Buzzapp Master 
Among the most upsetting phrases to hear during pregnancy, “Just wait” reigned supreme as my least favorite. “You think you’re tired now? Just wait,” they said. “You don’t have time to tackle your to-do list? Just wait.” There is truly nothing so invalidating as hearing that the difficult experience you are currently navigating pales in comparison to the torment that lies ahead. While I remain adamant that those two words should never be uttered to an expectant mother, my postpartum self is looking back at pre-baby me, struggling to maintain her eating disorder recovery, and whispering, “Just. Wait.”
My lack of preparation for dealing with postpartum pressure was at least partially due to the fact that I never thought I’d get pregnant in the first place. Having permanently dieted away my menstrual cycle in high school, I knew my inability to ovulate would merit medical intervention if I ever wanted to carry a baby. And I wasn’t sure that I even did until I met my husband. After one failed round of IVF, pregnancy seemed even less probable. But then, last January, after two courses of the fertility medication Clomid, it happened: I saw the undeniable double line, indicating a positive pregnancy test.
Over one year and one seven-month-old baby later, I’m still in a fair amount of shock. It turns out, becoming a mom has been a dream I didn’t even know I had come true. It’s also put a serious strain on my mental health and my already-fragile body image. While this sucks to admit, I’m aware of how depressingly common it is. According to a recent survey from Equip, an eating disorder recovery platform I’ve worked with for several years, 32% of respondents were concerned about how pregnancy might impact their disordered eating, while 64% were concerned about how weight changes during pregnancy would impact their body image. More than half (53%) were worried about how unwanted body comments and unsolicited touching from others would negatively impact their mental health during pregnancy.
I’ll admit that even since having my daughter in the fall of 2024, I’ve reflexively reached out to rub the bellies of pregnant friends without asking permission first—and I instantly cringe and retract my hand each time. Even during my second trimester, the supposed “golden” stage of pregnancy when you’ve survived the morning sickness and popped a telltale bump that no longer just resembles post-meal bloat, I hated having my abdomen touched. My stomach had always been the bane of my body image struggles, and that loathing didn’t magically disappear as my uterus expanded to accommodate an undeniably miraculous addition. (Hell, I’ve even managed to pile on some additional shame and guilt for feeling anything other than unadulterated joy and awe about the baby my body produced against the odds.)
I don’t know what I expected during such a trying time of transformation, but I was surprised, and maybe even a little disappointed, by how difficult I found it. I had clung to the hope that in the unlikely event I was ever lucky enough to become pregnant, I’d easily loosen my long-held death grip on disordered eating and distorted body image. But despite experiencing and writing about the nuances and complexities of eating disorders for so many years, I couldn’t intellectualize the process or use basic logic to think my way out of the discomfort. And as the “just wait” people had warned me, things have only become more uncomfortable postpartum.
It’s quite common to feel uncomfortable in your body throughout pregnancy and postpartum—especially if you have a history of disordered eating.I ask my therapist friend, Alyssa Mass, MFT, to help me make sense of the cognitive dissonance I’m having as a gratitude-filled new mom who also feels like crawling out of her new skin. “Feeling bad in your body after you’ve had a baby or while you’re pregnant is not, in and of itself, disordered,” she tells SELF. “I wish that were more normalized because I think it’s very real and very normal for somebody to be pregnant for nine months, experience a massive amount of body changes, have a baby, and feel like, ‘What just happened to me?’ It’s okay if that doesn’t feel good—that moment doesn’t last forever, but it does take time to recover, just like it took time for that baby to develop and come out.”
I know she’s right, but again, my logical brain is struggling against the visceral uneasiness of existing in a changed body. Jessica Baker, PhD, a clinical psychologist and Equip’s senior research manager, has studied the effects of pregnancy and postpartum on eating disorders and body image for years. She reiterates Mass’s point to me: Feeling shitty about your physical self after literally creating life may seem “superficial” or “disordered” but it’s an understandable consequence of being a woman in our modern world. “Society places unrealistic expectations on women for weight loss and return to a pre-pregnancy body postpartum,” she tells SELF. “The normal changes that happen to the body during pregnancy contrast societal expectations for the ‘ideal’ body, which can result in body dissatisfaction.” In fact, Dr. Baker points out that studies show that one third of pregnant women are unhappy with their bodies. On top of that, body dissatisfaction is one of the most robust risk factors for an eating disorder.
Research on the effects of pregnancy and the postpartum period on EDs has been ongoing, but the largest population-based study of the impact of eating disorders on birth outcomes began recruiting participants in 1999. The Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa) collected information on over 100,000 pregnancies, and the insights on eating disorders continues to inform more current research. MoBa findings indicate that “eating disorders in pregnancy are relatively common” and pose health risks to both the mother and child related to sleep, birth outcomes, maternal nutrition, and child feeding and eating.
More recent research has found that about 15% of pregnant women are likely to have had an eating disorder at some point in their lifetime, and about 5% have an ED in pregnancy. For those who have a history of an ED, pregnancy can be a triggering event. “Pregnancy and postpartum is often a major life change and can be a time of significant stress,” Dr. Baker says. “This can be a significant contributor to relapse in particular as women may fall into older patterns to relieve stress and/or anxiety.” Women with EDs are also prone to psychiatric comorbidities like depression and anxiety during the perinatal period, resulting in up to 66% of those with EDs reporting postpartum depression, compared to about 15% of those without.
