in my underwear pt 2

on 'snapping back' and the new politics of the body

Yes, that is a picture of me in my pants. I took it maybe three months after I gave birth. I felt very removed from my body at the time, or rather, it felt like someone else's body.

I was just a floating sense of dread, eating chocolate biscuits in the ether. My body had changed quite radically in the months leading up to birth (like, duh!) - and then it stayed changed.

I won’t bore you with any of that old ‘it grew a life’ crap - because of course, a miracle happened and I was super grateful. But almost all of my friends who’d performed that same miracle managed to perform the reverse miracle afterwards. They reverted into the bodies they’d lived in before with frightening ease.

This feels like a very unfashionable thing to say but lots of women really do just ‘snap back’.

Many looked even better. We’re fed this myth that mums end up all saggy and misshapen - in actual fact, a woman’s body has this truly wild ability to reconfigure itself after birth, the organs slot back into place, the rib cage shrinks, the hips realign. Sometimes there are marks and extra skin but not always - and, if my friends are anything to go by, not even that often.

Some people - though again, if you look purely at statistics it's actually a minority - gain weight. Around 15% of women will be more than 10lbs heavier than their pre-pregnancy weight a year after giving birth. 85% revert to their pre-baby weight.

I say this not to shame anyone but more as a corrective to this odd and pervasive narrative that a mother's body is somehow “ruined” by pregnancy and birth. Most people just go back to how they looked before.

I was - and am - part of that other 15%. When I took the photo I felt like I no longer understood what I actually looked like; my boundaries had all been redrawn. I kind of loved it - I was bigger, I had more body fat, there was something incredibly tactile about this new body.

But I also hated it. I hated that my clothes didn’t fit and that I was so far from the ideal I'd been taught to aspire to. The part of me that hated it was the part that had grown up with size zero, whippet-hipped girls, with bobble heads all over the front pages of magazines. The circle of shame. Etc.

And all of this was happening against a backdrop of GLP-1 advancements, Ozempic mania, newer better tweakments.

Susie Orbach, the psychiatrist who wrote Fat is a Feminist Issue, once told me that our bodies are under constant attack, from the diet, fashion, beauty, “wellness”, fitness and many other industries - from the whole body beautifying industrial complex - and it leaves us vulnerable to exploitation in myriad ways. I want to look at those attacks; at how body image is constructed and mobilised against us. At the science of the body, and how it's changing. What it even means to have a body now.

From regenerative aesthetics to the conspiracy theories around obesity via the history of slimming world.