WARNING: This Post-Pregnancy Shoot Includes Stretch Marks & Cellulite

Sick of seeing all those celebrity post-baby photo shoots and paparazzi shots where it looks like they didn’t even give birth to a bean, let alone a baby? Sure we know some women have naturally smaller frames and bounce back quickly. But just the notion of not snapping back to your size-0 self 10 seconds after giving birth to your precious one is really outrageous. We aren’t all Heidi Klum or Gisele Bundchen for goodness sakes!

The majority of us are normal with curves, lumps, bumps, sagging, cellulite, stretch marks and guess what? We aren’t ANY less beautiful because of that! We at GTHQ reject the notion of perfect symmetry being the only definition of “beauty”.

Well we certainly aren’t alone in our thinking. A photographer by the name of Jade Beall has started an extraordinary photo project called ‘A Beautiful Body’ where she photographs a lot of women who are either pregnant or have just given birth. The photos, all shot in black and white are an extraordinary display of femininity and beauty, challenging the notion that females must get back to their original sizes, if not skinnier, soon after delivery.

The idea for the project came about after she started putting up photos on her facebook page of women, showing their scars, imperfections, flaws, stretch marks etc and soon many more women contacted her wanting to be photographed in the same way. A celebration of women “warts and all” and the huge burden we go through to carry a child into this world.

It was sort of an answer to all those celebrities who immediately go on crash diets to shed the baby weight, making readers and fans feeling very insecure. It’s an unhealthy notion and unrealistic goal. More importantly, this photoshoot focuses not just on the woman’s body, but her inner beauty and what a beautiful bond mothers have with their babies. It was a celebration of life, captured by a woman who has gone through the exact same thing.

“As a teenager I suffered from feelings of deep unworthiness. I had acne and I was unable to look in a mirror for nearly three years, unless it was by candlelight. … I gained 50 pounds with my pregnancy and that added to my personal history of oppressive self-loathing in a culture that praises mostly photoshopped images of women in media.”

Ms Beall told the Huffington Post: “We are facing an epidemic of women who feel unworthy of being called beautiful. Nearly all of us struggle to feel beautiful in our own skin. And the expectations faced by women who have given birth are particularly harsh. Shaming mothers for not ‘bouncing back’ after childbirth can cause feelings of failure when being a mother is challenging enough and when a big number of us have already lived a life of feeling un-beautiful prior to giving birth,” she says.

The book is being crowd-funded on kickstarter, and the response has been overwhelming! She has already raised more than what she was intending, and she describes this book and project as “medicinal” as it has helped so many women with their self-esteem. She does each shoot for free, and the book, which will include roughly 150 photos, will be released in January 2014.

Wow! What an amazing idea and bravo Jade for being courageous enough to share her own story and many others. Her end goal is “to be a part of a movement of being kind to ourselves and to others,’ she told the Huffington Post. Here are some of the shots she has shown on her website, facebook and kickstarter so far.