The Mummy Tummy: What to do......

Mummy Tummy is a term every mom on the planet can relate to after they have had a child. Now I’, not talking about muffin top or “the shelf”, I mean the pooch, ball that sticks out right around or under your belly button and just continues to get bigger throughout the day? Yeh that.

And after countless attempts at sit ups (AHHHH), crunches (ouch!) and other useless forms of ineffective exercise do a lot of moms eventually just get “fed up” and begin to seek help. This is usually a trip to the doctor who will tell them either “yeh, that’s the way it goes after you’ve had a baby” or “if you want, you can have surgery”. Are you kidding me?? Neither of them could be farther from the truth especially if or when they don’t know what they are dealing with in the first place.

Diastasis Recti (separation of the Rectus Abdominis) is most commonly the cause for the mummy tummy. Your abs are separated, your organs are exposed and the more you eat, pushes them out – plain and simple. But can you get them back? Of course you can! But don’t get any fantasies that it’s easy. If your only alternative is to “suck it up” or have a $10,000 tummy tuck, then you must realize that the work needed to do it naturally is going to be a lot. But hey, I have never met a mom yet who wasn’t used to hard work. It’s just a matter of how hard you want it. Sound familiar?

So there you have it! But it’s not just exercise, it’s also a way of life. If you have a diastasis and it’s significant, there’s a good chance you have chronic back pain. You need to change the way you move and use your abdominals in every day life.

But if you don’t do anything at all, please stop the crunches, v-sits and all the other old school ways of creating a six-pack just to make your mummy tummy worse and more importantly, hurt your back even more.

Samantha Montpetit-Huynh is a mom of two beautiful girls and the owner and founder of Core Expectations, a Toronto-based full service wellness team that delivers personal training, abdominal rehabilitation, nutrition, massage, chiropractic and doula services to pregnant women and new moms across the GTA.