The Celebrity Truth

In Ricki Lake’s new book, Your Best Birth, the actress reveals how giving birth helped her deal with her traumatic past. The 40-year-old actress tells People that she was sexually abused as a child, and giving birth helped heal the pain as she was “able to look at my body and see what it was able to do, and embrace it.”

“I was sexually abused [around] age six or seven,” the mom of two says, adding that giving birth helped her to “Sort of let go of all the body image issues.”

Lake hopes that other survivors of sexual abuse who are expecting will be able to find a way of healing themselves during the process too.

“There’s a potential healing process that can take place for women, if they’re just in touch with it,” she says.

In her book, Lake has a chapter entitled, “For Sexual Abuse Survivors, a Healing”, in which she writes about her weight issues, and how it was easy to lose weight after giving birth to Owen, now 7.

“Well, it definitely didn’t fall off,” Lake writes, ” but it was the easiest time I’d ever tried.”

The actress continues, “I kept losing four pounds, losing five pounds, losing all this weight so quickly. I don’t know how to explain it other than it just felt like this purging of that pain and trauma from the past.”

Lake is currently working on a follow-up film of her documentary, The Business of Being Born, which will feature interviews with some of the most gorgeous celebrity moms in the world, including Cindy Crawford, Laila Ali and Christy Turlington.

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Story: Rebecca Lucas. Photo: PlanetRicki.com.