Pregnancy and childbirth has a funny way of wrecking havoc on your body, and one woman is putting it all out there.
Blogger Brenda DeRouen decided to recreate Kendall Jenner’s Calvin Klein underwear ads, stretch marks and all, to show women that it’s OK if you don’t have perfectly flat abs—and to prove a point to herself, too.
In a blog post simply titled “Love Your Body,” Brenda details how she freaked out when she spotted her first stretch mark while pregnant with her now 8-year-old son, especially since she had been religiously using cocoa butter, shea butter, and everything else she could find to fend them off. “I was so upset,” she writes. “I’d done everything I could do to prevent this and now my whole stomach was full of stretch marks.”
After giving birth, Brenda says she was “embarrassed” about her appearance. “I…wouldn’t dare put on a bikini,” she says. “I turned away when dressing in front of others, and wouldn’t chance doing the dirty with the lights on.” She finally decided to just “tighten her skin up” by working out. “I managed to get a four out of six pack, but no matter how hard I tried, the skin stayed saggy and the stretch marks would not go away,” she writes. “For years I dealt with not loving myself. I was self-conscious in relationships and I hated my body.”
Sign up for Women's Health's new newsletter, So This Happened, to get the day’s trending stories and health studies.
It wasn’t until recently (eight years after giving birth), she says, that she learned to accept her body. It happened when her friend said simply, “If you can’t learn to love yourself, then how can you expect anyone else to?”
“I decided right then and there that I needed to go face to face with my insecurities,” Brenda writes. “I decided to no longer feel self-conscious about my body. I would no longer allow society to define MY beauty. And I would fall in love with me, completely. And after years of hiding myself from myself I finally seen who I really was.”
And so, she decided to do the photo shoot—which has since gone viral. She also has this message for women: “Your neighbor, your co-workers, and your best friend(s) are all going through the same struggles as you. We all have flaws and insecurities. Yet, we continue to all allowed the media to take the what’s ours and mold it into something that’s unrealistic. Your body is yours. You have to live with it, so get used to it.” Preach.
