you are, Nikko, to have good produce available at home and in local markets. The major grocery chain stores here rarely have ripe, fresh, affordable fruit; and the people here have notoriously poor diet habits. Obesity, heart disease, diabetes is the norm and the hospitals are the biggest businesses and employers around.

Hi Bebe and Fab
I am guessing from your post that you do not live in North America? I am not trying to be nosey ;) but it certainly sounds that I have been very blessed to live here in BC for the last 45 years There are so many things we take for granted. Finding good quality food sounds very challenging for you. I have grandchildren who live on the same property that need to be gluten free and at first that was a challenge but now I mostly bake gluten free with everything and no one else notices the difference.
Would dried fruit, vegetables and nuts be a good alternative for you and can you purchase them from a reliable source.?

I live in the US in Eastern Kentucky near the Ohio River where Kentucky, West Virginia, and Ohio come together. The British celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver, did a television series called Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution based in the nearby city of Huntington, West Virginia, in 2010, featuring the notoriously unhealthy diets and attitudes of many of the people in our area. We like to think we're 'country' people because so many of our ancestors were gardeners or farmers, but the majority of people eat commercial foods and many children have no idea of where food really comes from. That's not so awfully unusual. When we lived in Florida, the standard joke was on asking kids where milk comes from.....milk comes from Publix. One of my complaints is the poor quality of commercial foods and produce and the great expense of organic foods at local markets. The unwillingness of this population to change is another concern, and a general lack of contact with reality is still another.

I should mention that part of our thinking in growing some of our own food is to sort of inoculate ourselves with the local pollution--a kind of homeopathic approach to dealing with environmental pollution. Then we heard about chemtrails and have to wonder how much aluminum we're eating. You can see informative videos on youtube about chemtrails. Shocking stuff.

I like to eat prunes as a sweet treat but hold it down to no more than 5 or 6 at a time. I eat them like raisins; cooked prunes are not appealing. We are growing cantaloupes this year and will have 10 or 11 of them ripening at one time. That probably doesn't sound like much, but my garden is like a sampler. I hear that cantaloupe can be frozen in pieces and I'll try it. I already have several pints of strawberries in the freezer. I also have green beans (Blue Lakes are wonderful), corn, soybeans and tomatoes frozen. I don't think I'll always be able to grow my own; but I think if I changed my eating habits, I could buy better food (less processed and closer to organic) at at least the same cost, eat better (nutritionally), eat less, and be more satisfied. Does that make sense?

I don't think you're nosey. We have a kind of anonymity on the forum that sometimes makes us seem boring and single minded. It's encouraging and interesting to me to catch a glimpse of what other women are able to accomplish.

Bebe