Biglaw, Kids, Pregnancy / Paternity

Biglaw Mommy: Losing It

Why is it so difficult for working mothers to lose baby weight? Some thoughts from Mommy Dear, Esq.

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I bet you thought the title of this column referred to some kind of working mommy breakdown. The “It” I’m losing being my patience, or my sanity, or my confidence, or something else equally dramatic. Although I can understand why you might think that, given that indeed, I’m not infrequently losing at least one of those things, you would actually be wrong.

No, things have been far too heavy lately, between feelings of failure and the depressing state of maternity leave in this country. This week, I decided to focus on something “lighter” (pun kind of intended, you’ll see), although in my opinion (and probably the opinion of many other mommies out there) it’s equally worthy of attention and not a few tears. The “It” I’m referring to this week is baby weight.

I truly do not understand how working mothers lose baby weight, unless they’re the lucky women who are just genetically blessed. (Maybe the same women who managed to pull off “skinny pregnant,” the increasingly popular term that refers to the adorable pregnant women who manage to keep their slender arms and legs, don’t develop the puffy pregnant moon face and just have a cute little basketball belly poking out over their yoga pants. Being someone who never had slender arms and legs to begin with, I most certainly did not have this pregnancy experience.) It just seems like there’s always something working against you.

In case any of you readers weren’t aware — I certainly wasn’t, pre-baby — you don’t walk out of the hospital magically back to your pre-pregnancy state. I’m pretty sure I still looked 8 months pregnant when I came home, with feet still as swollen as they were a week before my due date. It takes weeks and weeks for things to even shrink back down, and in those weeks, if you think you’re doing anything like exercising or watching what you eat in an effort to get ahead on the weight loss, think again. As I noted last week, most women are (a) still in pain (or in the case of C-sections, almost completely immobilized for weeks), (b) not sleeping and exhausted, and (c) emotionally drained. Finding the energy to exercise, if it’s even physically possible, actually does feel impossible, and turning down that ice cream at the end of a long day… not happening.

Actually, watching what you eat in the weeks and early months following birth is extremely challenging for a number of reasons. First, there’s the matter of sleep deprivation. Recent studies have linked chronic sleep deprivation with the increase of obesity in the U.S., so it’s no surprise that it would have a similar impact on new mothers. Although it may also have something to do with simply being too tired to exercise, an equal (if not more powerful) culprit is the impact that sleep deprivation has on your appetite and metabolism. When you’re not sleeping, your body needs other fuel, driving you to crave more, higher-calorie food. Seriously, look it up. It’s science. Lack of sleep also impacts your willpower, making it so much harder to maintain the discipline to pass up that ice cream, even though you already had some two hours ago. And, if you’re a breastfeeding mother, you may discover that you have never been so hungry in your life. True, breastfeeding burns a LOT of calories (500-800/day seems to be the common estimate), but your body does not let those calories go easily. You are just so, so hungry.

Eventually things start to regulate themselves and you’re able to get back into a more normal routine. Baby starts sleeping better, you have a little more energy, you don’t crave candy bars 24/7 and you can start to think about getting back into some semblance of shape. And then you go back to work, and it’s a whole new ball game. Remember this famous departure memo, from the Clifford Chance mommy? It’s probably SLIGHTLY exaggerated (Citrix sucks, but doesn’t take half an hour to load), but mostly true. In fact, when work is busy, it eerily mirrors my life, except for the getting up at 5:30 part. No way.

But if you look at that schedule, it’s easy to see that when work is busy, fitting in things like exercise becomes very, very tricky — particularly in places like law firms, where things like “lunch hours” don’t actually exist. I go slightly nuts when people say to me, “Why don’t you just bring workout clothes and go running on your lunch hour?” What lunch hour? One partner always takes lunch from 12:30-2, another doesn’t like to eat before 1:30, another invariably asks you to come by right at noon because she’s busy all morning catching up on email. Associates are lucky to grab lunch when they can, which one day might be at noon and many other days isn’t until 3:30. I have no doubt that if I planned to go running at lunch, I would have just slipped on my sneakers and walked out of the building when an email would come in asking me to come by because the client is on the phone RIGHT NOW. And after explaining why I was coming back to the partner’s office in running clothes, I would try to go again after that call, only to have the other partner return from lunch and look for me, and then after all that, I’d be too hungry to go run.

