Before I start, I need to get some housekeeping out of the way. Yes, pregnancy is physically hard. Yes, childbirth can be brutal on a mum’s Body. Those are facts we acknowledge and accept. In fact, any mums reading this will probably recognise a lot of this in themselves too.
Ok? Good.
With that out of the way, let’s acknowledge it all together: parenthood fucks up dads’ Bodies too.
I don’t care how fit you are going into fatherhood, you don’t leave that first year the same person as you went in physically. It’s almost impossible. Suddenly you’re using all kinds of muscles and parts of your body you never even knew you had, for way longer than you’ve ever used them. You’re holding your newborn baby for hours every day, constantly bobbing them up and down. You’re bending down to pick them up, to change their nappies countless times in a twenty-four hour period. All these new, taxing movements on your body, all when you’ve had zero sleep. It’s a universal truth - even Bandit in Bluey had to ditch the office chair and go for the yoga ball because his back’s fucked from changing nappies.
There’s no disputing it - for such little things, newborns take their toll on us.
Every dad I’ve spoken to has had these aches and pains, these same feelings that their bodies just don’t tick the way they used to before. At some point, we feel that creaking in each and every par of our bodies. But we all remember the one part of the body that gave up first; the one that said “fuck this shit, I’m out” from day one.
What’s mine? The knees.
Just before we had our first, the popular long-running baby and mother shopping chain Mothercare went into administration and started closing down in the UK. Like any other parents or parents-to-be, my wife first thought was, “let’s get down there for the closing down sales!”
I looked through the piles of stuff she brought back with a sense of pride at her vulture-like instincts. But amidst the piles of baby-grows, vests and muslins, I saw a weirdly-shaped foam pad, similar to this (that’s not an affiliate link, promise!).
I picked it up. “What’s this?”
“That’s for your knees when you’re changing nappies in the night,” she said.
“When I’m changing nappies?” I said. Yes, this was pre-parenting. I was naive.
“Well I’m doing the breast feeds all night. Like fuck I’m doing the nappies too.” Hard to argue with that, I thought. “You’ll be glad of that mat, trust me.”
Well, little did I know that yes, I would be glad for it. Without that piece of foam to protect my knees, god knows what shape they’d be in now. But even with it, they still took an absolute battering.
I guess it was part of the routine I took to. Every time I changed my newborn’s nappy throughout the night (so we’re talking at least six times a night in the early days), I kneeled down by the side of the bed while she lay on it. In fact, basically every nappy change or pick-up off the ground involved me dropping down onto my knees. Then she started crawling, and I ended up crawling around with her - on my knees.
I’m going on my knees to pick up toys, bits of food she’s thrown, cleaning up mess she’s made. By the end of the first year, I knew what the Undertaker must feel like after doing the Tombstone Piledriver for over thirty years.
It really hit home how fucked they were one time I did the shopping in Tesco. I had to reach down low to grab a pack of eggs. Initially I bent down at the waist, knowing the knees weren’t in great shape. I picked the first pack that came to hand, but the dates were crap. In fact, all of the ones near the front were bad.
I had no choice. I squatted down to check near the back, but before I could reach, the tendons in my knee felt like they were going to snap, right there and then. I pushed myself back to straight, had a little word with myself and went again. The tension came earlier this time; they just weren’t having it.
If it was busy in the aisle at that point, I’d have sacked off the eggs and moved on. Fortunately it was around 7am during the first month of the pandemic, and it was dead in there. So I dropped onto my arse to rummage for a pack of eggs with a decent date. I wanted to get to my feet as fast as I could, but then I noticed something else I needed a bit further down the aisle, also down low. Rather than expending the effort to stand up again and perhaps rip a ligament or something bending down again, I took the next best course and shuffled on my arse down the aisle. I grabbed whatever it was I needed, hauled myself up and hobbled away before anymore saw. Safe to say, I kept my head down walking past the bloke sat at the security desk on my way out. Maybe no one passing by had noticed the weirdo shuffling on his arse by the eggs, but you can bet he did.
