+
Culture

Jessica Simpson is pushing back on praise for 'snapping back' after pregnancy weight gain

Jessica Simpson is pushing back on praise for 'snapping back' after pregnancy weight gain

The process of getting your body to return to normal after delivering a baby can take time.

Most bodies don't just "snap back," and it can take from six to eight months for the average woman to feel mostly recovered from having a baby. It's also totally normal to retain weight after giving birth. Most women keep on 11 or more pounds. But there's still a stigma on postpartum bodies. As if the pressure that comes with having a newborn child isn't bad enough, women are also often pressured to make their bodies trim and slim faster than is medically safe.


When Jessica Simpson was pregnant with her third child, Birdie Mae, she was open about the changes in her body. Simpson would post photos of her swelling belly and swollen feet on Instagram.

RELATED:Here are the ways your body changes when you're pregnant that nobody talks about

Simpson was delightfully honest, saying she weighed 240 pounds. She even posted a photo of the toilet seat she broke, because that's something What to Expect When You're Expecting conveniently leaves out.

After Simpson gave birth to Birdie Mae in 2019, she continued to be open and honest about her postpartum experiences. Simpson posted photos of her workouts. "I am working really hard right now," she told People at the time. "It's not easy at all, but I am determined to feel good. I have been doing a lot of walking — getting my steps in not only burns calories but it also helps me clear my head and get focused."

Six months after giving birth, she posted a posted a photo of her body after losing 100 pounds of baby weight. Commenters on Instagram praised Simpson for "snapping back."

RELATED:James Van Der Beek's pregnancy announcement casually helps destigmatize miscarriages

In her new book, Open Book, Simpson reveals that she didn't post photos of her body to get compliments for snapping back. "Even now, people [are] commenting on my Instagram, 'Oh, snap back?' No, it wasn't a snap back and I don't even know what that word means," Simpson wrote in Open Book. "It's like, I work hard and when I work out, a lot of it is to release anxiety. That's one of my tools for sobriety. Just walking, just going and talking, walking and talking with my husband. Even some of my biggest fans…They're saying it as a compliment, but it's like, that's not what I was trying to get with this picture but okay."

Ultimately, Simpson is glad that extra weight doesn't carry as much weight as it used to. "I just thank God times are changing a little bit and people are standing up for themselves and making it not all about body image. I can hopefully be part of the change that my daughters grow up in a world where she can accept herself at any size," Simpson wrote.

Having a healthy postpartum body is more important than having a skinny postpartum body, and it's refreshing to see more and more celebrities acknowledge that.

All photos courtesy of The Coca-Cola Company

Behind the Scenes Making Recycled Records with Mark Ronson

True

You’re walking down the sidewalk, earbuds in, listening to your favorite hip-hop beats. As your head bobs to the sounds, the sun warms your back. It’s a perfect day.

When the chorus hits, the empty Sprite bottle in your hand becomes a drumstick, passing traffic becomes a sea of concertgoers, and the concrete beneath your feet is suddenly a stage. Spinning on your heels, you close out the song with your face to the sky and hands in the air.

Keep ReadingShow less
@penslucero/TikTok

Pency Lucero taking in the Northern Lights

Seeing the northern lights is a common bucket list adventure for many people. After all, it ticks a lot of boxes—being a dazzling light show, rich historical experience and scientific phenomenon all rolled into one. Plus there’s the uncertainty of it all, never quite knowing if you’ll witness a vivid streak of otherworldly colors dance across the sky…or simply see an oddly colored cloud. It’s nature’s slot machine, if you will.

Traveler and content creator Pency Lucero was willing to take that gamble. After thorough research, she stumbled upon an Airbnb in Rörbäck, Sweden with an actual picture of the northern lights shining above the cabin in the listing. With that kind of photo evidence, she felt good about her odds.

