"I pushed a baby out of my body, I don’t care what I look like"

by

Carolyn Robertson

posted in Celebrities

A word of warning to those who have an opinion on Anne Hathaway's post-baby "bounce-back:" She doesn't want to hear it.

Just two months after she and her husband Adam Shulman welcomed their son Jonathan, the Alice Through the Looking Glass actress reveals that she's already felt some pressure to get back to her pre-pregnancy shape.

Anne insists she's no slave to the gym - she's worked out all of three times since having her baby (which, for the record, is three times more than I worked out when my baby was eight weeks old!). Fortunately, the 33-year-old says that motherhood has actually helped her feel more confident about herself.

“Being a mom has changed me in a couple ways. I actually... feel a lot more confident. Normally you walk into the gym and - you see, I work out in West Hollywood, so you see like Thor’s trainer, you know the people who have too many muscles to be in The Avengers, that's who works out at my gym,” Anne said during a visit to The Ellen Show this week, her first interview since becoming a mom. “So I would normally walk in and feel so intimidated, but I walk in I’m like, 'Yeah I work out with 5 pound weights, but I pushed a baby out of my body, I feel good right now.' So I don’t care what I look like, I feel great.”

Anne Hathaway at the LA premiere of Alice Through the Looking Glass

I don’t care what I look like, I feel great.

I love that, because really, isn't that the point?

Despite her talk of self-acceptance, though, the story that Anne went on to tell shows how hard it can be to truly not give a damn about other people's expectations.

Anne recounts a conversation she had with a man at the gym who turned out to be a trainer: "[I told him,] 'Well, I have worked out here for a long time, but I've been gone because I just had a baby seven weeks ago. And I'm expecting him to say the thing that you say when someone says that you've had a baby, which is, 'Oh my god, you look great!' It doesn't matter if it's true. If someone says, 'Oh, I had a baby 13 years ago,' you say, 'You look great!' That is what you do. That is the etiquette."

"So I say to this guy, 'I had a baby seven weeks ago,' and he goes, 'Oh. Trying to lose the baby weight?' So I just muster up my dignity and I say, 'It's a little too soon to be worried about weight. I'm just trying to regain my strength...." And he walked away and I cried a little bit."

To be fair to this guy, Anne was in a gym talking about how she'd just had a baby, so maybe it was a fair assumption that she's trying to "lose the baby weight." Because that's what moms do, right? We have babies and then get to work on trying to remove all physical evidence that we've had babies. At least, that's how it often feels.

I think Anne had it right the first time, though: "I pushed a baby out of my body, I feel good right now. So I don’t care what I look like, I feel great."

Let's try to make that our mantra.

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Photo: John Salangsang/Shutterstock/REX/Shutterstock