Am I the only one who gets blasted by late night facebook ads, promising to get rid of my mommy pooch? These ads inspired a late night rant about what mommy pooch really is and what you need to know about it.
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WHEN YOU HAVE NO TIME FOR WELLNESS – EPISODE 15 – ROCK YOUR WELLNESS WITH LAUREN CHANTE
Hello, hello. Okay, a whole episode on mommy pooch, I kind of can’t believe it took me this long to record one. Because I’m pretty sure that this is one of the like, top 20 most Googled things of all time.
(I honestly don’t know that I’m just making it up.)
But I do know that it’s late at night now. And my Facebook ads are going out of control. I feel like all the weirdest ads end up on my feed late at night, and I’m getting all the ads about reducing your mommy pooch. And because I am an exercise scientist and a wellness coach, I was starting to flip out a little bit about what I was seeing, and I was like, oh my god, I have to record a podcast episode right now about this.
So we’re gonna do it, we’re going to talk about the mommy pooch.
And if you don’t know what the mommy pooch is, basically, it’s like after you have kids, you have like, the lower part of your belly looks like a pouch, almost like a little kangaroo mama pouch. And if you’ve had a C section, sometimes it’s from the C section. In my case, it’s just from having a bunch of children.
And it’s like, seems to be according to Google and Facebook ads, the like most hated thing that women have about themselves after having kids. And it’s really interesting to me, like having sat back and watched how other fitness and nutrition professionals talk about the mommy pooch just to see like, just to see how the conversation is going.
And I’ve just have found that there’s a lot of inaccuracies going on. And I kind of wanted to speak to that for a little bit.
But before we speak to that, like we also need to talk about the very real reasons that we are so stressed out about our mommy pooches. And
Obviously, you guys are pretty attuned to the really unattainable standard of beauty that we hold ourselves to, right?
But the thing that comes up, like when I look at myself in the mirror, and I look at my own journey with the mommy pooch…I don’t even think about it anymore. And it’s not actually because it’s gotten that much better.
Of course, as a professional, I have a leg up and definitely, like feel really good at my skin. But I still have a little bit of a lingering mom pouch… And it used to make me feel kind of insecure, but it hasn’t for a couple of years. And when I really look back on why that is…
It’s because I literally don’t have time to think about it. I literally don’t, I’m pouring myself into so many other amazing things in my life that I do not have the time or the space to care about that. And I don’t know necessarily if my experience is meaningful for you, I want to make space for whatever experience that you’re having personally, but I do think it’s important to ask ourselves…why do I have so much time to worry about my mom pooch? And is it possibly because I am not living my life to the fullest? I’m not doing all the things that I want to do. I’m not pursuing my passions, I’m not applying myself to a career that really lights me up… I’m not pursuing my dreams…
Because really when you are going after life full out without holding back…I really believe that it becomes hard to sit with some of the insecurities that we can have about our bodies.
So starting with that, and then we can talk about the actual mom pooch.
Okay, so I have seen people give so many different explanations of the mom pooch and so many different remedies for it. And I just want to put a hard stop to the idea that there is a one size fits all solution to making your belly look a certain way because the fact of the matter is it’s not there.
There are a lot of different reasons that women can develop that sort of pouch shape to their lower abdomen, right. So let’s talk about some of those reasons. Number one, it could just be genetically the way that your body stores fat, right? Some people distribute their fat in more of an apple shaped pattern, and some people distribute their fat in a pear shaped pattern. People store fat in different places at different times of their life to like as you age, sometimes your fat storage changes as well.
So for me, for example, I know that my abdomen is a place that I naturally have always stored fat, right, and secondarily, there’s a lot of lifestyle factors that go into that.
When I did the sleep deprivation episodes and the caffeine episodes earlier in the season, I talked about how increases in cortisol from sleep deprivation can actually increase the storage of body fat in your abdomen, right? So that could be a contributor to the mom pooch for some of us.
Also, if you had a C section, scar tissue, definitely a thing having to deal with scar tissue. And just generally the way that the shape of your abdomen has just changed from being cut open, sometimes not just once, but twice or three times for some of us or even more. So that’s a factor to consider…
Diastasis recti, which is when your abdominal muscle becomes split down the middle, the connective tissue essentially breaks and you have a gap between the right side of what I’ll call your six pack muscle and the left side of your six pack muscle. And so it creates this look of, I guess, kind of looseness in your belly. And then on top of that, just your connective tissue in your abdomen in general, not just in that one spot and can get kind of loose after having kids, right?
So as you can see, there are like a lot of possible things that go into why your body could look that way. And I see a lot of people trying to do these one size fits all approaches where it’s like, Okay, I’m gonna buy so and so’s plan. I’m gonna do this number of crunches and this number of sit ups and only have grapefruit juice for this number of days.
But we really need to like slow our roll a little bit and recognize that you need to sit back and look at your body and understand what’s actually going on with your body.
Oh, I forgot. Another reason is loose skin. Like for me, I have diastasis recti. But I’ve done so much work around healing that working with physical therapists, and just really supporting myself through it, that that’s not really the reason that I can still see the pooch in my abdomen, it’s because I have a lot of extra skin from having kids and my first and my second kid, it wasn’t really super bad. But that third kid, it was like my skin just could not recover the way that it did. I never got stretch marks when I was pregnant. But I just have that loose skin in my abdomen around my belly button. So it just looks different there, right?
All this to say, again, one size fits all approaches are not going to get you where you want to be.
