It seems to me that women who have had children seem to lose a significant amount of firmness not only in their breasts, but in their buttocks as well.Do women lose muscle mass replaced by fat? What’s going on?
DISCLAIMER: I am a man, and I have never, as far as I remember, borne a child. I have a wonderful wife who has done so four times and she has recovered her youthful figure each time. But I do not for one minute believe that women who do not look the same after four kids and twenty years as they did in high school have somehow failed the human race. I do believe that women ARE subjected to highly unrealistic expectations regarding their appearance and anyone who would consider a woman’s appearance to be more important than her ability to bear and raise a healthy, happy child knows very little about life in general and women in particular. /DISCLAIMER
I think there are a couple of things going on, and they’re probably related.
First, childbearing doesn’t always lead to “loss of firmness”. As an extreme example, there are supermodels and movie stars who have had children and looked every bit as good afterward as before. But this is also true of a whole lot of “ordinary” women.
Second, I suspect that some women who do seem to lose muscle tone after childbirth do so simply because they don’t, for whatever reason, get sufficient exercise to undo the effects that the weight gain associated with pregnancy brings. There are certainly a lot of valid reasons for this to occur – for starters, mothers do have their hands full with caring for a child (surprise!) after giving birth. They may also not be aware of what they might do to get back “into shape”. Or, they simply may not give a rat’s ass that they don’t look like Kate Moss.
Having said that, it’s also true that pregnancy and childbirth have dramatic effects on a woman’s physiology. There are profound changes in their metabolism, the pelvic bones can shift, muscles and tissues are stretched or compressed to their limits, there are hormonal and chemical changes, etc., etc. The really surprising thing is not so much that all this can have some permanent effect as that it so often doesn’t have much effect.
Finally, having attended the occasional high school reunion, my experience is that the ladies still look pretty good long after the gentlemen have gone seriously to seed. And men don’t have any excuse.
Women who – ahem – “lose their figure” after childbirth lose it in the abdominal area. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d guess that the loss of muscle tone goes all the way around.
Sheesh, whyncha ask somebody who’s actually had a baby?
You gain weight during pregnancy, usually at least 20 pounds, sometimes 30 or 40 pounds. Then the baby is born and during the next few months your weight goes back to more or less normal. However, like everybody else who’s just lost 40 pounds (even men), you discover that your skin has stretched, and it makes things look worse than they actually are. NO, women do not “lose muscle mass and have it replaced by fat”.