A man once wrote to Zoe Modgill on Instagram to tell her that his wife was really big and needed to lose weight, especially around her stomach. He wanted advice. “I’m like, what? Let me just go backwards a little bit.”
She gets a lot of these, she says. “It’s hilarious how most people will judge pregnancy just by their stomach, right? You’re pregnant, oh great, you should look big. Now you’re not pregnant, oh great, you should look small.” The questions she would rather people asked are harder to decipher in a photograph. “It’s not just about the weight. You can cover yourself up with some clothes; you can look leaner, but is your body functioning pain-free? Are you comfortable? Are you not peeing every time you laugh or you jump? These are all natural things that happen to one’s body, which is quite frankly not really talked about openly.”
Watch: In conversation with Zoe, ‘What nobody tells women about their bodies’
Modgill is a trainer, nutritionist, pre- and postnatal specialist, and Diastasis and Core Consultant, and she has personally been through nearly everything she is qualified to help with. Two miscarriages. Two pregnancies past 35, one with a complication that had doctors prescribing months of horizontal stillness. Two caesareans, two rounds of abdominal separation, and a postpartum body she filmed in her underwear and posted, to the horror of her extended family. She ran Studio 60 in Delhi for a decade, one of the first places in North India where a woman could train hard in peace, and now works from Goa through Stronger With Zoe, an online platform built exclusively for women, on the premise that a woman’s body is not one body but a sequence of them. “With women, there’s a lot of up and down. There’s getting married, having babies, coming back from having babies, having another baby, or reaching menopause. My life was, or is, doing all of these stages, and it just made sense to study them along and then help women in the same boat.”
This self-study matters, in truth, because much of the science around women’s health hasn’t been done. When researchers combed through 5,261 exercise science studies published between 2014 and 2020, across twelve million participants, they found that 31% of papers had studied men only and 6% had studied women only. The paper is titled “Invisible Sportswomen,” and its implication is blunt: most of what we believe about how bodies respond to training applies to male bodies. So when a woman asks whether she can keep lifting through her first trimester, the answer she gets is frequently extrapolated from men, or from nothing, or from custom dressed up as caution. Modgill’s whole career is rooted in a curiosity to know what happens when a woman decides to run the experiment on herself instead.
Trying, losing, and what she wishes all women knew
She was past 35 when she and her husband started trying, and the advice arrived before the baby did. “There was a lot of taboo around fitness and movement. Everybody likes to give you so much information, and let’s be honest, we never had ChatGPT or AI to confirm that this is garbage.”
Then two miscarriages, early, one after the other. Roughly one in five known pregnancies ends this way, and the great majority of first-trimester losses come down to chromosomal abnormalities, decided before anyone knew anything, preventable by nothing. Almost nobody tells a woman this, so she fills in an explanation based on whatever she was doing at the time.
“Those do completely scare you into feeling that maybe I shouldn’t, maybe I shouldn’t, or should, or what, or you get questioned. Now, having looked back at the research, I just wish that most women knew this. It has nothing to do with anything you could possibly be doing to yourself, such as exercising, eating well, or building muscle. These are all very good things to have on your priority list. There’s no one telling us, oh, ‘stop drinking alcohol, stop smoking, stop eating junk food’, not as much or as loudly as you hear ‘don’t exercise, don’t move, don’t do this, this and this. There was so much more stuff that made you freaked out.’”
So she made a decision and kept it. “I remember just telling myself, you know what? I’m just gonna do what I need to do, enjoy myself.” She was, by her own account, at her leanest and fittest when she conceived Zai, her elder son.
The complication, and the homework
Mid-pregnancy came a diagnosis with a script attached. “I ended up having a low-lying placenta, which meant doctors were loving to tell me bed rest is the answer. You got to lie flat, horizontal.”
A low-lying placenta sits near or across the cervix and raises the risk of bleeding. Most of them resolve on their own as the uterus expands, and months of strict bed rest carry their own costs, in muscle, in conditioning, in clot risk, on evidence that has never been strong. Modgill did not ignore her doctors, but she did multiply them. “I insisted on finding a couple of gynaecologists, speaking to them differently, understanding what was going on with my body, which I think is another thing that women should be more empowered about. Find out what is happening with your body. I think people just love to listen to something and then they don’t want to do any homework further.” Several opinions, better questions, a working grasp of the actual mechanism, and only then a decision about what she could and couldn’t do. “That led me to realise that I could do certain movements, which made me study even more, and how important movement is for a pregnant woman as well as for the baby, not just for you.”
