As her octuplets celebrate their first birthday, their famous mum has a present for herself – a fantastic new body. Francesca Moisin talks to Nadya Suleman.
She’s got the perfect breasts and washboard tummy of a pin-up model, but mum-of-14 Nadya “Octomum” Suleman says the secret behind her fabulous new body is ab crunches in the dead of night – not surgery.
Just 12 months after the birth of her eight IVF babies, Nadya has whittled her frame back to 60 kilos. At the height of her pregnancy, she tipped the scales at just over 135 kilos.
With the demands of her massive family, Nadya says she’s forced to squeeze in gruelling three-hour workouts after midnight, trekking to the gym as early as 2am while her octuplets – Isaiah, Jonah, Nariyah, Maliyah, Noah, Makai, Jeremiah and Josiah – are asleep.
“Four days a week I wake up at 2am, eat, drink coffee and go to the gym,” says the 34-year-old.“There I work out with a trainer for approximately three hours, focusing on a different part of my body each day.
“People are like, ‘Oh, you must have had some surgery,’” Nadya says. “No way, I would feel like I cheated … I wanted to prove to myself that I can do it on my own, naturally.”
Streamlined and super-fit, Nadya’s new lithe physique is quite the contrast to her pregnancy, when she struggled to get out of bed and could barely walk without feeling she might topple over.
“So many people take the easy way out and say, ‘Oh, let me go get this surgery now.’ They just don’t get it,” she says. “It takes incredible self-discipline and self-control to go exercise in the middle of the night when you’re supposed to be sleeping like everybody else.”
Along with her extraordinary weight loss, magically gone are the stretch marks and deep skin discoloration that came with her multiple pregnancy. But besides admitting to having a breast reduction in the past due to back strain, she insists her body is all natural.
“What you look like is beautiful enough, so don’t alter it,” she says. “And I won’t, because I don’t believe in mutilating oneself unless you have to, for medical purposes. With all the stretching from the babies, I got a very large bellybutton. But even though I hate it, I’m not going to change it.”
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