Before she became a mother, Christian country star Carrie Underwood was already a fitness freak, and had spent many hours out of her busy schedule just to work out and keep her body in shape.
Now that she has gone through the joys of pregnancy and childbirth, Underwood realised that her body has become different, but it's a change she welcomes.
"I think you've got to cut yourself some slack. Our bodies, men and women, are designed to do amazing things, and women are the ones that are lucky enough to get to have that experience to get to make a baby, you know?" she told CMT. "And it's beautiful and it's amazing, and there's stuff about you that will never be the same. But it's okay."
Underwood said she still works out whenever she can after her pregnancy, and she still tries to monitor her food intake, but her body is just responding differently. "I don't know if you'll ever feel back to normal. I don't know if I'll ever be back to normal, but this is the new normal, and I feel good about it," she said.
What keeps Underwood busy aside from motherhood and fitness is her singing career. She has just released a new single entitled "Smoke Break," which is about a personal time out.
"When we wrote it, we were very careful to try to make the metaphor as clear as a metaphor can be ... by putting. 'I don't smoke, but sometimes I need a smoke break,'" she explained the meaning behind the song. "You know, sometimes I need a step away. Sometimes I need a minute just for me – just to take a step away."
The song came from her highly anticipated new album "Storyteller," which the singer admitted was hard to name. "I was thinking about, 'Is there a song title that really represents the album as a whole?' No, because we kind of go in different directions. It all belongs together, but there wasn't one that just stood out like, 'Oh, yes, that would be a great album title,'" she shared.
But after taking a step back and analyzing all of her new songs as a whole, Underwood realized that "Storyteller" seemed to make sense.
"There's a lot of stories," she said. "Whether they're personal stories or we've made up characters and they're doing stuff, it just seemed like that's what I'm doing is telling stories. So 'Storyteller' just seemed like a good fit."
