Ways to [Not] Lose Your 43 Pounds of Baby Weight

1. Breastfeeding. Breastfeeding, depending on your genetic makeup, can apparently turn you into a blast-furnace for calories. For a certain percentage of the population, it will instead turn you into an elderly Eastern European woman who uses her mighty calves to push plows across the frozen steppes.

2. “Chasing your baby around.” You give it a shot, on the advice of numerous skinny celebrities, but wind up sort of pacing in a circle around her as she lies immobile on your floor, staring at you. This will probably work better once she can crawl.

3. Not caring. You are a beautiful Earth Mother. You love your body. You love everyone’s body! Join hands, and take part in the Circle Game. This one lasts for about three months, and then Earth Mother gets really tired of wearing fraying maternity jeans and her jammies to the store.

4. After the baby weans, your usual half-assed Paleo thing, which has allowed you to maintain a weight about thirty pounds under your body’s natural frozen-steppe inclinations for several years.

5. After that fails, a sensible calorie-controlled diet combined with brisk walking.

6. Intuitive Eating. Okay, your inability to surrender to Intuitive Eating is not really the fault of Intuitive Eating. Intuitive Eating is like karaoke and no-poo hair maintenance. You have to commit, or it’s a hot mess.

7. A remarkably expensive juice cleanse. Such a sensible plan! It certainly doesn’t spike your blood sugar and turn you into a tweaker. You can see the muuuusic!

8. That stupid Clean thing that Gwenyth never shuts up about. Not only does it not work, you begin to dream about the faces of the numerous children in the developing world that you could have bought millet for with the money spent on #7 and #8.

9. How would Buffy lose her baby weight? Internet research suggests an organic, flash-frozen meal delivery service out of Los Angeles. So much millet. Bags of millet. Millet and clean water and tampons.

10. Not caring. I mean, we’re not in the Earth Mother, body-loving stage of not caring anymore. This is the sullen, embittered stage. Whatever, universe. Hope you like frayed maternity jeans and stretched-out yoga pants.

Ways to Actually Lose Your Baby Weight:

1. Be about six months postpartum. Experience a natural hormonal shift while eating normally. Everything gravitates back into its usual orbit with a sudden slurping sound. Make immense penitential donation of millet to the developing world.