As much as you love your babies, pregnancy does some horrific things to your body. Most women know that a pregnancy will completely alter their physical appearance, but the end results are often more shocking than women anticipated. If you look in the mirror every day and want to cry at how strange your body looks now, you can change that. Here is how pregnancy and birth completely alter your figure, and how you can get your old body back again.
Your "Six-Pack" Is Shot
Your abdominal muscles, as well as a stretchy band of tissue called the rectus abdominus that runs down the middle of your "six pack," is utterly ruined during pregnancy. This is because your uterus lies behind these muscles. When your uterus expands and stretches to accommodate each new pregnancy, your abdominal muscles stretch all the way out too.
You can gain some of that tone back, but what you cannot fix is the rectus abdominus. The stretching pregnancy causes these bands of tissue to separate, creating the diastasis recti, or abdominal separation. No amount of exercise fixes it. What does fix it is a tummy tuck.
The Tummy Tuck with Lipo
The tummy tuck, or abdominoplasty, is a surgery that tightens up and sews up the abdominal muscles to make them tighter. This procedure also corrects the diastasis recti so that you no longer have that postnatal "pooch" hanging low over your groin. For maximum effectiveness, you should combine a tummy tuck with liposuction, a body lift, and breast lift.
LOTS of Stretched Skin and the Torso/Belt Lift
While it is an amazing thing your body does to expand and fit a small human being inside you, what it leaves behind is a lot of stretched, sagging skin. Many women are willing to cope with stretch marks, but they are shocked by the layers of loose, flappy, flabby skin. To correct this issue, your cosmetic surgeon can cut some of this skin away, and/or do a torso lift or belt lift to lift the skin upward. Then more skin is cut free, and the surgeon sews the newly-lifted and tightened skin to the skin just under your breasts. The scar is usually hidden by your bra line.
Sagging Breasts and the Breast Lift
You nourished your babies from your own body. That is pretty amazing. What is not so amazing is that the hormonal changes during pregnancy that caused your breasts to swell has now left them flat and sagging to your belly button. If you get a tummy tuck, liposuction, torso lift with skin removal, and a breast lift without augmentation, you will look and feel like a brand-new person.