Both mental and physical factors can undermine your self-confidence and body image during and after pregnancy.Our thin-worshipping, six-pack-obsessed culture certainly plays a large part in burdening expectant and new moms with unrealistic expectations, but there’s an undeniable physiological component to our collective body misery too. “During pregnancy, both estradiol (estrogen) and progesterone progressively increase up until childbirth, with a large increase in estradiol after the first trimester,” Emily Pisetsky, PhD, LP, associate professor of psychiatry in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders, tells SELF.
“These hormones have been associated with dopamine and serotonin and are thought to lead to an improvement in mood that many women experience during pregnancy,” Dr. Pisetsky says. While I can’t say I was always radiating joy as my belly expanded, it’s true that my body changes at least felt “purposeful” during pregnancy, and were somehow more tolerable than they’ve been in the postpartum months, as I’m still clinging to maternity clothes. “In the week following delivery, estrogen and progesterone both drop off precipitously,” Dr. Pisetsky says. “This is around the same time that many women experience ‘the baby blues.’”
That hormonal roller coaster doesn’t even take into account prolactin (associated with milk production) and oxytocin (associated with attachment and bonding), not to mention the barrage of other chemical changes that take place postpartum. And despite the pervasive, tired myth that eating disorders are a vanity issue or a choice, they are complex mental illnesses that are undeniably impacted by genetics, hormones, and environment.
In addition to the seemingly nonstop body commentary from friends, family, and strangers, Dr. Pisetsky says some medical providers overemphasize the focus on weight gain throughout pregnancy and after, placing undue added stress on women. “Although weight gets tracked frequently during pregnancy, many women are able to tolerate weight gain knowing it is for their baby,” she says. “We see a risk of relapse in the postpartum period, especially for folks who have higher postpartum weight retention.” I’m raising my hand here—despite being told my whole life that breastfeeding miraculously aids in post-baby weight loss, I wasn’t aware that some women actually retain weight while nursing. That hasn’t exactly helped alleviate any of my postpartum body dissatisfaction.
Then, of course, we have perhaps the ultimate environmental mindfuck of all: social media. Scrolling Instagram and TikTok was damaging enough to my self-worth prior to pregnancy, but there’s nothing quite like seeing a fitness or lifestyle influencer emphasizing the flatness of their abs mere weeks after delivery to demolish your confidence. “The internet knows pretty quickly when you’re pregnant and starts serving you targeted ads,” Dr. Pisetsky says. “Your For You pages will become loaded with pregnancy content, a lot of which is focused on food and exercise.”
While it may be impossible to completely avoid comments about your body during pregnancy, there are some ways to reduce the noise and quiet your inner critic.To combat the onslaught of messages about how your body should or could look postpartum, Dr. Pisetsky recommends curating your social media feed as much as you can. “Unfollow triggering accounts. Follow body-positive and higher-weight influencers to diversify the images and messages you’re seeing. Or better yet—take a social media break.”
The problem for me when it comes to this sage wisdom is the hours I’ve spent glued to my glider, nursing my daughter, coupled with crushing fatigue—the temptation to mindlessly scroll rather than dive into a book or doing literally anything mentally stimulating has been nearly impossible to resist. But Dr. Pisetsky’s advice is important to heed for those of us struggling with the constant need to compare ourselves to other moms (or to literally anyone in a bikini on a Bravo reality show, which I am wont to do). I wondered what else I could be doing to shake off some of the body shame I continue to feel postpartum.
According to Mass, reaching out to actual humans rather than projecting narratives onto filtered social media avatars is a start. “There can be a lot of loneliness in pregnancy and in motherhood—particularly new motherhood,” she says. “You’re awake at weird times, you’ve got a baby on a schedule—it can be really hard to connect with others, even if you want to. But I think that that can be a really dangerous spot for anyone struggling with the pregnancy or postpartum experience, so seeking connection is important.”
Talking candidly about these struggles—and, well, writing about them for national publications—has, in fact, been therapeutic. Also therapeutic? Actual therapy, which I have continued to commit to, weekly, throughout and beyond pregnancy. Dr. Baker notes the importance of this: “For those with a history of an eating disorder, it can be important to reconnect with a trusted provider to stay on top of eating disorder thoughts and behaviors to prevent relapse or keep them from worsening.”
Something I’ve been meditating on a lot throughout this body image struggle is a quote I actually came across in the non-cesspool regions of social media. Content creator Sarah Nicole Landry (a.k.a. the Bird’s Papaya) regularly posts photos of her stretch marks and unfiltered, un-Photoshopped postpartum body. The text on one such photo reads, “It’s ok if you look like you gave birth.” It’s such a simple sentiment, yet I can’t stop thinking about it. We’re taught that “You don’t look like you just had a baby!” is the highest form of praise to bestow upon a new mom, and we’re conditioned to chase the high of that supposed compliment in the weeks and months after building a human being in our bodies from scratch. It’s absurd when you think about it. And I don’t say that to invalidate the real pain this paradigm inflicts on women at any stage of their fertility journey. But why are we desperate to emulate a body that is not only unrepresentative of our accomplishments, but represents the actual erasure of our physical and emotional efforts? I’m not sure if I can shed the shame completely, but I’m ready to shift my focus.
If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, help is available. You can contact the Alliance for Eating Disorders’ fully-staffed helpline at 1-866-662-1235 or visit their website for additional support.
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