Tell me I’m not the first person to have gained weight while having a child! Sure, most birth mothers gain weight during a pregnancy. How about us adoptive mothers? I think that “baby weight gain” is something that, at times, plagues adoptive mothers also.

I have three birth children. I was extremely ill during pregnancies and actually lost weight rather than gained. With each child, after the birth, I put on weight. My birth baby recently turned 10yrs old and I still joke that my problem is “just baby weight”. What about with adoption, then?

As my family size has increased, so has my weight. In talking with several other moms, more than half experienced the same thing. The commonality leads me to believe that there may be something to the term “adoption weight gain”.

There is a proven connection between stress and weight gain. Anyone who has adopted a child knows that the stress load in both pre- and post- adoption is considerable! Often, we are too busy to eat right and too busy to exercise efficiently. As we, rightfully so, switch a huge focus onto the child, it is easy to forget to take care of ourselves. If there are problems with the child or with the adoption, this can be incredibly exacerbated. I mean, efforts to find help for kids becomes somewhat of a life and death struggle. Compared to a “silly little aerobics class”, our health, once again, gets pushed onto a back burner.

Sometimes a need to relax our nutrition standards comes in to play. One pizza dinner while I get this taken care of won’t be the end of healthy eating for the whole family, right?

If you are a mom who is switching from full time employment to full time momhood, there can be weight gain associated with that. First of all, walking past the refrigerator thirty times a day can be a new habit to get used to! Secondly, kid snacks are tasty! They come in cute little shapes, tiny little packages – and a little package of any very cute little foods never hurt a person, right? The truth is that really healthy foods take a lot longer to prepare – and are more often shunned by a kid – than a chocolate teddy bear cookie.

In an internet search, I learned that I am really not alone in my experiences. To hear it told on the forums and sites I happened on, I’m more the norm than the exception. Perhaps the prevalence of post-adoption depression is a big contributor.

What should we do about this “adoption weight” then? A photo of myself will prove that I do not have all of the answers. But, I think we moms need to make our health a priority. Physical exercise helps our bodies function better, reduces stress and depression, and changes chemical structures in our brain and body to lift our spirits and make us better moms. These amazing blessings we’ve adopted deserve moms who model taking time to take care of themselves!

More blog reading:
Post Adoption Depression
Weight and Energy
Get Fit
Post-adoption pounds syndrome