Here’s The Real Reason Women Have That Little Pooch

When it comes to anatomy ― specifically female anatomy ― perhaps no part of the body has confused the internet quite so much as the belly pooch.

Any time someone posts about the fat women tend to carry around their midsection ― and a strange number of people do post about it ― others are quick to chime in that “it’s not fat, it’s the uterus.”

Take, for instance, earlier this year, when a man posted a few photos of the pooch on random women and said, “On behalf of all men, we hate this.”

The post blew up, and the man was rightly ridiculed for his dumb blanket statement. Plenty of men love the pooch and went to bat for it: ”[We] never authorized this clown to speak on our behalf,” one guy replied. Women reacted, too: “On behalf of women, we don’t give a damn.”

But as usual when these things get posted, many people weighed in to let the man know he was ill-informed: “That’s literally our uterus. Learn human anatomy,” one woman said.

The “stomach fat is literally the womb [or uterus]” is a persistent, popular claim: In 2020, health influencer and dietitian Colleen Christensen posted an image on her No Food Rules Instagram account reassuring her followers “that [the] bump at the bottom of your stomach is your uterus.”

Christensen shared how frustrated she was that she couldn’t get a flat stomach until a friend put her at ease by explaining that “that bump is organs.”

As Christensen soon learned from her comment section, that’s not really the case: Internal organs do take up space in your body, but the uterus ― a thick-walled, hollow organ where the fetus develops during pregnancy ― is located in the female pelvis between the bladder and rectum, not in the stomach. (To Christensen’s credit, she later updated her post with