How to rebuild your fitness routine post pregnancy, according to experts

 

For many new mothers, the pressure to build a fitness routine post pregnancy and get back into shape begins almost immediately after giving birth. Between celebrity post-baby transformations and Instagram posts of women returning to the gym just weeks after delivery, it can feel like there's an unspoken deadline to look the way you did before pregnancy. But Dr Bijal Dodia, senior consultant physiotherapist at Sir HN Reliance Foundation Hospital, Mumbai, believes the focus needs to shift. “Your body is not a before-and-after photograph and recovery is not a race to fit back into your pre-pregnancy jeans,” she says. The real aim, she adds, “is to help your body feel strong, supported and capable again.”

But apart from societal conditioning, most women wonder when would be the right time to start working out (by choice). Amongst the nappy changes, breast-milk pumping and hair fall, exercise after pregnancy can quietly turn into a safe space to recover (and account for some humble me-time). So the real question lingers, when and how do you start exercising?

Start slower than you think

Whether you’ve had a vaginal birth or a caesarean, the baseline is the same. “Recovery after childbirth, whether vaginal or caesarean, generally takes around six to eight weeks. The body needs time to return to its normal physiological state and for tissues and sutures to heal,” explains Dr Anita Soni, director of obstetrics and gynaecology at Dr LH Hiranandani Hospital, Powai.

The route there differs, though. After an uncomplicated vaginal delivery, Dr Dodia says “gentle walking around the house, comfortable movements and breathing exercises can often begin within the first few days, if tolerated.” Gentle pelvic floor contractions can follow once they feel comfortable. Dr Soni notes, "This group can usually start walking earlier as pain and physical restrictions are generally lesser,” although tears, stitches or complications can change the picture.

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A caesarean is a different story. “A caesarean section involves abdominal surgery, so the incision and underlying tissues require adequate time to heal, making a gradual return to physical activity essential,” says Dr Soni. The same goes for a significant perineal injury, where Dr Dodia says recovery “needs to be more gradual and guided by the treating team.”

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What your body is actually doing

It helps to know what’s going on under the surface. The pelvic floor, the hammock of muscles supporting your bladder, bowel and uterus, may be weaker after pregnancy. That can show up as leaking, heaviness or general discomfort. Then there’s diastasis recti, the separation of the abdominal muscles that runs down the middle of your stomach. It’s common and it can affect core strength, which is why Dr Soni advises that women “gradually rebuild abdominal strength rather than immediately returning to intense workouts.”

There are less obvious factors, too. Pregnancy hormones can linger and loosen the joints and ligaments, so you may feel less stable than usual. Breastfeeding raises your nutritional and hydration needs and fuller breasts can make exercise after pregnancy uncomfortable. The fix is simple: drink plenty of water, eat properly and wear a supportive bra.

Building back up

Think of this as a ladder rather than a switch. "Once healing is under way, slowly introduce longer walks, gentle stretching, deep abdominal muscle activation and modified Pilates. Strength training comes next, starting with light resistance and controlled movements before gradually increasing the load. Swimming, for those who love the water, should wait until postpartum bleeding has stopped and wounds have healed sufficiently,” advises Dr Dodia.

Running and jumping need far more preparation. Here, the six-week check-up is a trap for the unwary. “The six-week postnatal check-up does not automatically mean that every woman is ready to return to all workouts,” says Dr Dodia. Dr Soni echoes this: "Medical clearance does not necessarily mean a woman is ready for high-impact activities such as running or intense workouts because they place greater pressure on the abdominal muscles and pelvic floor”.

'Extremely harmful to Indian democracy': Rijiju slams Naseeruddin Shah over 'dimagi naxal' video

 

Union Minister Kiren Rijiju has said that actor Naseeruddin Shah is a "dangerous urban dimagi naxal", calling his views "extremely harmful" to Indian democracy, after Shah shared a video accusing the Centre of attempting to destroy the education system.

In a post on X on Wednesday, the minister for minority affairs said he used to respect Shah, but came to know of his "real character" very late.

In a video posted on Facebook on Tuesday, a visibly angry Shah came out in support of Jamia Millia Islamia students, who have been protesting for the restoration of the students' union, and called himself a "dimagi naxal".

