The mother-of-two, who played Carly Hope in Emmerdale, admitted to crying over her changing shape from pregnancy and C-sections
Actress Gemma Atkinson has opened up about her turbulent relationship with body image, urging people to be aware of one thing. The mother-of-two, who played Carly Hope in Emmerdale, admitted to crying over her changing shape from pregnancy and C-sections, but now views this as a positive thing.
“When I was pregnant with my daughter, Mia ended up being an emergency C-section,” she said in a new episode of her podcast, The Overshare. “…you don’t look at your scar for a good few days, they change the dressing and whatever.
“And the first time when I got home, because I was in hospital for a week, I came home I remember peeling off the C-section bandage and standing in the mirror. It was so swollen and so bruised, I physically started crying thinking, ‘oh my god this is awful, this big cut on my body’.”
Fast forward to 2023, and Gemma gave birth to her second child, Thiago, who was also birthed via C-section. Despite the previous ‘shock and upset’ over her scars, she said everything completely flipped when considering it in a different light.
“Now, I’ve had a second C-section again, not an emergency one but a necessity, because Thiago decided to poo inside me while I was trying to get him out,” she quipped. “I now look at it as that’s where my children gained their life. How capable was my body?
“The first time I looked at it, the shock and the upset, I now feel a bit ashamed of, that I viewed it that way when it did such an amazing, wonderful thing.”
Beyond her scars, Gemma also revealed that she gained over three stone, ‘loads of cellulite’ and numerous stretch marks during this period. While she wasn’t too keen on this either, her husband Strictly pro Gorka Márquez ‘couldn’t get enough’.
She went on: “When I was pregnant, I put on three-and-a-half stone, and I developed loads of cellulite and I was like, ‘oh my gosh!’ Gorka wasn’t bothered, he was like, ‘more the merrier’, he couldn’t get enough.
“He was like, ‘you look beautiful’, and he loved it. It was in my own mind. My stretch marks now on my backside are going to be known as my tiger stripes. I have tiger stripes because I’ve grown, housed and delivered two children.”
Now 40, Gemma is fitter and more confident than ever before. In December, she, told Women’s Health that she wanted her body to be ‘functional’, adding: “That’s always my aim with training. It’s never, ‘I need to fit into a certain size,’ it’s ‘How can I remain strong?’
“Especially going into your forties; perimenopause will kick in…I want my body to be functional.” However, she encouraged people to be aware that everyone’s path to fitness may look different.
On the podcast, she said: “I’m asked a lot on my socials how many calories I eat a day. I mean, it’s a lot, I eat a lot of food but I’m doing a lot of expenditure. I’m walking, I’m training. If you put someone who’s five-foot-two who works in an office nine hours a day on the same calories as me, they would have completely different results, because it is all dependent on the person.
“And that’s another thing, I think there is not enough awareness. Everyone assumes one-size-fits-all.”
