Salma Hayek Talks Post-Baby Body And The Confidence Game

Though Jezebel questions her use of the word "disfigured" when describing her post-pregnancy shape, we're actually quite pleased with Salma Hayek's latest comments on the subject of post-baby bodies and being a woman in this overly critical age.

In a very feel-good interview for Glam Belleza Latina, Ms. Hayek talks about her struggles adapting to a changing body after giving birth: “I gained so much weight, I got an opportunity to see myself completely disfigured in many different ways — for a very good reason — and I don’t regret it for a second." And while that may have been hard at first, it ended up serving as a source of inspiration. Hayek says it was then that she finally began to love and appreciate her body. "The things that I used to criticize, they were not that bad after all.” Though, of course, she did get back to her pre-pregnancy figure eventually.

“We’ve got to fight for our confidence every day in modern life because we live in a society that is very harsh to women,” she explains, and that's music to our ears. And it's not just about looks, either. “You have to be smart and successful and a good mother and beautiful and young and skinny forever. It’s a lot of pressure. So I think we have to take a deep breath and just enjoy ourselves and say, ‘I’m going to be the best that I can be, and that’s more than enough.’ ”

True, "disfigured" may be a less-than-ideal descriptor (though her English seems fine to us, it is her second language, which could explain things). But we think it's probably an honest description of a pretty normal emotional response to a rapidly, and drastically, changing body. It's not abnormal to feel dissociated from your body when it goes through a serious transformation like pregnancy. What counts is that, in time, Hayek gained some valuable perspective on her own self image. There are two things we love about this interview: First of all, she manages to give some solid, common-sense advice without sounding pedantic. Second, she recognizes that the pressure on women today is about more than just looks — and combatting that pressure means not just accepting your body, but owning and enjoying the life you've made for yourself as a whole. Wise words, indeed!