Up to 60 percent of women have separated abdominal muscles after birth. Most find out by accident. A lot never find out at all. That statistics alone should’ve been in your discharge paperwork. It wasn’t.
Your body just ran the most complex biological operation a human is capable of. Nine months of full-system reorganisation: hormonal, cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, neurological. What comes after isn’t some failure to bounce back. It’s a full recalibration, and it has a timeline that nobody hands you.
Your hormones don’t taper. They drop off a cliff.
Oestrogen and progesterone peak during pregnancy, then crash the moment your baby arrives. If you’re breastfeeding, prolactin rises while oestrogen stays suppressed for months. That’s why vaginal dryness and low libido are so common right now, and so rarely said out loud.
It’s not about how you feel about your partner. Biochemistry doing its thing. That’s all.
That hair in the shower drain? It has a name.
Elevated oestrogen during pregnancy keeps more hair in its growth phase than usual. Then hormones drop, and all that retained hair sheds at once. There’s actually a clinical name for it: telogen effluvium. It typically peaks around four months postpartum and sorts itself out within a year, per the American Academy of Dermatology.
It is natural but temporary. But it is genuinely alarming if nobody warned you it was coming.
The soft belly that won’t respond to exercise might not be a fitness problem.
As your uterus expanded, the connective tissue between your abdominal muscles stretched, and for many women it separated entirely. There’s a name for that too: diastasis recti. Research in the Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy puts the rate at up to 60 percent by the third trimester.
Here’s the thing most people skip: standard core work, crunches, sit-ups, intense planks, can actually make it worse. Worth knowing before you jump back into any of that.
One more thing that often gets missed entirely.
Postpartum thyroiditis affects roughly five to ten percent of women after delivery. The American Thyroid Association tracks it. Symptoms are fatigue, mood changes, weight shifts, which overlap almost perfectly with ordinary new-mother exhaustion, so it gets written off constantly. If something feels persistently off and rest isn’t touching it, ask your doctor to run a thyroid panel. Simple blood test.
What to actually do with all of this
Your six-week check is the bare minimum, not a thorough assessment. When you go, write down every symptom beforehand: pelvic pain, leakage, mood changes, fatigue, low libido. If something gets brushed off and your gut says otherwise, ask for a referral. You’re allowed to do that.
On diastasis recti: most GPs won’t screen for it unless you bring it up. You can request it directly, or book a pelvic floor physio who’ll check it as part of a full postpartum eval.
For the hair loss, protein and iron support regrowth. Skip the expensive treatments. If shedding is still significant at twelve months, see your GP to rule out thyroid involvement or iron deficiency.
And the things that feel too embarrassing to mention: dryness, leakage, pain during sex after delivery. These are common. Pelvic floor physiotherapy addresses most of them, and it’s more accessible than people realise. Say it out loud at your appointment.
Sleep won’t be easy to protect. But any time you can chip away at the debt, even in fragments, your body recovers faster. Wound healing, hormonal regulation, emotional resilience: all of it runs slower on empty. Accept help where it exists. Let the other things wait.
Frankly, most of this should’ve been standard. It wasn’t. Now you have it.
The full Postpartum Recovery Guide is at firsttimemomsacademy.com, covering hormonal shifts, pelvic floor health, and the parts of recovery nobody talks about.