The underwear videos
Then the baby came. “Your body is like, whoa. You’re just like, okay. And I was like, I need to document this. I definitely shocked every family member in my close proximity,” she laughs. “Is it necessary to be standing in your underwear on the video? And I was like, yeah, it is. Just because it’s a nappy, but it’s not a bikini, there’s a problem there. This is reality.”
The reality she was filming is the one the bounce-back narrative airbrushes out. “Your body is stretched left, right and centre. Even if you eat well and exercise, your body still grows and changes. You accumulate a lot of extra fat and loose skin. That is how it works. There’s nothing I can do to prevent much of that, so it’s also about accepting it and understanding that this is what it is and this is how we work with it. I think it helped me be okay with where I’m at.”
It also gave her the diagnostic she now uses on every client, because a woman who cannot look at her own body has no baseline to work from. “I’ve actually met so many women who can’t take a picture of themselves, don’t like taking their video, and don’t like looking at it. And that is a red flag. We have to be able to accept where our bodies are in order to then change them.”
Your abdominals separate, and… then what?
Both pregnancies gave her diastasis recti, the condition in which the two vertical bands of abdominal muscle are pushed apart at the midline as the uterus grows, stretching the connective tissue between them. It is not an injury. It is how the baby gets the room. “All women do, in fact, experience that, whatever they think they can do, because that’s just how the baby needs to grow. There needs to be more space.”
The numbers are startling if you have never seen them: in a Norwegian study of three hundred first-time mothers, 60% had a measurable separation at six weeks postpartum, and a third still had one a full year after giving birth. Left unaddressed, the effects run past the cosmetic, because the abdominal wall works with the pelvic floor and the deep back muscles as one pressure system, which is how a soft middle turns into back pain, poor posture, and the leaking Modgill refuses to stop mentioning in public. Her diagnosis of why recovery takes so long is the useful, unpopular one. “Women in general are so deconditioned prior to having a baby that that core connection thing isn’t really there to begin with. So it will end up taking a hell of a lot of time and practice and effort and eating well postpartum to actually work that area of the body confidently.”
Eating well is doing real work in that sentence. Rebuilding muscle and tissue is construction, and construction needs materials, which means the standard postpartum instinct, eat as little as possible and shrink as fast as possible, works directly against the repair.
The plan, and the 80%
Her coaching runs on a four-week written programme with her on the other end of the phone, and she is upfront about what it is not. “My coaching plans are not spoon-feeding. I give you what to do, but unless you do the work, nothing works. Unless you’ve got a progressive plan, you’re not really going anywhere; you’ll just repeat, which is what most people end up doing. They end up trying to start fresh on a Monday every time because they’ve reached a dead end.”
Progressive is the operative word, and it is the single most common thing missing from how women train: a programme that never gets harder stops producing change, which is why the same three sets of the same twelve reps with the same weight for two years produces the same body for two years. The compliance target is 80%, because 80% survives real life. And for mothers, her argument is arithmetic rather than inspiration. “Your entire duty is to keep this child alive, which means it’s 24/7 vigilance, right? So the first thing you end up cutting out is yourself. And I’m guilty of it too. But that 30 minutes that you took away from stressing about something will actually give you five hours of really energetic, helpful, positive endorphins that you can then transfer on.”
The stakes run past you, as it happens, because there is an audience in the house. “Kids do what you do. They are just sponges. The way in which you deal with stress, or how you talk about your body, without even knowing, oh, I’m so fat today. This is what your kids pick up and learn as well.” Her own household has a short diagnostic. “When I’m edgy, and I’m not having a great day, my husband will be like, did you work out today? And I’ll be like, no, I need to.”
What to take from all of this
If you are trying to conceive, keep training and keep eating, and know that the guilt women carry after a loss is almost always attached to the wrong thing. If you are pregnant and holding a diagnosis with an instruction stapled to it, ask for the mechanism before you accept the instruction, ask whether it comes from your scan or from general caution, and ask more than one doctor. If you are postpartum, assume some separation, treat it as rehabilitation with a nutrition component rather than a cosmetic problem, take the photographs you’d rather not take, and measure yourself against function- your back, your posture, your continence, whether you can lift your child without bracing- rather than against the circumference of your stomach.
And whatever stage you’re at: 80%, not perfection. Your children are writing down everything you say about your body.
Zoe Modgill is the founder of Stronger With Zoe. Part two, on what your forties actually need from you, follows next week. Nothing here replaces advice from your own doctor, particularly during pregnancy.
1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com