What happens to a woman's tummy after giving birth & how long does it take?

Factual Questions
1

Please, no jokes about not getting back that girlish figure.

I don’t know how else to phrase other than the title. Does it sag from extra skin & stuff? How long does it take to get back to “normal” (for lack of a better word)? Or is the skin & muscle & everything pretty elastic and it just snaps back into place? Please inform me.

Thanks.

2

Well, it depends on a lot of factors - from the top:

Pre-pregnancy fitness level. If the woman is toned and fit before pregnancy, continues with moderate exercise during pregnancy and continues after pregnancy, generally she can expect a pretty full recovery of her figure in about the time it took to bend it out of shape in the first place - 9 months or so.

So, assuming a level of fitness before pregnancy, some things to consider are

  1. woman’s age - older skin is less elastic so it will be slower to snap back, and my not gain back all of its pre-pregnancy tautness.

  2. woman’s ethnicity (skin color) - some skins are more prone to stretch marks than others - a woman can vigilantly apply creams and lotions and still get stretch marks - these take time to fade, and will never fade completely (although topical vitamin E application helps a great deal)

  3. weight gained during pregnancy - obviously a 25 lb weight gain is easier to recover from than a 100 lb weight gain. (One of my friends gained over 100 lbs during her prenancy - Jr. is 3 and she’s still recovering.)

  4. whether her rectus abdominus muscles seperate - during many pregnancy’s the rectus abdominus muscles (the ones on the front of your tummy) spread apart to allow the tummy (uterus) to poke through - it takes time and exercise to bring them back together.

  5. the woman’s health and nutrition - food choices have a great deal to do with the quality of a person’s skin - if you want nice skin eat healthy food.

So - generally, a fit woman can expect a pretty full recovery from pregnancy provided she’s taken care of herself before, during and after.

That being said, some women have a much harder time after pregnancy than others.

IMHO, Post-partum depression can play a large role in this - if you feel awful, you may not care what you look like and may eat a crap diet and not exericse.

3

It depends on how much weight she gained, where she started, age, heredity etc. You don’t look completely “normal” right after birth, but with reasonable diet and exercise, you can get back to pretty much a normal look. It’s like losing weight under any other circumstances, mostly. How elastic your skin will be in returning to it’s former state pretty much depends on age and heredity. Some women get lots of stretch marks, some never get any.

4

For about a month after my son was born I still looked 2nd-trimester pregnant, except my belly was more saggy than when I was pregnant :frowning: By about 6 months post-partum, I had lost all of the weight, but I still had more fat in my abdomen than I had pre-pregnancy. I have very un-elastic skin (scars that should be thin lines end up looking like circles) so my experience is probably worse than most, but it took many months for my tummy to look close to “normal”, especially the skin around the stretch marks on my abdomen. It looked very loose and wrinkly. Eventually the skin did tighten up quite a bit, and I used a product called Mederma on my stretch marks religiously for a few months which helped a lot.

Believe me, during that early post-partum period, the condition of my tummy was the least of my worries!