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Is It Actually Possible To Love Your Post-Pregnancy Body?

The term “snapback” – in relation to women’s bodies after pregnancy and childbirth – fills me with a stone cold rage. When you think about it, the concept is ridiculous. Your body has spent nearly a year slowly and steadily changing to accommodate this new life that is growing within. Your internal organs have shifted and compressed, the volume of blood in your body has increased by 50%, and your hormone levels recalibrate as somehow this body of yours makes two eyeballs, a nervous system, a brain, eyelashes, tiny fingernails and so much more, all from scratch. And then when you've finished this miraculous feat of human engineering, with a click of your fingers you're meant to “snap back”?! What in the actual [censored]?!

But if I, with my few thousand followers scattered across social media profiles, feel the fake pressure, the actual pressure on celebrities to “bounce back” is insane. And that in part is where the ridiculous benchmark for us mere mortals comes from. We fall over ourselves to proclaim our admiration and praise for Teyana Taylor for looking “unreal”, being “body goals” and a “fitspiration” when she posts a picture of her flat stomach and abs six days after giving birth. Yes, you read that right: six days.