He accused the BJP-led central government of trying to destroy the education system and break the "courage of the country's youth". Shah was also wearing a "dimagi naxal" pin that he showed to the camera.

Rijiju criticised the actor, saying, "I thought Naseeruddin Shah was just an ordinary actor. I used to respect & like him... I never knew that he was a dangerous urban Dimagi Naxal."

"I came to know about his real character very late. (His views are) extremely harmful to India's democracy," he added.

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The term 'dimagi naxal' was first used by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his Independence Day address. He described "dimagi naxals" as those who have allegedly entrenched themselves in the system and continue to pose a threat to society by manipulating policies.

I thought Naseeruddin Shah was just an ordinary actor. I used to respect & like him.. I never knew that he was a dangerous urban Dimagi Naxal ! मुझे उसके असली चरित्र के बारे में बहुत देर से पता चला।। भारत के लोकतंत्र के लिए अत्यंत हानिकारक है। https://t.co/McSDNBJjPt

— Kiren Rijiju (@KirenRijiju) October 28, 2026

Speaking to PTI Videos on Thursday, Shiv Sena leader Shaina NC also questioned Shah over his remarks.

She said, "The question is whether Naseeruddin Shah is ACP Rathod or Gulam Hassan of 'Sarfarosh'. He talks about urban naxalism, supporting the tukde-tukde gang, anti-national movements. The question to you, sir, with utmost respect, is do you believe in pro-India sloganeering or anti-India."

Shah played the antagonist, covert operator Gulfam Hassan, in the Aamir Khan-starrer action drama Sarfarosh. Khan played the role of the protagonist, ACP Ajay Singh Rathod, in the 1999 superhit.

Shah, 76, has been posting frequent videos, voicing his support for students-related issues and has criticised the government for its handling of the Cockroach Janta Party-led protest over NEET exam irregularities in July.

Last week, Shah had also come out in support of the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute students, who have are on an indefinite sit-in over violent incidents on the campus.

In his video on Tuesday, Shah said, "I proudly declare that I am 'dimagi naxal'. I don't know what other nicknames the watchmen have given to people like me, anti-national, 'tukde-tukde' gang, and I don't know what else."

"... I want to ask this government a question... What else will you do to break the courage of our country's youth, to destroy the education system, and to put our democracy at risk? How much will you do? How far will you go?" he said in Hindi.

Why Young Indians Are Fearful About the Future of the World’s Largest Democracy

 

Demonstrations have swept across India in recent weeks, fueled by anger over what protesters say is a politically motivated purge of electoral rolls. 

The protests were sparked by the removal of some 130 million names from the rolls by election authorities, who have defended the process, saying the exercise was intended to weed out ineligible voters. 

But critics of the process, known as the Special Intensive Revision, said it was designed to bolster Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). They have demanded the resignation of the chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar. 

The demonstrations have been met with a heavy-handed response from Indian authorities, who locked down the capital, New Delhi, and detained leaders of the burgeoning Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a youth-led movement that emerged earlier this year. An Indian court on Monday extended the detention of two Cockroach movement leaders, Ashutosh Ranka and Saurav Das.

The movement proved itself a powerful force in Indian politics this summer when it successfully campaigned for the removal of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who resigned on July 25. 

To discuss the protests and what they mean, TIME spoke with Mukul Kesavan, a historian, novelist, and one of India’s best-known writers. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q: What are these protests actually about? Are they a natural progression from the Cockroach movement’s earlier protests, or something different?

MK: It’s related to the Cockroach movement (CJP) sit-in at Jantar Mantar [a traditional site of protest in the Indian capital] that led to the resignation of the education minister, in that the sit-in created a space for dissent by making Modi’s government back down. But [the Oct. 12 march] was distinct because it was organized by the Congress Party along with other conventional political parties. The CJP had no hand in organizing it, though one of its progressive/left stars, Neha Bora, participated in the march to the Supreme Court. It was also about a distinct issue: the Election Commission’s fiddling with voter rolls. 

Q: Police detained the movement’s leaders before the October 10 rally, then detained two of them again at Jantar Mantar days later. What does that tell you about how the government sees this movement?

