Frankly, I’m proud of her. I know a few women who just cannot get back their pre-pregnancy body. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a post-pregnancy body, but these women have tried diets, exercise programs, personal trainers etc. and nothing seems to work. That this new mom is able to get her body back is fascinating. But apparently, this picture is causing worldwide controversy.
Is the postpregnancy body the new weapon of choice among superfit women? Yes, charge critics of Norwegian soccer wife and fitness blogger Caroline Berg Eriksen, who posted a flat-stomach, bra-and-panties selfie to her 245,000 Instagram followers just four days after giving birth.
“This is not a selfie. This is an act of war,” writes one Australian blogger in response to the image — just one of many blogs, news outlets, body image experts, and social-media commenters around the world to weigh in on the matter in the past few days, putting the photo at the center of a major online body image controversy. “This whole situation has become ludicrous. The competition for women to give birth and then immediately remove any trace from their their bodies that they ever carried a child is OBSCENE. There is no other word for it.” Another blogger calls the photo of Eriksen, who is married to pro soccer player Lars-Kristian Eriksen, “wildly provocative.”
Eriksen posted the photo of herself on Instagram, along with the caption, “I feel so empty…4 days after birth,” igniting the online backlash. Twitter users called Eriksen and her washboard abs “intimidating,” “unhelpful,” “obviously a freak,” and “unfair to all women.”
She’s a rare specimen. She’s posing on her toes, gut sucked in so that exaggerates it but obviously she was in great shape before the pregnancy and during. As long as the baby is perfectly healthy and she didn’t get this way doing something harmful (and not implying that she did, at all), then I have no problem with this picture- but people need to see it for what it is, a very, very uncommon and hard to achieve and not achieving it means nothing.