Celebrity Moms and Why They Don’t Really Exist
Come on, we were all excited when Kate Hudson got really fat while expecting her first child. Unfortunately, now she’s skinny again, and most Supermoms are still working off the last ten pounds from a child we gave birth to five years ago, not five months ago. Then there’s Elizabeth Hurley and her flat stomach moments after giving birth, nuzzling her Little Precious as she strolls through Heathrow Airport in a spotless all-white outfit, completely perfect and pristine after a 12-hour flight. No leaky diapers and poop stains for this Ubermom. No all-over massive body-sweats and frighteningly large hair losses months after the birth. This baby has been seemingly plucked cleanly from their body without leaving behind even a trace of his former living arrangements.
Ms. Hurley reportedly hid out at Elton John’s mansion, worked out for two to three hours a day, and lived on only brown rice and watercress soup for seven weeks. Miraculously, she shed the 53 pounds she supposedly gained during her pregnancy (which probably landed her at a hefty 130 at the height of her weight gain). How wonderful it would be to hang out at a rich guy’s mansion, with loads of staff that will watch the baby, feed the baby, and change the baby, while you work out all afternoon. Come on, most Supermoms would work out for five hours if this were the setup. She admits that her main motivation was money. Her income is directly linked to her looks. Unfortunately, or fortunately, this is not the case for most Supermoms.Compare yourself to your truly imperfect peers only. For the record, Kelly Ripa is a freak of nature. And just remember – you didn’t look like Elizabeth Hurley prior to having a baby, so please don’t expect to resemble her after. There is one tip about weight loss that we can take from these Ubermoms. Some of the hardest, fittest bodies in the world are endorsing this new fabulous method of losing weight and toning up. Pamela Anderson, Demi Moore, Elle MacPherson, and Cindy Crawford all swear by it. Catherine Zeta-Jones endorses it in every post-baby interview she gives.
The secret? You can lose weight and look great by…running after your own children! Just ask them. All along we had been led to believe that having children made you gain weight and get soft. Apparently not. These women maintain that they eat “normally” and that they don’t have any special exercise routine at all. “Well, I have three children, you know,” 40-something Demi responded in an interview. “That’ll keep anyone in shape.” She did admit to one more secret, which is that she “moved furniture around her house, a lot.
” This Supermom could push a couch up four flights of stairs 12 times a day and not look like her. All of those reports on her spending $400,000 on plastic surgery were apparently vicious rumors. This could be good news for some Supermoms. You might not have $400,000, but you might have something better: four children (like me). I could beat those skinny amateurs who only had two or three children. The grim reality is that they had probably been lying to elevate themselves to that even more enviable state of thin – that of being effortlessly so. These women just look tighter than their former “loose” selves did. They have been tweaked by some of the best surgeons and personal trainers that money can buy, not by chasing their soon-to-be-arrested-for-underage-drinking-and-Internet-sex-tapes-children. Frivolous surgery really is the only way to look that good.
Whatever their reality, our reality is that it is only going to be exercise and food control that will unbloat our bodies from their childbearing shapes. Dammit. The moral of the story is that, unless “running after your children” literally means you are the full-time coach of your son the Olympic cross country star, you will not be able to attain the ideal pinup girl shape in this way. (Too bad, as I was thinking of having a fifth just to improve my odds).
Excerpted from The Secret Life of SuperMom by Kathy Buckworth, ©2005 Sourcebooks, Naperville, Illinois. Kathy Buckworth is the author of Journey to the Darkside Supermom Goes Home, available at bookstores everywhere. Please visit http://www.kathybuckworth.com
