This book was recommended to me by my good friend M-, who has at least a brown belt in karate and is also a professor and so into researching everything. I am a little wary of postpartum exercise books right now – the one dvd I tried didn’t seem to differ much from a standard exercise dvd, and there are a lot of books out there to help you start dieting as soon as you get out of the hospital. A very bad idea, in my opinion, since you need the weight to breastfeed and (at least in my case), it went magically away on its own. Even if it doesn’t, I don’t think right after giving birth is the time to start fasting. Anyway, the first time I saw this book, I misread the title as “Love your Mummy Tummy.” I was all prepared to love it because of that, since my mummy tummy stubbornly persists despite my lack of fat, according to the scale. Then I got frustrated, but now that I’ve actually read it, I love it anyway.

Lose Your Mummy Tummy by Julie Tupler She’s hoping to hook you on the vanity of having a flat tummy, but the real purpose of the exercises in this book are medical. The goal is to correct a diastases, or muscle separation, which occurs in 98% of mothers. This separation lets the organs hang out, creating that lovely “mommy pooch” so many of us know and try to love. She’s got a lot of exercises, some to do while nursing or driving, a 15- and a 30-minute exercise routine (no unreal expectation of a whole hour to devote to fitness!), and lots of things to do to use your body more gently during everyday life. (There’s some nice correspondence with the Alexander Technique here, which is nice and familiar for me.) There’s a dvd, too, which I haven’t seen yet, but hope to soon. Tupler has the creds, too – she’s an RN, a trained doula, and a mother. This is a beautiful, focused and practical book.