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Update on the Battle Against Stretch Marks and Hints for Losing Baby Weight

by Jessica Stamm

A few days ago I turned 30!  And I’m excited about being 30 for reasons I will explain in another post if Mr. Milk stays asleep long enough for me to enjoy some birthday week blogging.  Last year at this time I was very pregnant and wrote a blog on stretch marks.  I must admit here that I did not escape from pregnancy stretch-mark free – I do have a few souvenirs around my midriff to remind me that my little daredevil baby decided not to “drop” (the term used to describe when the baby moves from kicking you in the ribs constantly to a lower position in your pelvis which makes you waddle like a penguin and is usually a sign that they baby will be born in the coming weeks) until 8 hours before he was born.  So, rather than the gradual drop that most women get to enjoy a week or two before labor, I experienced rapid stretching of the skin as my little boy planned his great escape from my uterus which will cause some stretch marks no matter how much lotion it rubs on its skin.  But they are fading with time (and liberal application of coconut oil) so there is hope.

Stretch marks and all, I’m pleased to share that I’ve been happily sporting a bikini since my first trip to the beach a couple months after the boy was born.  And somehow I’ve managed to lose the baby weight well enough that I don’t have to wear my son as an accessory to explain to other beach goers “it’s baby weight, so stop wondering if I’m still pregnant”.  Don’t get me wrong – I’m no Heidi Klum – but I was able to get back down to my pre-pregnancy weight pretty quickly without turning into a fitness freak mom.  Here are some things that helped me, hopefully they can help you too!

  • If possible, breastfeed.  Breastmilk contains about 20 calories per ounce, and with Mr. Milk drinking an estimated 40 ounces of milk daily I’m burning 800 calories extra calories a day doing nothing but sitting on the couch!
  • Eat lots of healthy fat.  The term “lots” may mean different things to different people (gauge it by how you feel when you eat healthy fat) but to me this is about 6 tablespoons of extra fat daily in the form of butter, cream, coconut oil, avocado, and olive oil on top of a base diet of foods rich in healthy fat such as fatty fish, eggs, shellfish, organic cheese, and grassfed meat.  Eating healthy fat helps your body to get rid of extra fat pounds and has the added benefit of making sure your baby is getting all the good brain fats from your milk.
  • Eat enough protein.  This helps your body to build muscle mass, repair from birth, and keep your hormones at healthy levels to prevent postpartum depression.  A good general marker is to eat the number of grams that is equal to half your body weight in pounds.  For example, a woman who is 120 pounds should eat about 60 grams while someone who is 160 pounds should eat about 80 grams a day.  If you are under more stress or are very active you may need more protein to help conserve muscle mass.  Also, if you have kidney problems then you may need less protein (ask your doctor).  To give you an idea of the protein content of foods, an egg contains 7 grams of protein, a large chicken breast or hamburger patty contains about 30 grams, a 3 oz. piece of fish contains about 20 grams, and a cup of beans contains about 15 grams.
  • Eat small meals all day (and night, if you’re up and you’re hungry).  This one is easy to do with a newborn because unless you have a live-in nanny or your mom lives next door you probably won’t be sitting down to three big meals a day for a while!
  • Drink lots of water.  Again, amounts vary but drink enough that your urine is light yellow (even if it is fluorescent from vitamins) and your milk (if breastfeeding) flows freely.  It’s easy to mistake thirst for hunger and overeat the wrong kinds of foods as a response.  I have found that drinking out of a huge cup or quart-sized mason jar with a straw helps me drink enough water through the day to keep up with demand.
  • Take the baby for walks.  This was especially helpful for me in the weeks after Mr. Milk was born because I needed to get out of the house!

So that’s it!  It’s not rocket science but it worked (and was about all I could handle as a new mom figuring out how to care for my new creature).  If any of you have tips for losing baby weight please share them in the comments section!

September 27, 2010   3 Comments

Winning the Epic Battle Against Stretch Marks

by Jessica Stamm

Tomorrow is my birthday!  I will be 29 years old and on that magical day I will also be exactly 6 months pregnant, which puts me into my third trimester (though I’m still confused as to how 40 weeks splits evenly into 3 trimesters, someone please enlighten me).  For my birthday I decided (among several other more thoughtful and less superficial birthday wishes) that I want a pregnancy with no stretch marks.  Which of course makes it hard for buying me a gift, but I’ve been doing research that hopefully will help more of you than just the “smug pregnant women” who may be reading this blog.  

