Jessica Alba loves...and then hates...the ways she looks post-baby

Jessica Alba has revealed to GQ that she loves her post-baby body: “My breasts are saggy, I’ve got cellulite, my hips are bigger, but I love it.” In the same breath, however, she then says “Every actress out there is more beautiful than me. All better looking than me. I’ve seen them without makeup, so I know.”

*Sigh*

Kourtney Kardashian passes out trying to lose baby weight

Oh Kourtney, silly girl.

Well, it wasn't so long ago that Kourtney Kardashian (KK) was banging on about how quickly she lost her baby weight in Life & Style mag. According to New York Daily News, if you watched Sunday's episode of Kourtney and Khloe Take Miami, you would have seen the physical costs associated with her extreme dieting.

In the episode, Kourtney is running and finds herself passed out, having eaten nothing for the day (in anticipation of the upcoming Life & Style photo shoot).

"I've been obsessing about this weight thing a little too much," she says. "I'm so embarrassed that I punished my body for a photo shoot."

Well, I guess we can all thank Kourney for admitting that her post-baby weight loss wasn't as easy as it is portrayed on the magazine. On the other hand, it makes me so sad that rational human beings can be forced into going to ridiculous lengths to look good for the media. All of the working out and dieting she did was probably for nothing considering so many of the images we see are airbrushed anyway!

Bethenny Frankel: the ultimate post-baby 'skinny girl'

Kendra does Ok! (again), debuts post-baby bod

Okay so I have a few things to say:

1) Surprise, surprise. Kendra is on the cover of Ok! again. I think she must be on contract with them.

2) ALLEGEDLY, she's lost 25lbs in 8 wks (that is, she gave birth 8 WEEKS AGO) after gaining 55lbs during her pregnancy AND having a caesarean.

How has she done it?

Kendra says she’s doing “45 minutes of hardcore training and weightlifting” followed by running and walking on a treadmill until she’s tired.

How has she really done it?
Crash dieting and ridiculous eating regimens (or perhaps by eating regimens I should say not-eating regimens). Everyone knows that you're supposed to wait about 6 wks post-caesar before exercising, which she clearly hasn't done. And hello? What about breastfeeding? If in fact, she is breastfeeding, losing that much weight so quickly can't be good.

Is anyone else sick of this? FOR REALS. I haven't even had a flipping baby and already I'm feeling the pressure.

Say bye bye to bras?

OMG. So I went to Phuket, Thailand in 2008 for a story that I writing for a magazine here in Melbourne. I watched some Aussie mums have post-baby breast implants and, let me tell you, it looked pretty gosh darn painful.

Apparently, there's a new surgery using Breform which is a breast enhancement that functions like a sports bra under the skin or as the manufacturer says it's an 'internal bra system' (yikes, a 'system'...sounds like a machine from the future). The benefit of this new technology is that it prevents the skin from stretching or sagging unlike traditional implant surgery. The Breform is made of a special mesh which, upon being placed underneath the skin, will over time become incorporated into the breast tissue.

The Breform has been licensed in Europe but the USFDA says it will be about 10 years before Breform is approved; it needs to undergo lots of testing but preliminary studies show that it's pretty safe thus far. In spite of the good results, some experts are concerned that the Breform will be dangerous or present a cancer risk for pregnant or breastfeeding women whose breasts might outgrow the internal bra.

Hmm. Impants that leak or mesh that you can potentially outgrow? Can you think of anything worse?

Photo credit: www.Breform.com

Kourtney Kardashian calls Ok! fake

It's not everyday that I want to give mad props to Kourtney Kardashian. For those of you who may have forgotten, she gave birth to her first son Mason in December. Kourtney has come out with guns blazing, stating publicly that the Ok! magazine cover which features she and her new son with an accompanying story about her post-baby weight loss secrets is all talk and no truth.

Kardashian told WWD that not only was she never interviewed for the Ok! story in the first place, the photo that appears on the cover is actually a photo taken seven days after Mason's birth by Albert Michael of StarTraksPhoto.com. The cover image has been touched up to make Kardashian appear thinner on OK’s cover than in the original photo, which first appeared as part of the Jan. 11 issue of Life & Style.

