Being pregnant for nine months is one of the wildest experiences you can have. Your body is constantly changing and your organs are literally shifting around to make room for the baby growing in your tummy. When you envision it like that, it’s very obvious that your body isn’t just going to snap back to how it was when you give birth, and some parts of it might stay altered forever. However, it’s important for new moms to adjust and feel good in their bodies, and here is how to do just that.
Fall in love with your new shape
Some parts are stretched out, others are soft, and there are stretch marks almost all over. But this doesn’t mean that your body isn’t beautiful and that you can’t love the new shapes you have. Just think about how soft your tummy feels to your baby when they lay on you and fall asleep. How soft your skin feels to the touch, even if there’s more of it than “there should be”. Your new tiger stripes are a reminder of a life that grew inside of you, and it’s like your child’s signature on your body. We’ve been told that a woman’s body is “ruined” after pregnancy, but it’s just as beautiful as it was before, only different. You don’t have to worry about every single piece of your body being “perfect”, because you have more important things to think about, and if you could see yourself through the eyes of your child, you’d see how beautiful you are to them.
Do what feels good
It is perfectly okay to want to change something about your body. And after your kids are grown up, there comes a time when you might want to reclaim your identity as more than just a mother. Toning up your body to look as it did before pregnancy is a way to do that. However, you might need professional cool sculpting to get to this point, because your body changed in more ways than just gaining weight, and fitness alone isn’t enough to get it back to how it was. You can also lift up your breasts if you’ve been breastfeeding and they’ve sunk a little bit, as well as remove some of the stretch-marks with microneedling or a similar technique. Remember that just like having a post-partum body doesn’t make you less of a woman, reversing those changes doesn’t make you less of a mother. You have the right to have a body you like and you’re proud of, and if that means toning it up, then that’s what you should do.
Practice body love in front of your child
One of the main ways children start developing body-consciousness issues is through their parents, who openly dissect their bodies in front of their children. If you stand up every morning in front of the mirror, look at your stomach and complain how it isn’t flat and your child sees that – they will internalize it and think that there is something wrong with them if their stomach isn’t flat. Make sure your child sees your body as it is and sees you accepting it and accepting them. Explore the different ways bodies can look and the shapes they can take together, and your child might be the person who helps you see your body in a different way.
Feeling beautiful is a different story for each person. While some will instantly be fine with the new body they have, others will need time to adjust and accept it and some will want to change it back. No method is better or worse than the other, and we should all do what feels right to make sure we are comfortable in the skin we live in.
