Celebrity vs. Reality Post-Baby Body

When you scan as many celebrity mom blogs as I do, you can’t help but have your face rubbed in the fact that as a non-famous mother, you most likely don’t have the abs of a post-baby Kourtney Kardashian.

The truth is, I didn’t have Kardashian abs before having two kids, so it’s not like I expected them to magically appear just by chasing my children around, which if you read a fair amount of these types of you stories, you know that’s an often-cited celebrity solution to getting back that pre-baby body. “Oh, just chasing little Bluebell/Brooklyn/Bronx/Bear around is all the exercise I need!” is the kind of thing you see a lot of in the celebrity baby blog circuit.

In the real world, where you work from 9 to 5 and then come home to work for another four hours or more, finding time to take care of yourself is unofficially a chief complaint of the working parent, based on my own anecdotal observations. By the time my husband and I are done cleaning up the kitchen and doing what we can to get ready for the next day, strenuously working out is at the bottom of the preferred “me time” activities we can fit in before calling it a night and going to bed. Plus, if I exercised then, I’d be wired and unable to get to sleep at a reasonable hour.

Yet just by looking around at almost all the other working moms I know, most everyone else seems to place a premium on working out. Tell me, ladies, how are you managing it all? What’s your secret? Are you just blessed with a killer metabolism or are you doing the opposite of what I’m doing and making workouts a priority? Do your kids move around a lot more than mine do or is your house bigger, giving them more square footage to cover so the whole chasing them thing actually is exercise for you?

I have been getting up early to walk before work, but I’m not sure it will do much in terms of giving me abs of steel. Besides, I’m not striving for a bikini-perfect body to keep my reality show on the air. My focus is on being a healthier parent.