As the original image (on the left) shows only Kardashian's upper body, Ok! clearly took it upon themselves to reconstruct the lower half of her body for the cover photo. Kourtney even tweeted about the retouch:

"One of those weeklies got it wrong again...they didn't have an exclusive with me. And I gained 40 pounds while pregs, not 26...But thanks!"

I'm really happy that a celebrity actually has admitted to the absolutely ridiculous body abominations that are regularly appearing in the tabloids. It's bad enough that new mums feel that they have to compete with celebrities to drop their baby weight, but when the post-baby bodies that are slapped around the weeklies are also being re-touched (and literally fabricated) to the hilt, it makes you realise that it actually is impossible to achieve the body shapes featured in the magazines.

Good on you Kourtney for coming clean!

Looks like the secret to post-baby weight loss isn't diet and exercise. It's Photoshop

Octomum flaunts her post-baby bod

Wow! So we all know that Star isn't the most reliable of sources but in this cases, pictures don't lie. Nadya Suleman (aka Octomum) is looking unbelievable since giving birth to her babies just one year ago. She claims there was no plastic surgery involved and apparently has no stretch marks in spite of going from 270 lbs to 120 lbs post-birth. Can't say I love the idea of parading around in a bikini for a crappy tabloid photo shoot but if she really did it without surgery, well...dang!

Love your cervix

Have you ever wondered what your cervix looks like? How about after you've given birth?

Then you MUST check out The Beautiful Cervix Project created by a student midwife. This is an ode to being a woman, where cervixes aren't objects of a medical gaze, but objects of beauty in their own right. The creator not only photographed her own cervix throughout her menstrual cycle, but also has loads of photos of cervixes at different stages of life.

Octomum drops her weight

Photo credit: splashnewsonline.com

Holy mother of octuplets! Have you seen Octomum!?

Like a pregnant version of a linebacker, Nadya hit 270lbs during her pregnancy and now she's back into her pre-baby jeans after a weight loss of 145 lbs without a trainer or surgery.

Losing 40 pounds immediately after delivering her octuplets, Suleman says she felt compelled to join a local gym after their birth. There, she fits in thrice-weekly midnight workouts (while a nanny watches over her sleeping children) with strength training but no cardio. "I get enough of that with the kids," Suleman, who gets by on three hours of sleep, tells Us.

Well, can't say that working out at midnight seems very healthy but I suppose it's better than dropping straight into the plastic surgeon's office.

Losing weight is a 'cinch': puke

Apparently, losing your baby weight is now a 'cinch' thanks to a modern-day corset thing by Anew that allows post-baby mums to 'look fit' without actually getting 'fit'. Sort of like another expensive version of Spanx so you can shrink your waist and your wallet without actually losing anything in between.

Not sure how I feel about this. The product website has this slogan 'Achieve your balance, Anew your life' sort of implying that if you can have a slimmer waist, somehow your life will be transformed. I think for most women, as 'empowering' as fitting into your pre-pregnancy clothes may be, what really needs to be addressed are the life-altering changes that come with motherhood. It's never really about the weight. The weight is just an easy place to focus your anxiety. A corset isn't going to solve your problems and hiding the extra weight is really only a temporary cure.

Heidi 'letting it all hang out'

"The great thing about being pregnant and going to these things is that I don’t have to suck my stomach in,” the supermodel and Project Runway host told PEOPLE at Los Angeles Confidential’s pre-Emmy party. “It’s fabulous! I can let it all out.”

And let it out she did...in a fabulous party frock just a few weeks out from the birth of her fourth child. I can imagine that being pregnant for a supermodel has to be pretty weird and also liberating. When everyone knows you for your washboard abs and tiny waist, on some level, for women like Klum that have jobs that require that they manage the size of their bodies constantly, it's easy to see why being pregnant would actually be a relief in a way that for most women it really isn't. I wrote about this same idea in an earlier post about Milla Jovovich.
Milla, as many of you know, gained quite a bit of weight during her first pregnancy (70lbs). She often cited her feelings of empowerment and liberation in being able to eat whatever she wanted after a lifetime of having to watch every morsel of food that passed her lips.

