When Meredith Nash sees a whisper-thin woman whose pregnant belly is barely visible beneath a loose fitting blouse, she thinks one thing: Angelina.
And when she sees a new mother jogging down the street with her infant strapped into an aerodynamic stroller, one word pops to her mind: Heidi.
Ms. Nash is the Australian academic behind the Baby Bump Project, a study exploring how women are affected by today's voracious coverage of celebrity pregnancies like those of Angelina Jolie, Heidi Klum and other A-list mommies.
"I really wanted to know how the average woman feels about her own pregnant body in the face of the Hollywood baby boom," she said of her project.
Ms. Nash, a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, has been following a group of Australian women from the first trimester of their pregnancies through birth and postpartum, while noting their body image and consumption of celebrity news.
She found that regular exposure to the "culture of the bump" - magazines and TV shows that breathlessly analyze and speculate about famous pregnancies - does change women's relationship to their bodies. Ms. Nash found that subjects who regularly consume tabloid representations of pregnancy are more likely to describe themselves as "fat," than those who do not follow celebrity culture, and feel heightened pressure to lose their baby weight quickly after delivery.
"The majority of the women in my study did compare their weight gain and post-baby weight loss with celebrities," she said.
"I think the fear of fatness in pregnancy is undeniably influenced by celebrity culture."
Some expectant mothers say they try not to let these messages affect them, but agree that a celebrity-focused population has added new expectations to pregnancy.
"I feel like there is even more pressure to always look good and not let yourself get too big," said Alanna Garcia, 30, of Burlington, Ont., who is expecting her first child in September.
When Demi Moore posed knocked up and nude on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991, it was considered a groundbreaking moment, in which the pregnant form was finally being publicly celebrated.
But since Canadian magazine mogul Bonnie Fuller coined the phrase "Bump Watch" in Star magazine, tabloid culture has adopted a stalker-like obsession with documenting every inch of the pregnant form.
Even celebrities who aren't pregnant but appear in public wearing loose fitting clothing are immediately accused of having a bun in the oven. Those whose pregnant stomachs are deemed too big are ridiculed, as was Naomi Watts, who, with six weeks left in her pregnancy, was recently accused of being 10 months pregnant. (Ms. Watts put an end to the ridicule late last week when she gave birth to a boy who weighed in at a not-so-shocking eight pounds, four ounces.)
Danielle Friedland, founder of Celebrity Baby Blog, says her site does not post photos that speculate whether someone is pregnant, and bans comments that mock a celebrity for their weight gain.
"The really thin women project an image that you can only gain 10 pounds and then burn it off within a week of giving birth," she said. "Most women don't have a staff of people to whip them back into shape."
But even women who understand the advantages inherent in a celebrity lifestyle say they are affected by an increased pressure to drop pounds after giving birth.
Michelle Graham, a 21-year-old from Kingston, recently gave birth and said it is hard not to compare herself with the Hollywood model of motherhood. "I know it is going to take a little longer to lose it [the weight] but why do they make it look so easy?" she said. "I got very big during [my pregnancy]and I'm still a fair size and it has been a month."
After noticing that this concern was widespread among her subjects, Ms. Nash decided to set up a website where women can discuss the bump phenomenon and how it affects them.
Her website, Babybumpproject.blogspot.com, has been viewed by women around the world.
"I wanted to give women a space to evaluate the celebrity pregnancy as something that is completely unrealistic for the average woman," she said.
But Mario Lavandeira, the man behind the celebrity blog Perez Hilton, says discussion of celebrity pregnancy is something his readers demand, and that bump photos remain the most popular items on his site.
He does not worry that accusing someone of having an eating disorder one day and saying they look pregnant the next sends a dangerous message to his female fan base.
"I don't think it's the worst thing to speculate that someone's pregnant," he said. "It could be a lot worse to think that someone's possibly a drug addict."