Eva Mendes makes her first post-baby appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show today, and the 40-year-old actress opens up about her daughter Esmeralda and how she's shedding the baby weight.

Ellen starting things off by playing a clip of Eva's last appearance on the show, when she denied being pregnant. "Liar liar," Ellen joked. "Not really," Eva replied. "I was so early on and all mom’s will understand, you’re not supposed to tell anybody during your first, well certainly not the world, in your first trimester. And my mother didn’t even know yet. So that would have been an awkward phone call. ‘Hey mom did you catch Ellen today?’ Um, oops!" Good point!

Eva, who welcomed her first child with partner Ryan Gosling back in September, revealed that parenting is "exhausting" but "the best." When asked how she's getting her body back, Eva didn't even mention exercise. So what's her secret? Breast feeding! "I’ve always heard it," she said. "It really does help to shrink your uterus back to normal size. It does! I know it’s a really weird thing to say, but it does. [B]reast-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."