Blog From A Broad

newsflash: real pregnant women get fat

So I was flipping through my weekly supply of high brow popular literature and came across an article about Geri Halliwell (Ginger Spice). Accolades were given for Geri's fabulous post-baby body, a mere four weeks after giving birth! She's in her size 8 (that's a US size 6, kids) skinny jeans already. Nancy wossername who's married to Vic Reeves is also incredibly thin after giving birth days ago to - wait for it - twins! And apparently Katie Holmes has hired a personal trainer in a desperate bid to return to her pre-pregnancy figure for her wedding. Aren't they fabulous?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

For the love of water retention and fat stores for breastfeeding, please stop publishing articles like this. Women have a distorted sense of body image as it is; we don't need the media to tell us that fat is bad even after just giving birth. What normal woman has a perfectly flat tummy less than a month after giving birth, particularly after a c-section? Where are our priorities when our biggest concern as a new mother is getting back into skinny jeans?

There's been a recent magazine spread showing a certain celebrity in all her pregnant glory, but she's been airbrushed within an inch of her life. Surely even she must have stretchmarks (especially as this is her second child in less than a year) and rolls of fat. Instead she looks like she's been modelled out of styrofoam and sprayed with a fine mist of bronzing powder. You can't even see her c-section scar, despite the shot of her in nothing but a strategically placed sheepskin. They've erased all evidence of a previous birth and edited out any signs of a current pregnancy, except for the bump. It's like pregnancy in the movies (or my personal favourite, the gravity-defying bump in "Lost") where perfect bodies strap on a prosthetic belly, and remain fashionable and gorgeous.

In reality, pregnancy is like filling your body with lumpy cottage cheese and 50 litres of olive oil, drawing a relief map of the Himalayas with a purple marker pen on 90% of your body, blowdrying your hair until it resembles burnt grass, using those comedy binoculars that leave black rings around your eyes, planting hair follicles in strange and surprising locations, inflating your hands/feet/face with a bicycle pump like a Peking duck, and boobs that skim the surface of your navel. With a bump.

I would pay big money to see that celebrity picture.