Eva Mendes emerges post-baby, talks breastfeeding to lose weight

Eva Mendes, who tried desperately to keep her pregnancy a secret, has stepped out for the first time post-baby to pay Ellen DeGeneres a visit.

And she sure looks great (per the norm of new celeb moms), doesn't she?

Like so many others before her, she's chalked up some of her post-baby weight loss to breastfeeding.

"It really does help to shrink your uterus back to normal size," said Eva. "It does! I know it’s a really weird thing to say, but it does."

"It does. That’s what I’m doing," joked Ellen. "I’ve lost five pounds."

"It’s the best yeah," said Eva. "So it’s breast-feeding is really helping and then obviously you want to be healthy for the baby because she’s eating kind of what I’m eating so you want to make good choices."

And little baby Esmeralda is growing fast -- however she's not yet sleeping through the night. "No! ...She’s two months! You know we’re getting the hang of it, the sleeping thing, but yeah I’m exhausted and it’s the best," says Eva. "Really, I’m so incredibly tired. I thought I was tired before at times, but no. Nothing like this, but I wouldn’t have it any other way."

Eva and Esmeralda's daddy, Ryan Gosling, are very private people, and they went to extreme lengths to keep their pregnancy from the public eye.

"Did you worry that someone was going to leak it?" asked Ellen.

"I mean, not really we didn’t get to that point," said Eva. "I think just early on, we decided it’s going to be very hard for her to have privacy. And we thought this is the first opportunity we can give her to protect her and so then I had a nice calm pregnancy, which I did."

Oh, and Eva also gave Ellen permission to show a photo of the baby. It's pretty special:

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