This is what you need to know about approaching it.
If it has to do with the way your body is distributing fat, then there’s kind of a variety of things that you’re gonna have to look at, you’re gonna have to look at lifestyle factors that could be contributing to you storing in a particular area, and then you’re just gonna have to, you know, learn about nutrition and any any nutrition interventions that could help you with body fat, if that’s what you choose to do, right.
Then on top of that, oh, I want to make a note here. Sometimes people think that if they do ab exercises, they’re going to lose the body fat that is on top of their abs. And that’s actually a myth called spot reduction. spot reduction is the idea that if you use a muscle, the fat around, it disappears. And that’s not true. A great kind of anecdote, explaining why that is, is look at people who talk a lot like me. If spot reduction was true, then people who talk a lot would have the skinniest faces in the whole world, right? That’s not how it works. When your body is in a calorie deficit and losing body fat… It’s going to take it from a variety of places around your body based on your personal genetics and your hormonal profile. So just put that to rest
So then after that, if we’re looking at scar tissue, there’s there’s not much that you’re going to be able to do for scar tissue just with diet and exercise. Right?
I know there are some people who believe in fascia blasting, and different types of treatments that you can get with doctors and things that I honestly don’t really know a lot about.
But what I hate to see is I hate to see people who have like a scar tissue related poop shape to their belly going and doing interventions, diets, exercise plans, that don’t actually address the real reason they have that shape to their belly, it’s just spinning your wheels, without going in a direction that’s actually helpful for you.
So then when we look at diastasis recti, diastasis recti is first of all, something that you should be screened for immediately after you have a baby when you go and you have your postnatal visits with your OBGYN or your midwife or whoever helps you deliver the baby, right? So you should know if you had diastasis or not.
The best thing to do for diastasis is to get yourself in with a women’s health physical therapist to work on fixing your diastasis, and I know that this feels like a huge hurdle for a lot of women, because you just had a baby, you have a newborn like it feels who’s gonna want to go to all those appointments, figure out what to do with the baby. For me, I would bring my baby with me if I could, but some places don’t let you do that. It just kind of depends.
But I will tell you guys that I see a lot of people making the mistake of just going on YouTube and doing diastasis exercises, or like buying cookie cutter plans. And there’s a couple of things that I am seeing going on online with diastasis recti programs that are frankly freaking me out.
The first one is I’m seeing a lot of like personal trainers, yoga instructors and Pilates instructors selling plans or doing videos on plans for healing diastasis recti. And one of the first things that I learned in my career as an exercise scientist is that your scope of practice is never medical, you can never say that you can heal something. Like when it comes to my nutrition programs, the wellness reborn intensive, I cannot say that they are designed for the purpose of healing diabetes, or curing diabetes, or curing hypothyroidism.
And the same thing should really be said for exercise people as well, for personal trainers, Pilates instructors, and yoga instructors. Your role is preventative your role is prevention. But the moment someone is in pain, or has an injury that needs to be healed, which diathesis is, it is no longer in your scope of practice, you need to immediately refer out to a physical therapist or to the doctor, right?
So I have major questions about the professional integrity of the people who are peddling these programs, whether the programs are good or not, I couldn’t even tell you but that is like a major red flag to me. Because understanding scope of practice and following scope of practice is about integrity. And I personally only want people who are coaching me on my body and on my wellness to have integrity. So there’s that to know, the women’s health physical therapist really is the expert at helping you to heal your diathesis.
And on top of that, I can tell you that there’s no substitute for doing it in person because there are things that they do with women’s health, physical therapy treatment, that really helps you to connect to what’s going on in your body that you can’t do on your own. So for example, we’re gonna get like, real specific with you guys. Send all the men out of the room, plug your baby’s ears, I have actually had electrodes put in my hoo ha (my lady parts) and been able to work on doing like kegs and look actually see on a computer monitor if I was using the right muscles or not.
And it was actually crazy because it turned out that I was trying to squeeze some things that actually weren’t what I was supposed to be trying to squeeze. And so through using the biofeedback of having the electrodes and watching the screen, I was able to connect to the right muscles to use.
The same thing goes with the transverse abdominus, which is an abdominal muscle that runs across the bottom of your belly. It’s… if you look at the shape of the muscle, it’s almost like a belt that runs between your hip bones. And it helps to draw in your abs. So if you’ve ever been in an exercise class, and someone has told you to draw in your belly, it’s the transverse abdominus that’s doing that but a lot of us end up kind of doing this weird Squeezy thing with our six pack muscle, which is the rectus abdominus instead of the transverse abdominus. When I started going to women’s health, physical therapy and actually seeing using the electrodes, the contraction…
I figured out that I wasn’t actually using my transverse abdominus, I was using my six pack muscle, my rectus abdominus. So all this to say that… if this is the root of the mommy pooch for you, this is like not just something that you should be doing at home. So I hope I was able to make that evident.
And then the last thing is loose skin something that I am totally dealing with. And I am happily at a point where I could care less. I’ve just am really grateful for my body and I’m too busy doing other incredible things in the world to think about my mommy pooch.
But that is not something that you’re going to be able to fix using some sort of like a diet or an exercise thing. So we really just have to focus on like the big rocks.
In terms of no cookie cutter plans. Everybody’s body is different. The reasons that you have mommy pooch are going to be different from one person to another and it’s really important that you are not using a way of getting rid of the mommy pooch…that has nothing to do with why you have it.