Ashley Graham on Postpartum: "I'm Living In a Different Body and It's Been Hard to Get to Know Her"
"I can't say that I can look in the mirror and be like, 'I love you.'"
Ashley Graham doesn't always love her postpartum body, but she's learning to honor it.
The supermodel, who's been something of a poster child for body acceptance for over a decade, opens up about her changing relationship with her body in a Marie Claire cover story for our new Motherhood Issue.
"I'm living in a different body and it's been hard to get to know her," Graham admits. "I can't say that I can look in the mirror and be like, 'I love you.'
"It's not that for me. It's that, Wow, I made some children. I was as fit as I could be in 2019 when I got pregnant…I'm still trying to get to that, but I've had to get over it in my head that I’ll look like I did in my late 20s, early 30s. She's gone. Let's focus on the new girl. That has been like the last four years of my conversation in my head."
Graham is a proud mom to three boys: Isaac, 6, and twins Roman and Malachi, 4. She shares her kids with husband Justin Ervin, whom she married in 2010.
As part of her conversation with entertainment director Neha Prakash, the model also discusses the rise of GLP-1s and the new cultural "trend" for shrinking bodies.
"It's really disheartening," she says of what feels to some commentators like going backwards. "There was a pendulum that swung that was so body acceptance, positivity, everybody be who they want to be. And now it's going back this whole opposite way that feels like a smack in the face to the women who have felt like they've had a voice.”
Still, Graham isn't letting the doom and gloom set in. "It goes with the times—and GLP-1s are a time," she says. "I know that there are and there's gonna still be women who are considered plus size forever. This drug isn't going to wipe out a whole statistic of women."
