Pregnancy isn’t pretty.
I mean sure, it’s miraculous and awe-inspiring and wonderful, blah blah blah. But more often than not, the day to day reality of pregnancy involves a lot of peeing, barfing, leaking, and your body changing so much you don’t even recognize it anymore. Plus swelling. My god the swelling.
Thing is, not enough people talk about or show these hard realities of pregnancy. If you look at it through pop culture, all you’d see is a lot of glowing hair and beautiful skin. Thanks to social media, though, more and more people are able to share their ugly truths about pregnancy and help normalize what is literally the most normal experience in all of humanity.
Take, for example, fitness model Chontel Duncan. You may remember her as the woman who caused controversy by (sarcastic gasp!!) choosing to keep working out while pregnant!
She’s been pretty open about sharing her pregnancy experience, including this picture of her swollen foot from her first pregnancy which is wonderfully unflattering:
This picture means a lot coming from a super-fit model who keeps working out while pregnant. Even if you do everything possible to maintain your shape, pregnancy is gonna do its thang. You can’t control the weird and gross things your body is going to do.
And really — would you want to?