However, as soon as she landed, snow began falling so hard that the entire sky was “barely visible,” she told Upworthy. Martin, the Airbnb host, was nonetheless determined to do everything he could to ensure his guests got to see the spectacle, even offering to wake Lucero up in the middle of the night if he saw anything.

Then one night, the knock came.

Keep ReadingShow less

Baby Cora bears a striking resemblance to actor Woody Harrelson.

We can all get a little fascinated by doppelgängers and it's fun to find people who look alike. But what do you do when your baby girl looks uncannily like a famous middle-aged man?

Mom Dani Grier Mulvenna shared a photo of her infant daughter Cora side by side with a photo of Woody Harrelson on Twitter, with the caption "Ok but how does our daughter look like Woody Harrelson." The resemblance truly is remarkable, and the tweet quickly racked up hundreds of thousands of likes, shares and replies.

Keep ReadingShow less
Image by sasint/Canva

Surgeons prepared to separate 3-year-old conjoined twins in Brazil using virtual reality.

The things human beings have figured out how to do boggles the mind sometimes, especially in the realm of medicine.

It wasn't terribly long ago that people with a severe injury had to liquor up, bite a stick, have a body part sewn up or sawed off and hope for the best. (Sorry for the visual, but it's true.) The discoveries of antibiotics and anesthesia alone have completely revolutionized human existence, but we've gone well beyond that with what our best surgeons can accomplish.

Surgeries can range from fairly simple to incredibly complex, but few surgeries are more complicated than separating conjoined twins with combined major organs. That's why the recent surgical separation of conjoined twin boys with fused brains in Brazil is so incredible.

Keep ReadingShow less
Education

Unearthed BBC interview features two Victorian-era women discussing being teens in the 1800s

Frances 'Effy' Jones, one of the first women to be trained to use a typewriter and to take up cycling as a hobby, recalls life as a young working woman in London.

Two Victorian women discuss being teens in the 1800s.

There remains some mystery around what life was like in the 1800s, especially for teens. Most people alive today were not around in the Victorian era when the technologies now deemed old-fashioned were a novelty. In this rediscovered 1970s clip from the BBC, two elderly women reminisce about what it was like being teenagers during a time when the horse and buggy was still the fastest way to get around.

Keep ReadingShow less
via Pexels

Parents who just can't stop fighting

Whitney Goodman, a licensed marriage and family therapist, shared a video about kids who grew up in homes where their parents were always fighting, which made many people feel seen. It also started a conversation about who deserves more empathy in the parent-child relationship: the parents or the children.

Goodman is known as the “radically honest” psychotherapist and the author of “Toxic Positivity: Keeping it Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy.”

"If you grew up in this kind of house, you may have noticed that your family would split off into different alliances or teams to try to manage the material discord. Because the marriage wasn't a good or safe foundation for the family, everybody else had to kind of go and form these new teams,” Goodman explained in an Instagram post.

Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

People fell in love with Marty the cat after his owner wrote a heartbreaking goodbye letter

“I know this is a small tragedy in the grand scheme of the world, but one that I feel acutely knowing that I expected many more years with my friend."

Photo by Juanita Swart on Unsplash

RIP Marty

Tons of people found themselves clicking on the trending hashtag #RIPMarty, expecting to hear tragic news about a celebrity of some sort.

Instead, they learned about Marty the cat, whose owner shared the most heartbreakingly beautiful goodbye letter following his passing. That letter quickly went viral online, leaving folks completely invested Marty's story, not to mention utterly devastated.

Will Menaker, who shared the letter on Twitter, began by sharing how he and Marty first met. Or more accurately, how Marty introduced himself by emerging from under a car and unapologetically following Menaker up to the steps of his apartment seeking pets. Eventually, as the weather began to get colder, Menaker experimented with bringing Marty inside.

“From that moment on I was in love. I wouldn’t say I ‘had’ a cat, but from then on I shared a house with a tuxedo cat I would name Marty,” Menaker wrote.

Keep ReadingShow less