It wasn’t just the knees. Eventually the hours I’d spend per day holding her on my shoulder gave me cramps in my hamstrings and constant aches in my back. Standing like that even messed up my natural stance for a while; people commented on how I seemed to be leaning back, even when not holding the baby. Someone straightened me out, and I couldn’t believe the degree to which I was contorting my body, just our of muscle memory for how I held my daughter. One time my dad even caught me bobbing up and down without the baby in my arms, stuck in the same motion that I’d be perpetually performing night after night whilst rocking her to sleep.
But fatherhood does more to us than just ravaged joints and chronic backache. Unfortunately there’s one quantifiable way that we change - we get bigger.
There’s research that shows on average, men put on over a stone (or over 8.5kg) in the first year of fatherhood. Factors like the lack of sleep, less time to exercise and basically eating whatever you have time to get your hands on during the day all contribute. Hell, there’s even evidence to say that we start putting on weight before the bay arrives. In the weight gain department, we don’t stand a chance.
That’s not necessarily the trouble, though. The weight gain prior to becoming a dad you can put down to our biology, and the weight gain afterwards down to circumstance. Either way, they’re natural events in the journey of a dad.
The problem comes in the obsession in some circles with losing it again.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t strive to eat healthy and exercise or anything like that. But if you’ve even dared to once Google anything about fitness, then be fucking prepared for an avalanche of Instagram adverts from people selling programmes about shredding your belly fat in twelve weeks, or from companies selling t-shirts to hide your ‘dad bod’ (an unhelpful term, as it has no set definition. This article uses the term to describe Jason Momoa, for fucks sake). Mums will be very familiar with this as well; the pressure on them to ‘bounce back’ after giving birth is as incessant as it is unwelcome.
I know I’ve felt pressure to look a certain way as a dad of a young child; one who has less energy to exercise and less free time to eat well. And I know that if I feel this way, there’s more of us out there.
I’m not saying that it’s impossible to achieve results fitness-wise if you’re a dad, and wanting to make a change is admirable, for sure. In fact, we can do far worse for our kids by demonstrating a willingness to keep ourselves healthy, for their sake as well as our own.
What I’m calling for though is an end to the external pressure. Becoming a dad is amazing, sure, but it’s also can be a constant mindfuck of tiredness, guilt, frustration, sadness, and a whole load of other negative thoughts that pop up on a daily basis. The last thing we really need on top of all that is to feel shit about ourselves because our bodies don’t necessarily look the way they used to for a year after we become fathers, or five years, or perhaps ever again.
If you feel any kind of way about he way your body has changed since becoming a dad (or a mum, for that matter), consider this your permission to take your time doing whatever the fuck you want with your body. If you want your body to look the way it did before, then great. But it doesn’t have to happen in twelve week, or six months, or even a year or two. There is no time frame.
There are really great people to follow on social media for health and fitness advice, and all the best ones absolutely despise these ‘get shredded quick’ courses and fad diets, that are impossible to sustain and only end up with us feeling worse about ourselves.
There’s plenty of time to get to where we’re going when it comes to how our bodies look, if that’s what we want. There’s no rush. No one else dictates our timescales but us. We’ll all get there eventually, by making small changes that we can sustain over long periods of time.
In the meantime, we’ve got parenting to do.
(Having said all that, if your knees are fucked like mine were, a few squats a day might strengthen them just enough to avoid finding yourself bum-shuffling in the egg aisle.)
What about you?
What body part of yours gave up the ghost first once you became a dad? Have you noticed the same sense of urgency to get your body back to looking how it did before?
It can be hard talking about our bodies, especially if we’re not one hundred percent fully satisfied. But one conversation can lead to another, and hopefully help less of us feel like we’re feeling these things alone. I’d love to hear from you.
Thank you!
I just wanted to quickly say thanks to everyone who’s checked out Some Other Dad since I started it last week - it’s been so cool starting to interact with dads all over the world and seeing the green shoots of growth start to bloom in this newsletter. We’re already into double figures for subscribers - but let’s keep going!
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Previously on Some Other Dad
Last week’s first issue discussed how some dads find it tough to make new friends in fatherhood, particularly those of a certain generation. In it, I discuss my own experiences with socialising with other dads (or hiding from them, in one case), and how pre-conceived ideas of masculinity might be to blame.
