Gwen Stefani with 4-month-old Zuma Nesta Rock (I cannot hear that name and not immediately think Zima. I’m sure she did not mean it but her baby will forever be linked to a much-mocked adult beverage.) If this is “gross, big and uncool” sign me up!
Gwen Stefani is hot. I think everyone, regardless of gender or orientation, can agree on this one. I have long loved the blond bindi-sporting No Doubt singer – their Tragic Kingdom album is still in my top ten list of albums that most affected me – so I was a little torn when I came across this quote from an interview she did with contactmusic.com:
“I hadn’t planned on doing a tour; I’d had Zuma, I felt so gross – I got so big and felt so out of touch and not cool. I was trying to write this cool record and nothing came out.”
On one hand I can totally understand pregnancy making you feel not like yourself but on the other hand did the post-pregnancy weight really make her so “gross, out of touch and uncool” that she could no longer write music? Really?? This topic of one’s weight affecting their whole sense of self came up in a slightly different way at a book club I recently attended while visiting my sister Laura last week (Miss you like Jell-O popcorn!!).
Maryam, a 30-year-old group fit teacher with impossibly beautiful auburn hair and a super-fit figure, shared a story that I think most women can relate to whether or not they’ve ever been pregnant. She is the mom to three adorable children and after her last one was born, she returned to teaching a mere 8 weeks later. As she explains,
“When I received that phone call from my boss asking me to come back, I had a very basic decision to make: Was I willing to endure the humiliation of standing overweight center-stage in front of my fit participants and proceed to lead them through a vigorous work out? Was I even fit enough to keep up myself?”
None of my fitness gear fit. I had to go shopping for some seriously baggy clothing. Don’t even mention the multiple layers of Spandex I had to employ to ensnare my extremely buxom nursing bosom. The first few classes were brutal. I’m the type of instructor who does the entire work out with my participants but alas, I had no strength. No core strength. No upper body strength. My legs were weak. I felt like an utter failure when I could only hold my plank for 25 seconds.Reliving this experience, it all sounds like a really bad idea and a sure let down formy class participants. But something really cool happened. I connected with them in a way I previously had not. Many of them attended my classes before the pregnancy and were happy to have me back. But even more than that, they were opening up to me on a much more personal level because they could identify with my struggle to become fit again.”
The part that really stuck with me was not the part about trying to wrangle nursing boobs into multiple sports bras – although that is both true and hilarious – but the fact that her class participants loved her more after her puke-tastic pregnancy and weight gain. They didn’t care about her jiggly parts, they cared about her and her willingness to share her struggles.
And Maryam isn’t the only one. I recently got to see this played out in the flesh when Turbo Jennie returned to teaching TurboKick this past week six weeks after giving birth to the cutest little peanut ever. I don’t think Cher’s (eleventieth) comeback tour gets people as excited as we all were for Turbo Jennie to return.
When people ask me why I wrote my book I usually say something like, “Well I’d just had my third baby and like many new moms I wanted to get back in shape…”
But that day, my sister shot back with, “Charlotte, pregnancy is a shape. And so is being post-partum. They’re different ‘shapes’ of you but they’re still you and they are all normal and healthy.”
She’s right. Pregnancy is not a disease and pathologizing child-bearing is insulting. It isn’t something you overcome, it’s something you experience. And the really cool thing about being female is we have this whole sisterhood to experience it with.
The media may tell us – and Gwen Stefani may even have believed it (temporarily I hope) – that weight gain, pregnancy or otherwise, robs you of your self and the only way to be loved is to get “high school skinny” again but I think we women know better. Even if we do complain a little bit about not being able to fit in our old jeans yet (ok, some of us complain a lot) we recognize the beauty that is in other women, regardless of their stretch marks or pants size or squishy bellies. Hopefully someday we’ll even learn to love them – and ourselves – because of them. It’s the evidence of our journey; the stories of our lives written on our very skin.
Like Gwen, have you ever been held back from doing something you love because of how you feel about your weight? Or are you like Maryam and TurboJennie? Have you ever had a fitness instructor that you loved even more because he/she chose to share their struggles with you rather than hide them?
PS. A huge thank you to all of you who have taken the time to share your stories with me through comments here or e-mail. I have a file folder in my e-mail where I keep them all! No, not to write about or use here (I will ALWAYS ask you before reprinting anything you send me) but rather because I just love reading them. I love being a part of your lives.
Written with love by Charlotte Hilton Andersen for The Great Fitness Experiment (c) 2011. If you enjoyed this, please check out my new book The Great Fitness Experiment: One Year of Trying Everything