London - This made me laugh: it takes the average woman one year and seven months to lose her baby weight, according to a new survey. Is that right?
Well clearly I never got that memo, because my youngest is nine (that’s years, not months) and I’m still carrying my jelly belly baby.
Pregnancy weight, and how quickly a woman does or doesn’t lose it, is one of those eternally fertile subjects.
In celebrity-land, the approved time frame in which someone is expected to “snap back” (such an unpleasant turn of phrase) seems to be getting ever smaller.
Katie Price, for example, who recently gave birth to a small human she has decided to name, inexplicably, Bunny, is the reigning queen of the snap-back. Barely hours after Bunny’s birth, Price was posting snaps of her unfeasibly flat belly on the internet.
The Duchess of Cambridge, too, doesn’t mess around. Nor did Victoria Beckham (although everyone rather cruelly said she’d had a tummy tuck after the C-sections, but I can’t believe any responsible surgeon would agree to such a thing).
Admittedly all these women are highly motivated to regain their shape.
But the reality is, whether or not you lose the baby weight is only partly a question of hard work and dedication; there are myriad other factors to take into account, too.
Truth is, it’s easier for some than it is for others. Any random sample of mothers will tell you that. For some women, pregnancy and childbirth rarely makes a kink; for others, it can do irreversible damage.
That’s why these surveys are so destructive (this latest one was by a parenting website).
New mothers are a slightly nutty, vulnerable lot at the best of times.
They have quite enough to cope with without idiotic surveys telling them how long it should take them to lose the baby weight.
Some women never lose it all. And that is nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, it may even be nature’s way.
After all, motherhood changes us all for good. Why shouldn’t that fact be reflected in the way we look? - Daily Mail