MK: There has been a reversal of the government’s attitude towards the CJP. At Jantar Mantar 1.0, the government underestimated the cockroaches, thinking it was a sit-in that would peter out. They were ambushed by the massive turnout of the young on July 20. The lesson the government learned from the police violence that discredited it was that it couldn’t afford to let the cockroaches occupy a space where massed citizens confronted the police for phone cameras to record. We’re seeing a strategy of pre-emptive detention to head off that possibility. 

Q: India’s elections have long been a source of national pride. Has this episode damaged that image, at home or abroad?

MK: India’s elections were a bit iffy until a man called T.N. Seshan became chief election commissioner in the early 1990s. He was an awkward egomaniac who took his office seriously enough to clean up the whole election process. The Election Commission became a three-member body that was more or less impartial till the Modi government passed a law that gave the government the majority in the three-member panel that appoints the election commissioners. Gyanesh Kumar has been grotesquely partisan and the Special Intensive Revision has so obviously tried to shape the electoral roll to favor the BJP that the institution has been publicly discredited. India begins to resemble electoral autocracies elsewhere like Turkey. 

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Q: What do these protests tell you about Modi’s position?

MK: It’s the conventional thing to say, but it’s palpable that Modi’s aura of menace and authority has dissipated. The mockery and rudeness of young cockroaches, especially the young women who crowded into Jantar Mantar, did something that solemn ideological opposition had failed to do: it made him seem ridiculous, old and out of touch. I don’t know if the protests tell us anything about his electoral reach: we’ll have to wait for an election to find out. Opposition parties have to find a way of turning this fizz into votes. 

Q: Modi has now been in power for 12 years. What are his real achievements? What will historians credit him with?

MK: Some achievements in infrastructure: road building, airports, etc. The kind of things authoritarians do well. It’s hard to know what the economic growth figures mean in terms of general wellbeing. Geopolitically, his time in office has been a disaster: India is on bad terms with all its neighbors, in denial about China and in the doghouse with Trump. It might be more useful to talk about how he has degraded the republic’s institutions—the press, the courts, the election commission—than his achievements. His greatest "achievement" has been to normalize the rhetoric of Hindu supremacy. 

Q: India has one of the largest young populations in the world, yet the quality of its education and the prospects for its young people are grim. How does the situation compare to other places where young people are protesting? 

MK: With the possible exception of Sri Lanka, all South Asian countries, including the ones that have seen youthful insurrections in recent times like Nepal, Bangladesh and India, have school and university systems that are generally poor, with a few exceptions: elite institutions. This would be bad in itself, but the success of China in improving its educational system at every level makes our failure demoralizing.

Koffee With A Red Flag: Rashmika Mandanna-Vijay Deverakonda, Deepika Padukone & More; How Does Karan Johars

Koffee With A Red Flag: Rashmika Mandanna-Vijay Deverakonda, Deepika Padukone & More; How Does Karan Johar's Koffee With Karan Land Its Guests In Trouble? |

A day without coffee can be dangerous... for the people around me, says a favourite online meme. However, there’s another certain cup of Koffee that ends up causing major trouble for those who do taste it.

‘Self-absorbed’ is what some termed him, while others said it was merely a storm in a teacup and that our country has bigger things to worry about, when Vijay Deverakonda said that his wife, Rashmika Mandanna, had to ask him to marry her 100 times before he would say yes. But this was just the latest in what seems to be a recurring theme across seasons of Koffee with Karan. This week, Vijay was named the red flag; in 2023, it was Deepika. During Season 8, she said that, after some difficult past relationships, she wanted to stay uncommitted, which is why both she and Ranveer were allowed to see different people.

Viewers noticed that Ranveer seemed as if he had been caught off guard by this revelation to the public, which led to several reactions on the internet, with Deepika becoming the red flag of the season. What should have rather been appreciated, was that she had opened up honestly about her relationship, that too with the man she had eventually married. But every action has a reaction, and a social media overreaction.

. . . . . . . . 

For Season 6 in 2019, the ‘Red Flag of the Year Award’ went to Hardik Pandya. Hardik and KL Rahul drew severe public backlash for their misogynistic remarks, with the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) provisionally suspending both players, fining them ₹20 lakh each and sending them home mid-tour from Australia. The OTT platform took down the episode.