Everyone is prone to stretch marks, especially teens and people who are in quick phases of growth or weight gain.  Men get stretch marks too – especially those who are on workout programs that cause them to build muscle fast.  Of course, male stretch marks on their arms because their arms just got too big for their body way too fast are still more charming than the stretch marks many of the women I know (myself included) share because hormones just made our thighs get bigger faster than our poor teenage skin could handle.  But it’s worth it because like my mom used to say, “You’ll never be in a rap video if certain body parts don’t grow so fast that it creates microtears in your skin.”  Okay, she didn’t say that but I hope I’ll be the kind of mom that says that to my teenage daughter.
Stretch marks are caused by microtears in the second layer of the skin created when it stretches too rapidly.  Hence the name stretch marks.  When these tears heal and repair, they sometimes leave silvery lines of scar tissue or if tiny amounts of blood leaked into the tears, the healing scar tissue may be a dark or purplish color.  Here is some of the information I have found for preventing and even reversing existing stretch marks:
  • Proper stretching and healing of skin is dependent on zinc.  This is part of the reason that teens are so prone to stretch marks.  Yes, they are growing really fast but they are also in a time of hormonal change, stress, and a tendency to eat more sugar and generally less nutritious food overall (at least when Mom is not looking) – all of which contribute to loss of zinc.  Pregnancy is also a time of loss of zinc because that little parasite growing in your womb is taking it!  In fact, over 80% of pregnant women worldwide are estimated to have inadequate zinc levels.  Modern day low-fat and low-meat diets have greatly contributed to loss of zinc from the general population.  To learn more about zinc and see a list of zinc rich foods, visit the Linus Pauling Micronutrient Information Center.  If you are too lazy to do that, then I’ll just tell you that to get zinc in your diet, eat oysters, beef, and dark meat poultry.  Vegetarians can include milk, almonds and spirulina but may want to think seriously about adding a zinc supplement or at least a multi that is rich in zinc (15 mg or more daily).
  • Stretch marks can be prevented and reversed with topical zinc preparations.  Most expensive creams and lotions intended for stretch mark and scar reversal usually contain zinc oxide as one of their active ingredients.  Here is the beautiful thing I discovered last week at the drug store – Extra Strength Desitin, the diaper rash ointment, contains 40% zinc oxide!  And it’s only like $6 for a tube.  Needless to say, I bought a tube of it and have started using it on my belly to make sure the skin that is somehow going to stretch to unbelievable lengths will have enough zinc to do so.  I haven’t gone super overboard on this, as the cream contains some preservatives that I’m not too excited about (namely BHT, which is also a food preservative so it can’t be TOO horrible) but half a teaspoon or less is plenty to get a good coat on.  And the cream smells okay to me, but for my poor husband it just brings back memories of changing his little brothers’ diapers.  Maybe not what you want to be associated with when you’re climbing into bed for the evening!
  • Hydrated skin stretches more easily than dehydrated skin.  I realize I am beginning to sound like Johnny One Note with my desire to make sure people are hydrated so I will just leave this bullet point at that.  Hydrated skin stretches and is less likely to tear.  So drink water.
  • Coconut oil prevents stretch marks and helps fade existing stretch marks.  I know – you are in shock and awe that I have worked coconut oil into this blog.  But it’s true!  I couldn’t find an actual study on coconut oil and stretch marks, but living here in Hawaii I have heard tons of anecdotal evidence from women of all shapes and sizes saying that coconut oil applied daily after showering prevented stretch marks.  Also, several women had stretch marks from previous pregnancies and they noticed that these marks faded after using coconut oil.  One reason coconut oil works better than other oils is that it is able to penetrate the skin to moisturize deeper layers of skin and prevent scar formation.  Jojoba oil also has this property, but I prefer coconut oil personally because it is so heat stable (in other words, it can sit in my hot bathroom for months and I don’t have to wonder if it’s gone rancid) and it is less expensive per ounce than jojoba.   
So that’s my research.  Hopefully it will help you in the fight against stretch marks.  I should design a ribbon or one of those ridiculous rubber bracelets for the Stretch Mark Awareness fund.  Maybe a rubber band would do – they’re stretchy!  And then I can charge you $10 to buy my rubber band bracelet to help support stretch mark awareness worldwide.  Feel free to mail me a check if you want to participate and I will send you back an old and tired rubber band.  It is my birthday, after all!

September 23, 2009   6 Comments

Life Update

by Jessica Stamm

I realize it has been over a month since my last blog post and in the world of blogging that is way too long!  I have a great excuse for slacking on writing though (actually two great excuses) – I’m pregnant and we’re moving to Hawaii.  Yes, as if one large life change wasn’t enough, everyone’s favorite bossy nutritionist now finds herself in the middle of two.  But what’s life without a little excitement?

