Claire Mysko - Does This Pregnancy Make Me Look Fat?: The Essential Guide to Loving Your Body Before and After Baby

Does This Pregnancy Make Me Look Fat?

Does This
Pregnancy
Make Me
Look Fat?

Claire Mysko and Magali Amade

Health Communications, Inc.
Deerfield Beach, Florida

www.hcibooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mysko, Claire.
Does this pregnancy make me look fat? : the essential guide to loving your body before and after baby / Claire Mysko and Magali Amade.

p. cm.

eISBN-13:980-0-7573-9603-8 eISBN-10:0-7573-9603-8

1. Pregnant womenHealth and hygiene. 2. PregnancyPsychological aspects. 3. Body image in women. 4. Beauty, Personal. I. Amade, Magali. II. Title.
RG525.M97 2009
618.2dc22

2009028272

2009 Claire Mysko and Magali Amade

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

HCI, its logos, and marks are trademarks of Health Communications, Inc.

Publisher: Health Communications, Inc.
3201 S.W. 15th Street
Deerfield Beach, FL 334428190

Cover design by Justin Rotkowitz
Interior design by Lawna Patterson Oldfield
Interior formatting by Dawn Von Strolley Grove
Interior illustrations Monica Martinez

Some names of those interviewed have been changed to protect their privacy.

Contents

The Healthy Beauty Pledge for Mothers and Mothers-to-Be

I promise to...

Acknowledge that there is no such thing as the perfectbody or the perfectmommy.

Never define my self-worth according to the number on the scale or the size of my clothes.

Make decisions that are right for me. They dont have to be right for everyone else.

Ask for help when I need it. Ill make a phone call,write an e-mail, or send a text-whatever it takes to reach out for support.

Take care of myself and take time for myself, even if some days I can only manage one-minute increments.

Separate the retouched, made-up beauty fantasies in the media from what matters most to me in reality.

Work on developing a relationship with food that is about health, nourishment,and enjoyment, not deprivation, indulging,and punishment.

Stop all body-bashing talk with my friends, my colleagues, my partner,my family, and myself.

Give up the mission to get my prebaby body back and start focusing my energy on moving forward in my new life.

Remember that, one person at a time, healthy beauty is a revolution-for ourselves and for our children.

Signed ___________________________________

Lets get something out of the way right now. This book will not tell you how to get your prebaby body back. But dont stop reading yet. Instead, consider if you can relate to any of the following scenarios: A group of female colleagues meet for lunch. When the half-eaten grilled chicken salads are cleared from the table, they agonize over which dessert to share. A fudge brownie plus three spoons adds up to fifteen minutes of discussion about who thinks shes carrying a little extra weight these days and who cant believe shes being so bad by indulging. In a shop downtown, one friend gives another a pep talk through a dressing-room door, offering heartfelt reassurances that its the fluorescent lightsnot her thighsthat are the problem. On the other side of town, a pregnant woman sits in the waiting room of her obstetricians office. Surrounded by tabloid magazines and pamphlets for Botox, she tries to steel herself for the moment shes been dreading all week: stepping on the scale.

As women, we are well-schooled in the language of weight loss and weight gain. Turn on your TV and count the minutes until you see a diet-related commercial. Log on to Facebook and you might find yourself staring at a muffin top ad or a quiz to determine if you are a certifiable lard ass. There is, to put it simply, a lot of noise when it comes to the topic of slenderizing our bodies and the volume gets louder once youre expecting a baby and then adjusting to life as a new mom.

After more than a decade of work as beauty activists, we came to a profound realization: Pregnancy and new motherhood are the times when women go through the most insecurity-inducing body changes and when we have the least support to deal with those changes. By support we dont mean the onslaught of articles that reveal which new mom celebrities fit back in their bikinis in five minutes by just eating healthy, or the mommy makeover specials that are increasingly prevalent on plastic surgeonsWeb sites. Neither of these are on our list of self-esteem boosters.

At the other end of the spectrum are the Bad Mommy Police, who will make women feel incredibly selfish for giving a minutes thought to how we look when we should be showering every ounce of our attention onto our new bundles of joy. Dont worry: There is a middle groundand we will help you find yours, if you are pregnant, considering getting pregnant, or are home with baby.

We first met when Claire was the director of an eating disorders organization, a position she took after finally giving up her dangerous quest to be model-thin. Magali was an internationally renowned model who wanted to reveal the truths she knew about the fashion industrythe rampant retouching, the insane pressures on insanely young models, the difference between the pretty fantasies on those glossy magazine covers and the ugly realities of her real-life eating disorder. We teamed up with the goal of educating and raising awareness. However, as we traveled around the country talking to women, we quickly learned that the main event was not the stories we were sharing, but the stories other women shared with us. Concerned women would fling their hands up in the air and ask what they could say to their friends who werent eating enough. Others lined up to tell us how exasperated they felt after years of yo-yo dieting, or to share their secret behavior that wasnt an eating disorder but something elsesomething they hadnt confessed to anyone until that day. We saw the shame as women hesitated, and then continued with their stories. We recognized that shame because wed felt it ourselves.

Magali got pregnant in 2005 and Claire got married in 2006. Motherhood was no longer some distant role we might someday step into, but something very real. We talked about how strange it was to suddenly find the details of Magalis pregnancy weight gain an acceptable topic of daily discussion at business lunches and among friends, especially after all the years shed invested in shifting her focus away from that number on the scale. We took notice of what other pregnant women and new mothers were talking aboutand what they werent. There was plenty of chatter about how everyone wanted to lose their baby weight and not lose themselves in motherhood, but how were women really coping with those pressures? There were shelves filled with books about work-life balance and op-ed pages devoted to mommy wars and opting out. Where was the thoughtful exploration of how pregnancy and motherhood changes a womans relationship to her body and her sense of beauty and style? Tabloid baby bump-watch covers just werent cutting it for us.

A Silent Majority

S eventy-eight percent of women we surveyed who do not have children yet or do not plan to have children told us they have concerns about how pregnancy and motherhood could change their bodies. Most of them keep those concerns to themselves. Fifty-seven percent said they dont talk about the connections among pregnancy,motherhood, and body image with their friends. Fifty-one percent said they never discuss it with their partners.