The Sad and Scary Truth

When I got pregnant, I had no qualms at all about "ruining my body," like some people might. I was severely unhappy with my body before I got pregnant, and though I knew it technically could get worse, it was hard to imagine that actually happening.  


What I never imagined, however, was the state my body would be in 8 months after giving birth. I expected stretch marks (check!) and stretched-out skin on my stomach (check!), but this? This is bad.  


I lost all the baby weight (very quickly, actually), which is weird, because I've spent the last eight years trying unsuccessfully to lose weight. In fact, according to the scale, I've lost all the baby weight PLUS another 20 pounds, but I don't think you can count it as losing the baby weight if NONE came out of my stomach. Yeah. My body never got the memo that I am NO LONGER PREGNANT and therefore the extra stomach space is no longer necessary.


I have lost weight in places I had resigned myself to NEVER losing weight in, like my legs  And my love handles? POOF! Gone! But my stomach? Guh. I see a lot of people glancing down and getting that look on their face like, should I congratulate her on being pregnant again? Or is she just fat? before they quickly look away and look embarrassed and nervous.  


And since I have lost weight in my legs, it makes my round, protruding stomach even more obvious. You know that awesome movie So I Married an Axe Murderer where the dad tells the kid his head is so big it's like an orange on a toothpick? Well, my gut is like an orange with two toothpicks for legs.  

Yeah, those are my feet at the bottom, and YES, they are different sizes. My pregnancy was rough, alright? BACK OFF!

This is not an exaggeration.  

I still look roughly three months pregnant, which for some people would be no big deal. But do you REMEMBER the horror that was me pregnant? I have not. At 12 weeks, when some women don't even know they are pregnant, and most people I know are still keeping the pregnancy a secret, I looked like THIS:

Yee-gads!!!

The worst part might be that I have tried to remedy the situation, to no avail. This is where it gets scary, people. I got sick of sit-ups doing nothing, so one night I did THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY sit-ups. Yeah, that's one hundred more than two hundred, and then another fifty. Get this: I felt nothing. No burn. No pain. Not even the next day! What this obviously means is that all my muscles melted away into fat, and doing those sit-ups wasn't flexing my muscles, it was just squeezing fat up against other fat. Based on my extensive knowledge of exercise physiology, I am going to go ahead and say this is NOT an effective exercise.

So, three things:

1.  Body: I hate you.

2.  Universe: Why?

3.  Readers: Does anyone know how to regrow muscle?  Preferably for free, with no surgery, and little-to-no hard work. Thanks.