Heidi Klum said the other day that she wasn't sure that she would be able to lose her baby weight in time for the Victoria's Secret runway show in December. In her last pregnancy, she had her baby in September and was famously back on the catwalk in two months. For her own sake, I hope that Heidi doesn't push herself back into her knickers just for the satisfaction of her fans. Having a baby is a big deal. She needs to recover in her own time and not according to everyone else's timeline.

In other news, the BBP has been selected for preservation in PANDORA by the State Library of Victoria. PANDORA is an online archive in which selected Australian websites, deemed to be of 'national importance' are preserved and made permanently available to the public for research and reference. Personal sites, like this, are usually only selected if they provide information of significant research value unavailable elsewhere. PRETTY BLOODY EXCITING!

Bec Hewitt bounces back

Bec Hewitt (wife of Lleyton Hewitt, tennis player) is upheld as the best in body after baby in the last issue of Ok! Australia . What enrages me the most about the article is not necessarily that some editor deemed Bec Hewitt, quite possibly the most uninteresting 'celebrity' ever, but that the magazine suggests that Bec has 'bounce back secrets' which upon reading said 'secrets' are really just weight loss as a consequence of being a busy mother of two children. In fact, when I was reading the article, it made me think of Miranda in SATC in the episode in season 6 where she fits back into her 'skinny jeans'. When the other gals ask her how she did it, she says that she had a baby and no longer had any time to eat. While Ok! seems to pitch Bec's eating/exercise as some kind of 'regimen', in fact, what Bec has done to lose her baby weight is eat healthfully and exercise moderately when she has the time and from appearances, it seems that she is fairly fully occupied with her children. She note that she has some kind of fancy trainer. Whether this admission (or perhaps lack thereof) plays right into the fancy of celebrity motherhood as easy and worry-free is up for debate but what also got me thinking was that her husband's role was pretty much non-existent in her quest to reclaim her body. She mentioned that her brother looked after the kids when she wanted to exercise but the the affective work of caregiving was primarily her own. Mr. Tennis rarely got a mention.

Friday news you can use

I have my finger on the pulse so you don't have to:

Katherine Heigl has a new baby girl she adopted from Korea

Nicole Richie has been spotted kicking around Bev Hills minus her new little bird, looking remarkably svelte just one week post-birth

Jenna Elfman is pregnant with her second in real life and on her show.

Halle Berry is allegedly covering up her second bump...

Danger: Exploding thighs!

Heidi Klum opens up to Page Six about her pregnant body, saying the last month is the worst:

"The last month is unbelievable, how rapidly your stomach goes. It's huge. The thighs, the butt -- everything explodes in the end."

"It's bizarre. Just as it's a miracle that you can grow a human being in your belly, it's a miracle that your body goes back to normal again," she says. "I don't think you ever get back to exactly the way you were, but you do get close. And I'm happy with that. Especially when you see your kid for the first time."

And of course, Heidi isn't worried about regaining her pre-baby body.

Milla J shows off her post-baby bod for Maxim

Hello, Milla.

Twenty months on from giving birth to her first daughter, Ever Gabo, Milla J is stripping off for this month's issue of Maxim. According to the model/actress:

"Look, I do Vogue, OK? I'm not doing this [photo spread] to advertise a designer; I had a little girl recently, and I'm doing this to show my post-baby body!"

"Lingerie and a sheet were all I needed," she goes on. "I know it's all about my body. I want to give readers exactly what they want, and they want to see me."

Um, okay. I'm glad she has a healthy ego.....

Anyway, if you remember Milla gained 70lbs during her pregnancy so the transformation is pretty unbelievable.

Doritos girl on quitting exercise

Former Doritos girl, Ali Landry, has admitted to People that after giving birth to her daughter in 2007, she waited two years to begin exercising again.

nstead of hitting the gym, Landry, 34, relied on a home-delivery meal service to drop her pregnancy pounds. "I lost the majority of the [post-baby] weight pretty fast doing that," Landry said at Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS A Time for HeroeBlogger: The Baby Bump Project - Create Posts Celebrity Carnival in L.A. recently. "But I have to say, it was that skinny fat when you don't work out, and you're not toned."

Her feelings changed, however, when she was cast to appear on the celebrity sports competition show, Superstars:

"When I got the paperwork for Superstars, and I saw they asked what size swimsuit I wear, I had a hot flash, nearly broke into cold sweats and hired a trainer immediately."

