Very often, we see actresses being trolled on social media and their post-pregnancy weight is one of the reasons. It is very natural for women to gain weight, but the actresses often become easy targets of body shaming. Ridiculous, right? Where some people casually pass comments, they don’t understand the consequences and the effect it has on the stars. Sameera Reddy, who is expecting her second child with husband Akshai Varde, recently opened up on post-pregnancy weight, depression and how she fell apart after her first pregnancy.
After the birth of her son, Hans Varde in 2015, she said that she was almost close to 102kgs and couldn’t recognise herself. “From being that ‘sexy Sam’, I went to this. I put on 32 kg up to and couldn’t recognise myself. I was a complete mess,” she told IANS in an interview. She also mentioned how people would react after seeing her. They would say ‘Is this Sameera Reddy? What happened to her?’ all this further put her in a hole.
Sameera was feeling depressed but didn’t let that stop her from being a good mother. During this time, she also got this auto ailment called Alopecia areata, which made her lose patches of her hair after almost six months of giving birth. And this had nothing to do with her pregnancy. The changes her body went through was tough for her.
She said:
It was the worst case scenario of what I could’ve imagined in terms of my body and the way I fell apart as a person because the pregnancy was very tough for me.
Recalling her first pregnancy experience, Sameera said, “I had placenta previa, which had me on bed rest for almost four to five months after the pregnancy. I just started putting on weight and falling into some kind of place in my head because it went from shows, award functions, and a glamorous lifestyle to just not being able to handle what pregnancy was doing to me.”
But this time around, Sameera has embraced her baby bump and weight gain. “I will not look glamorous all the time. But I wanted to come out and say Hey! it’s okay to be like this’,” she said. Just recently, she gave it back to a troll and said that not everyone is like Kareena Kapoor Khan who can get back in shape in no time after pregnancy.
She also shared that she got help in terms of therapy and understood that she was lost and confused as a person.
In an episode of our web series called The Girl Tribe, Sameera had opened up on being an actress in Bollywood, the facade she had to put up to stay in the game, dealing with fat shaming post the delivery of her son, and how that whole experience has now changed her outlook on life.
Watch the episode below:
Thank you for opening up on these topics, Sameera. We’re sure a number of women will be able to relate to this and learn from it.