Why my breasts were reaching my belly button after breastfeeding

It was six weeks after I weaned her. I was standing in a changing room with a bra that fit perfectly and it still looked wrong, and it took me an embarrassing amount of time to work out why. The fit was fine. There just was not as much to fit.

I bought four bras in six weeks trying to solve that. Push-up, balconette, one of the expensive ones a woman in a shop fitted me for properly. Every one of them worked for exactly as long as I had it on.

I want to be honest about where my head was, because I think a lot of women are in the same place and never say it out loud. I thought I had done this to myself. I thought I had fed her too long, or stopped too fast, and that this was simply my body now and I had better get used to it. By the second month I had a surgeon's consultation page open on my phone at two in the morning, more than once.

What I had wrong was not the cause. It was the idea that there was nothing to understand and nothing to do about it. There was. What happens to your body when you wean has a name, an ordinary biological one, and nobody had ever said that name to me.

During pregnancy and nursing, milk-producing tissue expands. A lot. That expansion is temporary by design. When you wean, that tissue does what it was always going to do: it recedes. The clinical word is involution.

Here is the part nobody mentions. The tissue recedes, but the skin and the internal support structure that stretched to accommodate it do not automatically recede with it. Those internal supports are called Cooper's ligaments. They are connective tissue, not muscle. They stretched to hold something that is no longer there.

The volume leaves. The container it left stays stretched. That is the entire mechanism.

It is not a failure of willpower. It is not a moral event. It is involution plus connective tissue that was stretched during pregnancy, and it happens to a very large number of women.

Knowing the name of it was the first thing that made me feel less insane.

The second thing that helped was finding out I was nowhere near alone in this. I had assumed I was unusual. I was not even close.

None of that changed what I saw in the mirror. What it changed was the story I was telling myself about it. I was not broken, I was not the only one, and there was a mechanism underneath it I could finally point at instead of just feeling bad about.

Once I understood the mechanism, everything I had already thrown at this stopped making sense. I am listing all of it, including the expensive parts.

Four bras. A bra is external support. It holds things in a position while you are wearing it and does nothing at all to the tissue underneath, because it is not touching it. I knew that. I bought them anyway.

Six weeks of chest exercises. Push-ups, dumbbell presses, the whole routine a friend swore by. Chest work builds pectoral muscle, and pec muscle sits behind the tissue in question. You can build a very strong wall behind an empty shelf, and the shelf is still empty. Any honest trainer will tell you that if you ask them directly.

A firming cream that cost more than the bras. Creams and oils work on skin. Cooper's ligaments are not skin.

And I priced out a lift. I am putting that in here because I think most women in this position have at least opened the tab, and nobody writes it down. I got as far as a consultation fee and a number in the low thousands, plus weeks of recovery I could not take with a toddler in the house, and a permanent decision I was not ready to make eight months after giving birth. I closed the tab.

I am not telling you not to. For some women it is the right call and it is the only thing on this list that is genuinely structural. I am telling you it was not what I wanted to do first.

None of these were scams. They were all doing exactly what they said. Three of them were just aimed at things that were not the thing that had changed, and the fourth was a bigger decision than I was ready for.

This is where I started paying attention to how products in this category talk.

Almost everything I found was selling growth. Bigger. Fuller. Up a size. Which is a completely different question from the one I actually had, which was about something that had been there and then wasn't.

I got skeptical of the growth promises quickly, for a boring reason: nobody selling one could tell me how it was supposed to work. There was always a testimonial and a percentage, and never a mechanism. When I asked what the thing actually did, the answer was the result, restated louder.

So I made two rules. I would not buy anything that could not explain itself. And I would not buy anything that promised me a specific outcome, because nobody selling a supplement can honestly promise one. Anyone who does is telling you something they cannot possibly know.

This is the genuinely useful part, and it applies whether or not you ever buy anything from anyone.

Two things helped me that were not a product, and I want them in here for that reason.

The first is the name. Involution. Stretched Cooper's ligaments. Being able to describe what happened in words that were not I ruined myself changed how I felt about it more than anything I bought.

The second is time. This process takes months to happen, and it does not un-happen in a week. Whatever you decide to do, including nothing, decide it on a timescale of months. Anything sold to you on a two-week timeline is being sold on urgency, not on how bodies work.

I take Purevia now. I am not going to tell you what it will do for you, because I do not know, and neither does anybody selling you anything in this aisle.

That consultation page is still bookmarked, and I have not deleted it. I wanted to give the cheap, reversible, undramatic thing a fair run before I did the permanent one. If I ever go back to it I will go back to it having actually tried something first, instead of out of the panic I was in at two in the morning in month two.

There are three of them, and they are for different things.

Prefer just one? The breast one or the booty one. Not sure which? Answer a few questions and we will point you at one.