"They, I think, put me in the best shape of my entire life. I am in shock that I have [definition] in my stomach after having a baby – I didn't even know that was possible," she says. "Hopefully, that will be encouraging to all the women out there who don't feel so good about their body after a baby."

Not sure why her story would be inspiring. In fact, it just reconfirms that even though Landry was happy not rushing to 'get her body back', as soon as she was going to go back to work she was pressured to drop her weight.

Bah.

It's an order: American soliders must shed their baby weight

Women might as well just give up on life now.

Just when you thought standards of beauty for post-baby mums couldn't possible get more unachievable, it seems that new mothers in the U.S. military are subject to pressures that most of us can avoid because our jobs don't demand it.

Enlisted US soldiers have six months postpartum to meet Army weight standards and pass the Army Physical Fitness Test (APFT). Otherwise, they can be flagged and ultimately lose their jobs. Until recently, women started physical training with their regular units six weeks after delivery, outnumbered by fit and unsympathetic men and commanders with no experience in training soldiers who are also new mothers. "They look down on you, no matter how good a soldier you were before," said Warrant Officer Jacey Martin, a new mother and soldier at Fort Bragg.

According to the Defense Women's Health Research Program, more than half of new mums fail their fitness tests and about one-third don't meet the weight and body fat standards within six months. Apparently, there are some postpartum PT (physical training) programmes, however, many PT instructors have not been trained in techniques for working with new mums.

Um, not so much.

Spice Girls: who has the better post-baby body?

It's a Spice Girls post-baby body battle according to Closer mag

Round 1: Mel B (Scary Spice) can't believe Mel C (Sporty Spice) needs a personal trainer to lose her baby weight.

The 34-year-old singer was shocked when she discovered her fellow Spice Girls star had hired an expert to help get her figure back after giving birth to baby Scarlet in February.

"I read about Mel C's post-baby fitness regime and thought, 'Good on her! I was surprised she has a trainer though, because she's always been so good at doing her own workouts and training - she is Sporty Spice after all."

Mel B is now famous for her toned physique and her crazy relationship dramas with Eddie Murphy.

She explained: "It's really important to take things slowly when you've had a baby because your body has been through so much. After Angel, I went for long walks and got back into weights and cardio only when I felt up to it. I found breastfeeding really helps the weight fall off too."

So does that explain why she had lipo after having her second baby?

MJH: loves herself a little too much

Man, Melissa Joan Hart can't seem to get enough of herself. She has now resorted to posting about her weight loss on her MySpace Blog.

Apparently, People mag forgot to mention the most important part of her post-baby weight loss:

"Hi all, Just want to explain a little more about things discussed within the People article. While the article is correct and properly quoted, I want to point out that I naturally have a small-frame body, being only 5'2" tall, so 155 pounds was an unhealthy weight for me, even with a baby. My "normal" healthy weight should remain under 120 lbs. More importantly, what was left out of the article was my body fat percentage, which is currently just under 18%, which I am extremely proud of right now. I am also fitting into my size 27 jeans. Stepping on a scale means nothing to me since muscle weighs more than fat. What matters is how I feel on a day-to-day basis. Thats it, just wanted to get that off my chest."

Um, narcissism much?

Totally Tori: dieting sucks (duh!)

Tori, seriously. You are taking over my life!

In one of her typical moments of profundity, Tori had an epiphany at the offices of Us Magazine, realising like every other woman in the developed world that 'It sucks to diet and exercise'.

My god. And she's also a raging hypocrite: "I read all the magazines -- I know how all the actresses look great weeks after having a baby, and that doesn't happen [to me].

Um, Tor? Did you forget that you lost 22lbs (10kg) 4 months after your first birth and then lost all of the baby weight by 7 months (40lbs)?

So you say there was less pressure with your second baby? "The pressure came off. The weight came off a lot quicker when I wasn't like, 'Oh, I have to follow this diet regime!' It was just easier doing it the natural way," continued Spelling.

Um, Tor? Did you forget that you stopped breastfeeding Stella 3.5 months after she was born so you could start to diet? Since when is denying your baby the boob so you can lose weight 'natural'?

For shame.