Yahoo LifestyleThe week I posed naked for a magazine
I would say that, like many women, I have a love–hate relationship with my body. And for most of my life it has been intense dislike. I’m not a naturally skinny girl and since I was a teenager my weight has yo-yoed.
At the peak of Hear’Say’s fame I was a size 14 and the band’s management were constantly on at me to lose weight. When the band finished I had shrunk to a small size 8. But even then, when fashion designers were enthusing about how ‘fabulous’ I looked, I felt uncomfortable and unhappy – and Gray hated my body, calling me Boney-M.
So for me, one of the most amazing things about pregnancy was that I felt truly comfortable with my body for the first time. Yes, I was putting on what seemed to be half a stone every time I saw the doctor. Yes, my boobs were huge, my thighs had expanded and I had what Lauren and I termed ‘armulite’ on my upper arms (how had I put on weight there?).
But my body was making a baby and I felt fabulous. I would never have agreed to go naked on the front cover of a magazine before my pregnancy but when Glamour magazine asked me if I would ‘do a Demi’ (after Demi Moore’s famous pregnancy pose for Vanity Fair) I thought it was a fantastic idea.
It all started as a bit of a joke. I was on the judging panel of GMTV’s High Street Awards with the Glamour editor Jo Elvin and we got quite friendly. One lunch time she was telling me she was having a nightmare trying to choose a celebrity to be on the front of the magazine’s August issue. ‘At this rate, I’m going to have to ask you to do a Demi for me,’ she said.
[Relevant: Famous, nude and pregnant magazine covers]
I didn’t think anything more about it, but the next day my publicist phoned me and said, ‘What’s all this about you going naked for Glamour?’
It wasn’t something I had thought about before but I immediately agreed and just a few weeks later I was posing in front of dozens of people at the shoot with just a G-string to preserve my modesty.
It was one of the nicest shoots I had ever been on. Practically everyone there was a parent so we talked babies all day. When I got hot flushes they all understood what I was going through. And I didn’t feel embarrassed scoffing my usual fish and chips.
And I felt proud of my body. It’s the first time I have ever done any sort of modelling and not felt compelled to suck my tummy in. I had the same experience a few weeks later when I was hosting the Miss Scotland competition and for once didn’t feel fat and ungainly next to all the aspiring beauty queens.
In fact, I was revelling in my curves and became quite vain about them! If I caught a glimpse of my profile while shopping I would stop, have a proper look and rub my belly. My boobs might have expanded to a size 32E and none of my trousers fitted but being pregnant meant I was 100 per cent happy with the way I looked.
It wasn’t just that I didn’t have to suck in my belly. It was an incredible time: my body was creating a baby. When you are pregnant you realise how awe-inspiring nature is. It’s incredible how your body knows to create a placenta, how your bones know to soften to help with the labour, how you breathe deeper to take in more oxygen.
Getting pregnant can be hard and sustaining a pregnancy just as hard – in a way both are miracles in themselves. But I think that in this country people are split into two groups – they either celebrate pregnancy or treat it like an illness. The Glamour shoot was a celebration of pregnancy and I felt empowered.
However, not everyone saw it that way. Even my mother was a little bit shocked when I told her – she literally couldn’t speak. But she absolutely loved the pictures when they appeared, as did Gray.
The front cover seemed to polarise opinion – which to me summed up how different people see pregnancy in Britain. I got lots of letters and emails saying how wonderful it was but there were quite a few which said how it was disgusting – pregnant women should be hiding their bumps not showing them off.
I was surprised that a lot of the angry letters came from women who presumably would have preferred it if I had disappeared into confinement as soon as I had discovered I was pregnant. It made me annoyed that people – especially women who had children themselves – seemed to think pregnant women should be hidden from view.
Read more about Myleene Klass’s first pregnancy in My Bump and Me.
