Meghan Markle Recalls Still Wearing Five-Inch Stilettos After Gaining 65 Pounds During Pregnancy

“I was clinging very closely to my husband, like, ‘Please don’t let me fall.’”

• On the season 1 finale of her podcast “Confessions of a Female Founder,” Meghan Markle spoke with Spanx founder Sara Blakely.
• In part of the May 27 episode, Meghan spoke about how she gained 65 pounds with each of her pregnancies, with son Prince Archie and daughter Princess Lilibet.
• That said, Meghan still wore five-inch stilettos, even towards the end of her pregnancy.

Meghan Markle has shared candidly not just about her entrepreneurial journey on her new podcast, “Confessions of a Female Founder,” but also about motherhood—including her experiences during both of her pregnancies with Prince Archie, 6, and Princess Lilibet, 3.

In the season 1 finale of the show on May 27, Meghan spoke with Spanx founder Sara Blakely, revealing that the Duchess of Sussex gained 65 pounds during each of her pregnancies—but still wore five-inch stilettos.

“A friend just said to me the other day, they were like, ‘I just saw this picture I’d forgotten about when you were so pregnant with Archie,’” Meghan said of her pregnancy with her son in 2019, when she was still a working member of the royal family alongside husband Prince Harry.

“I always wear my five-inch, pointy-toed stilettos,” Meghan said, telling Blakely that her friend was shocked by the photo of her very pregnant and very much in said shoes. The friend told her, “You have the most enormous bump and your tiny little ankles are bracing themselves in these high heels.”

“But all my weight was in the front,” Meghan added. “So you’re just going, ‘How on Earth am I not just tipping, you know face planting?’ I was clinging very closely to my husband, like, ‘Please don’t let me fall.’”

Meghan’s first season of her podcast featured eight episodes, where she spoke with Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd, Girls Who Code and Moms First’s Reshma Saujani, Highbrow Hippie’s Kadi Lee, IT Cosmetics’ Jamie Kern Lima, Clevr Blends’ Hannah Mendoza, FIGS’ Heather Hasson, and Kitch’s Cassandra Morales Thurswell. While speaking with Wolfe Herd in the series’ first episode, she revealed that both she and Wolfe Herd had postpartum preeclampsia, which Meghan called “so rare and so scary.”

“And you’re still trying to juggle all of these things, and the world doesn’t know what’s happening quietly,” the Duchess of Sussex said on April 8. “And in the quiet, you’re still trying to show up for people—mostly for your children—but those things are huge medical scares.”

On the May 6 episode with Mendoza, Meghan revealed that she had an Ayurvedic doctor while pregnant with Archie and Lilibet, telling Mendoza that “so much of it was about seeing food as medicine.”

“I will say, for myself, especially when they are baby babies and before I was a mom, I’ve always wanted to be a mom,” Meghan added. “I was like, ‘Oh gosh, I’m going to give a speech with a baby on my hip.’ I had a whole vision.”

But, she admitted, that vision didn’t totally come to be: “Granted, I had a lot of external things happening by the time I had both pregnancies and both babies,” she said. “But it was not the way I envisioned it.”

It’s not clear just yet if there will be a season 2 of “Confessions of a Female Founder,” but Meghan said of the show (per People), “What’s been meaningful is being able to talk about my own entrepreneurial journey with other female founders who are either on their own trajectory of growth or have IPO’d, sold, or created high-impact brands and gone through all of the learning curves that we all do at the start.”

“You’re just trying to figure out how to walk, then you want to learn how to run, and then you want to learn how to fly,” the As Ever founder continued. “All of those things take time. There’s also something very exciting and energizing about learning something new as we get older. The entrepreneurial journey, for anyone, is a lot, and I’m also really, really lucky that so many of my close friends are female founders that I can glean advice from.”