Paula Radcliffe Quotes

From your first kid, your body still kind of looks the same once you get back in shape.

I think the best thing about being pregnant would definitely have to be seeing just my belly grow and seeing, like, wow, there is, you know, something inside of me.

I went up a pants size during my pregnancy.

To be a mother is a magical experience. The whole body is transformed by this.

I'd already put on a bit of weight before I got pregnant.

My body will never go back to what it was, and I wouldn't expect it to after three babies.

Some women can't stand being pregnant, getting big and bloated, and hauling around a giant stomach, and some women, for reasons probably understood by Darwin, love it.

The experience of pregnancy - it depends on your situation, but it can be quite isolating.

Maternity leave is for women to hide and heal their disintegrating body.

Being pregnant changes your body image. You watch your stomach expand. If that happened without being pregnant you'd be in deep distress! But because you're excited about what's going to happen, you view yourself differently.

I think that at the time, when I was first pregnant, it was hard to make the transition from being totally self-involved to not being able to think about myself at all. At the end of the day, I think that's the best thing that someone can go through. I think it makes you a better person. It doesn't mean that people who don't go through that aren't good people. For me, it was a good thing.

When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again; yet after giving birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external, subject to all sorts of dangers and disappearance, so you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to keep her close enough for comfort. That's the strange thing about being a mother: Until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one.

The doctors advised me not to have even one. My health was still not good, and they said that pregnancy might be fatal. If they hadn't said that to me, maybe I wouldn't have got married. But that diagnosis provoked me, it infuriated me. I answered, 'Why do you think I'm getting married if not to have children? I don't want to hear that I can't have children; I want you to tell me what I have to do in order to have children!'

Been thinking about having a baby. But if I want to do it, I'd have to do it soon 'cause it's getting near closing time. The clock is ticking. My gynecologist said, if I wanted to have a baby, I would have to do it - the latest - by the ended of this show.

Please don't wait until the doctors tell you that you are going to have a baby to begin to take care of it. It is already there. Whatever you are, whatever you do, your baby will get it. Anything you eat, any worries that are on your mind will be for him or her. Can you tell me that you cannot smile? Think of the baby, and smile for him, for her, for the future generations. Please don't tell me that a smile and your sorrow just don't go together. It's your sorrow, but what about your baby? It's not his sorrow, its not her sorrow.

I think when you have surgery on any part of your body, it's never going to be the same.

Even if you've gone through an average childhood, you have girlfriends who get pregnant and then have to choose whether or not to have a child. And this stuff certainly makes you think about what you're taking on. I certainly want to have children, but I could never do it until I felt I loved myself enough, and wanted to bring someone into the world because I had some kind of security.

Look, I can carry a baby! I'm gaining weight right, everything's going well.

Obviously when you're pregnant everything changes, you have another body to take care of.

Enjoy the pregnancy, not racing ahead and relishing the moment. I think people see pregnancy as something to get over with, but every stage of becoming a mother is really special.

I think people are uncomfortable seeing pregnant women, particularly with any kind of conflict. [Pregnancy is] very much a projection of life and love, but it's also very complicated. People have very complicated pregnancies. They could be accidental or people suffer depression, and that was a really interesting thing for me. And a challenging thing. I have not been pregnant. I don't know what that's like, let alone to be really conflicted about it. Acting in the film about pregnancy was a really interesting thing to do.

If pregnancy were a book, they would cut the last two chapters. The beginning is glorious, especially if you're lucky enough not to have morning sickness and if, like me, you've had small breasts all your life. Suddenly they begin to grow, and you've got them, you've really got them, breasts, darling breasts, and when you walk down the street they bounce, truly they do, they bounce bounce bounce.

When I was pregnant, everyone told me you're going to be one of those women with a little football in front. And then this...thing, this Scooby-Doo monster belly arrived. I gained 65 pounds. Every single part of my body was thicker - even my scalp! But that's the advantage of being young - it went right back.

I feel I've learned a lot about [experience of giving birth], and I think it's amazing. Men and women who are ob-gyns are pretty amazing.