Overall, I must say I am very thankful for how things are going with the pregnancy.  I just finished my first trimester and have had no morning sickness, very little fatigue, and no real food aversions which makes life much happier while in the midst of packing one’s life into a POD and shipping it over the ocean.  I promise I won’t turn this into a pregnancy blog since that would only appeal to a portion of you dear readers, but you will be able to look forward to blogs along the lines of:
  • Nutritional support for stress (also known as “Where are the B vitamins???  Did I pack the B vitamins in the POD or in my suitcase?  Honey, have you seen the B vitamins?  If I lose one more thing to day I am going to freak out!!!”) 
  • Creative ways to blog using a laptop when your abdomen is housing another human
  • Nutritional remedies for stretch marks
as well as such classics as “I’m now in my second trimester so you have to read anything I write and say that you really enjoyed it because that’s what the baby wants you to do.”
So there’s the update!  Thanks for reading and I’ll be writing more soon.

July 10, 2009   No Comments

The Amazing Benefits of Coconut Oil

by Jessica Stamm


Anyone who knows me or has heard me lecture knows that I am a little over the top in my excitement about the amazing healing properties of coconut oil.  That said, it should come as no surprise that when I suffered two minor life-threatening injuries last week (I burned my thumb while trying to devour shrimp scampi directly out of a hot pan and then cut the other thumb while filing paperwork) I immediately turned to coconut oil to help me recover.  For each dramatic (and did I mention life threatening?) injury I dabbed a little bit of coconut oil onto the burn or cut after I had washed it with soap, put a bandaid over it (a Tinkerbell bandaid, to be specific) and within 24 hours I had completely soft skin with no blisters or scars.  Don’t act like you’re not impressed!

When eaten, coconut oil offers benefits including improved thyroid function, weight loss, anti-viral and immune support, and liver detoxification (for more info, see the book The Coconut Oil Miracle (Previously published as The Healing Miracle of Coconut Oil).  In addition to all of these benefits, coconut oil can also be used topically for:
  • First Aid to prevent scars and infection
  • Prevention of stretch marks 
  • Diaper rash
  • Sexual lubricant (this works really well for menopausal women or those on non-latex forms of birth control but please don’t use it if you’re relying on latex for birth control since any kind of oil will cause latex to degrade)
  • Curly hair or dry ends (keep away from roots unless  they are extremely dry or you’re looking for that “haven’t showered for 10 days” greasy look)


What I do is buy coconut oil online in bulk so I can use it for cooking and other household needs.  It doesn’t need to be organic (coconuts don’t need a lot of pesticide application to grow) and if you don’t particularly like a coconut flavor in cooking, then don’t buy the extra virgin variety.  This is the first press of coconut and will have more of that flavor than the later presses.  The only thing you really need to watch out for when buying coconut oil is that you aren’t buying a hydrogenated product, which will pretty much negate any benefits of coconut oil because it has been processed to contain trans fats (I’ll post a scientific rant on trans fats and some point on this blog).  It should say on the side of the bottle whether the coconut oil is hydrogenated or not.  Any brand of coconut oil will do as long as it is not hydrogenated – just look around and see what you can find for a good price.  Here is a nice and inexpensive one I found online:  

 

Once I get the coconut oil in, I divide it out into small jars or other screw-top containers and leave them around the house as needed for moisturizer or lip balm (melt it and add a few drops of essential oil in for a nice smell) and for first aid for situations like the ones I found myself in last week.  I know my injuries were not as exciting as they could have been, but I have known people who had 2nd degree burns and were able to heal with no scars by using coconut oil on the burn site.  No kidding!  

If you have a coconut oil story to share, I’d love to hear it!  Please post it in the comments section.


June 3, 2009   3 Comments

Homemade Body Butter

by Jessica Stamm

CB107516I love the body butter that I buy at the Body Shop but it is expensive and has a few questionable ingredients, so once I ran out of it I decided to make a homemade version.  I kept the body butter container, washed it out, and poured into it a combination of gently melted coconut oil (about 8 ounces) and my favorite essential oils (about 30 drops).  Swirl this mix a few times so the ingredients blend together, then store in a cool place until the coconut oil solidifies. 

This stuff works great as a moisturizer or lip balm with the added benefits of nourishing the skin, preventing scars, reducing the visibility of existing scars, and preventing stretch marks.

March 6, 2009   2 Comments