Last month, the interwebs were in an uproar over a Jillian Michaels interview in Women’s Health Magazine. Jillian is a world-famous personal trainer who’s seen each week on The Biggest Loser, and has a very successful workout system called “30 Day Shred”, which is quite popular with mom bloggers.
Jillian announced in the May issue of Women’s Health Mag that she would not be having any babies of her own, and here’s why:
“I’m going to adopt,” Jillian says. “I can’t handle doing that [birth] to my body.”
Many bloggers have already talked at length about this interview, but I’ll have to talk about it too because these statements are something I cannot ignore. I also take issue with the some of the other bloggers who’ve attacked Michaels for putting down women’s post-baby bodies when they, themselves, have written books putting down women’s post-baby bodies. Oh, the hypocrisy. I suppose it’s okay when they do it, but not when Jillian Michaels does it. I have an idea – how about it’s not okay when ANYBODY does it? There. That’s settled.
Now back to the statements. After the mommy-blogger uproar, many women left comments on these various articles wondering why anyone would be upset with Jillian’s statement about birth to begin with. Over at ShePosts, nearly all the commentors felt that it was nobody’s business whether or not Jillian wanted to give birth, or what her reasons were for it.
I don’t think it is anybody’s business if she doesn’t want to have children of her own. That’s her choice to make. I do, however, think it is her customer’s business if she, the world renowned body sculptor, thinks that a body cannot recover from childbirth. If she really believes that, why does she bother telling mothers that they can get fit using her system?
Here’s what I’d tell Jillian, and any other woman worried about what a baby will to do her body: Yes, a baby will change your body. But guess what else changes your body? TIME.
As my fiercely feminist college professor used to say, “Not a single one of us gets out of this life alive.” Not a single one of us gets out of this life looking the way we do right now, either. I hate to break it to Jillian, but “that” is going to happen to her body whether or not she has a baby. Aging happens. Gravity happens. Shit happens.
But there are some glorious and beautiful benefits to the post-baby body (other than, ya know, that whole creating-a-human thing, which is a pretty great gift in itself.) My husband, for example, never saw the big deal in Heidi Klum, that is, until she had kids. Now, he thinks she looks radiant, softened, and womanly. I have to agree – she’s drop dead gorgeous now, and she’s cranked out kid after kid over the last few years. Does everyone bounce back the way Heidi Klum did? No, of course not. But you’d think if anybody could bounce back from childbirth, it would be A FAMOUS PERSONAL TRAINER WITH GOBS OF MONEY.
But to hear Jillian Michaels, one might think that there simply is no recovering from “that,” and “that” is certainly so awful that no person could possibly find you attractive again.
Jeez, if “that” is so totally unappealing, doesn’t it makes you wonder how any of us gets pregnant with the second, or the fifth, or the nineteenth baby? I’m guessing our partners like our post-baby bodies just fine, and don’t feel like “that” was so bad, otherwise they wouldn’t keep coming back for more.
Jillian did try to do some damage control on her Facebook fan page. She said,
There is a misunderstanding circulating in the press on my personal choice to not get pregnant. I think that pregnancy is admirable and selfless. For myself, I have remnant body issues left over from childhood which leads me to make adoption my personal choice down the road.
I think it’s admirable that Jillian wants to adopt. However, if I were a birth mother, I’d probably think twice about giving my child to a woman who didn’t want to have children of her own out of sheer vanity. I think it’s kind of insulting to expect another woman to have a baby for you because you don’t want “that” to happen to your body, but I guess it’s okay if “that” happens to hers?!?! What does this say about the way she’d raise the child? Our bodies are sacred vessels, sure, but are they so sacred that they shouldn’t be used for anything other than selling workout DVDs and posing for magazine covers? Come on, Jillian. Certainly you can see how messed up that is. We are meant to live. And “God” willing, we’ll all live until these bodies are wrinkled, weathered, and completely devoid of a six-pack abdomen. “Remnant body issues” or not, Jillian needs to have to come to terms with the fact that her body is not going to look like this forever, and that is something she is going to have to learn to accept.
As a feminist, I do think that Jillian Michaels is a woman who has every right to feel however she wants to feel about giving birth. Yet, I also believe that people should be holding this celebrity fitness guru accountable for making statements about the body that go against everything she tries to tell her customers.
As a business woman and entrepreneur, Jillian needs to remember that many of her customers are mothers, and they don’t want to hear somebody tell them that there’s no hope for their post-baby body. As a matter of fact, what we need to be telling mothers is that their post-baby bodies look great, even if they don’t look like Heidi Klum, or even Heidi Klum’s fat sister “Greta.” And at the end of our lives, me, and Jillian, and Heidi Klum are all going to be wrinkled just the same, and nobody will ever care whether birth widened our hips or not.
Maybe then, Jillian will wonder whether clinging to her body image issues was worth it…
____________________________________
UPDATE: A commentor pointed me toward this clarification by Jillian, which states that her problems are physical infertility, and not a body image distortion. I’m glad I wrote about this, otherwise I might never have gotten the real story and would have stayed mad at Jillian forever and ever. Let this be a lesson to those in the media to either answer the question truthfully, or plead the 5th. Your professional reputation may depend on it.
I was expecting my body to look really different (READ: bad, saggy, fat) after childbirth. Nobody had prepared me for what happened. I was at prepregnancy weight 3 days after delivery, with a perfectly flat (and aburdly tanned, since it had tanned while being stretched and thus now had more pigment per sq inch than before) smooth belly. Combined with the full G-cups I got from my milk coming in, I felt like a porn star. It was odd, I felt too sexed up to be a mom :D Luckily the breasts calmed down. I kept losing weight until I was about 10-15 lbs lighter than prepregnancy. A lot of BF'ing moms I know have had this happen.
Anyway. I just wanted to put my two cents in. It doesn't always take starvation or surgery to get back to pre-pregnancy body in weeks or even days. I could have posed in a bikini in a magazine before I got out of the hospital with my newborn :) I didn't appreciate people hating me for it. I don't know what I did, apparently my body just bounces back quick. Not my fault! :D
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
Like