Of course, there are several other moments, like Deepika and Sonam Kapoor’s digs at Ranbir Kapoor in Season 3, when they insisted he would be apt for endorsing a condom brand. Ranbir’s father, Rishi Kapoor, was infuriated by this, and Karan reportedly had to step in to manage the issue. Then, of course, there’s the Kangana nepotism debate, Kareena’s comment on Priyanka’s accent and her counter... but these fall into another category.

The common thread here has always been Karan, who seems to have the uncanny ability to make his guests say controversial things that affect their public image. Ranbir famously said that he wouldn’t appear on the show because, while Karan would profit from the controversy, the guests are the ones who always get into trouble.

It seems, however, that with Karan announcing this year as his last, and only two episodes having streamed so far, surprises may still lie ahead this season. While the genteelness of Rendezvous with Simi Garewal may be a thing of the past, Karan’s isn’t the only show that regularly courts controversy. Speaking of which, anyone going for Samay Raina’s show this week?

Jacket Made Of Potatoes, Tiger Cubs In Bowls: Delivery App Forced To Apologise After AI Food Blunder

 

Just when the internet was trolling everything AI Slop, another banger dropped. AI can write articles, generate images and even help restaurants showcase their menus. But when a food delivery platform asked AI to create pictures of dishes, the results were bizzare and weird. From a jacket seemingly made of potatoes to tiger cubs swimming in a bowl, the images have sparked online ridicule and forced the company to apologise.

Just Eat, a popular food delivery platform in the UK, had been testing AI-generated images to help restaurants display dishes that did not have photographs on their menus. The idea was to make food listings more visually appealing without requiring every restaurant to arrange professional photography. However, the experiment quickly turned into a recipe for disaster when the technology began interpreting familiar food names far too literally.

When AI Gets Food Completely Wrong

One of the strangest creations involved a jacket potato, a popular British dish consisting of a baked potato with a crispy skin and various fillings. Instead of showing the actual dish, AI reportedly interpreted the name as a winter jacket covered with potatoes. Another image showed a bowl of tiger cubs instead of tiger prawns, a seafood dish. The result was a surreal interpretation of a menu item that left little room for confusion about how badly the technology had misunderstood the description.

Then came the bacon-and-egg soda. A cafe in Northern Ireland serving bacon and egg soda bread found its dish represented as a glass of fizzy cola with a fried egg and bacon floating inside it. The mistake appears to have stemmed from the AI confusing soda bread, a type of bread, with a carbonated drink.

The oddities did not end there. A chip muffin, also known in parts of the UK as a chip butty, was depicted as a muffin stuffed with potato chips. A cheese roll was transformed into something resembling sushi, with slabs of cheese rolled into the shape of Japanese rice rolls. In another case, garlic bread appeared in the shape of an aeroplane, apparently after the technology misinterpreted the word 'plain'. Meanwhile, salt-and-pepper chips, usually prepared with seasonings and ingredients such as onions, garlic and chillies, were reduced to a rather unexciting-looking plate of chips.

Delivery App Pauses AI Image Rollout

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The images quickly attracted attention on social media, where users shared the unusual creations and questioned the usefulness of AI-generated food photography. While some found the pictures hilarious, others raised concerns about whether customers could trust menu images when deciding what to order.

The criticism also highlighted a practical problem: a food photograph is not merely decorative. It helps customers understand what a dish looks like before spending their money. An inaccurate image could create unrealistic expectations and leave diners disappointed when their order arrives.

In response, Just Eat apologised for the inaccurate images and confirmed that it was removing them while pausing the rollout of the technology as it worked to improve the tool. A company spokesperson told the BBC that Just Eat works with tens of thousands of small restaurants on food imagery, including by funding professional local photographers. The spokesperson acknowledged that the AI trial had not always produced the intended results and said the company was sorry for the inaccurate images.

I Slop Food Images (Credits: Instagram)

The platform had labelled its AI-generated pictures, but that did not prevent the mistakes from becoming a talking point online. The incident has also raised questions about human oversight, particularly after the company said its AI-generated images had been manually checked before appearing on the platform.

For now, the episode serves as a reminder that while AI can make certain tasks faster and cheaper, it can still struggle with context, regional food terminology and the nuances of everyday language. When it comes to ordering dinner, customers generally want to see the dish they will receive, not an AI's imaginative interpretation of its name.