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So, lunch hour is out, which leads most people to suggest morning workouts. That’s also a great idea in theory, echoed in all those Yahoo articles about “10 Things Successful People Do” (apparently all successful people are early birds who get up at 5 to exercise). I love it, except that if you’re a working mom who leaves early and then starts working again after the baby goes to sleep, often until 11 or 12, and then if your baby doesn’t sleep through the night so you’re up a couple of times between 12-5, and then your alarm goes off at 5 — where does sleep factor in? I don’t care if the “Successful People” have also found a way to survive on 5 hours of sleep a night. For most of us, we really do need 7-8 hours to function well, and new moms already have to accept that they’re probably going to be lucky to get 6. Cutting into that precious little sleep time to exercise just feels like too much to ask.

If serious exercise is also mostly out, at least during the week, then we’re back to eating well. Obviously, we should all strive to eat well. But I found it challenging to eat well while working at a law firm even before I had a baby. Pre-baby days, when work was busy, I ate three meals a day at my desk. That much takeout is never conducive to maintaining a healthy diet. Now, with a baby, I have to be home in the evenings, so in a perfect world I could be cooking healthy meals (and then bring those healthy leftovers for lunch the next day). Except, try cooking when you’re home alone with a mobile baby. Good luck. Pasta it is.

I know that with all the really serious issues facing working mothers, losing baby weight might seem like such a trivial or superficial thing. I would argue that it’s not, for several reasons. One, it can be hard to feel good about yourself when your weight isn’t where you’d like it to be, and this can have a major impact on your confidence and how you project yourself. In a profession like the law, that matters. I’ve definitely found myself in meetings feeling self-conscious about how my suit fits (or doesn’t fit) as compared to other women in the room, which is distracting and unproductive. Although it shouldn’t be the case, I even catch myself second-guessing my opinions and decisions, because I just don’t feel that great about myself. Two, I hate to say this, but we do live in a society (particularly, it seems, in New York and other major metro areas) that is biased favorably towards thinner people, especially in the professional world. Maybe I’m projecting some of my own insecurities here, but I feel like there is a tendency to pass judgment, not just on people who are seriously overweight/obese, but even on those of us who are just less-thin, especially in a place like a law firm where the emphasis is on working hard, discipline and intensity, where it feels like everyone is type-A and imposes the same strictness on their diets and exercise regimes as they do on their work. Others seem to agree with me — this Forbes article from 2012, for example, notes that “weight bias may contribute to the glass ceiling on the advancement of women to the top levels of management.”

And if you need a third reason, how about the fact that work clothes are really freakin’ expensive, especially if you have to wear suits. Replacing a work wardrobe because you haven’t lost the baby weight can cost you hundreds, even thousands of dollars. (Another plug for maternity leave: forcing women to return to work sooner makes it more likely that they’ll have to shell out money for clothes that fit, and I’m betting the women with fewer maternity leave benefits are the ones who will really struggle to spend that money.) Buying new clothes might not be as big a deal as self-esteem or workplace discrimination against heavier people, but it’s certainly not nothing.

So if you’re a working mother struggling to lose your baby weight, know that you’re not alone. There are many, many of us struggling right along with you. Now, please excuse me while I unbutton my pants under my desk. They still don’t fit.

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Mommy Dear, Esq. is a senior Biglaw associate in NYC by day and a new mommy by evening, weekend, and 3:30 a.m. She’s currently trying to “have it all,” “lean in,” and sometimes even cook dinner. Mommy Dear, Esq. is very, very tired. You can email her at mommydearesq@gmail.com.

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