It’s Q&A time! You can ask your own question here for a chance to have it answered in an upcoming edition.
The first part of this week’s answer is available to everyone, and paid subscribers can read on for all my thoughts on dealing with pregnancy weight gain and body changes when you’re in recovery from disordered eating.
I struggled with an eating disorder since I was a young girl, and it continued for 13 years until I got help. I am now three years out of the woods with my ED. I have worked through my own internal fatphobia and am unlearning diet culture. I practice intuitive eating, and honestly it saved my life. Listening to your podcast and reading your book helped me in so many ways. What I am up against now is how to incorporate intuitive eating in pregnancy. This is my first time being pregnant and my body is getting bigger, which after the last few years of it finding a set point and not moving much, is very strange. I thought I had accepted myself and this process. I wanted to know if you have any advice for a pregnant person in recovery. I haven’t seen much material for intuitive eating and pregnancy. Honestly the pregnancy apps can be triggering because they talk about x amount of calories to eat and how many pounds you’re “allowed” to gain. Thanks again for your hard work! It’s helped me so much!
FYI: my answers here are for educational and informational purposes only, aren’t a substitute for medical or mental-health advice, and don’t constitute a provider-patient relationship.
I can relate so much to your experience—particularly the strangeness of suddenly gaining weight after a period of relative stability, and realizing that as much as you may have accepted your body size and shape before, you have to go through the process of acceptance and letting go all over again. Of course, I say this as someone who has never been subject to anti-fat bias, and I recognize that many higher-weight people may never have had a period of relative peace around their size because we live in such a weight-stigmatizing society. Still, I think that regardless of starting size, it’s just often hard to reckon with gestational weight gain. As important and life-giving as weight gain is during pregnancy—and in recovery from disordered eating, for that matter—our cultural relationship with it is fraught because of all the messages we get about calories and food restrictions and the need to not gain “too much” weight in pregnancy (which is based on rather arbitrary metrics, as we’ll discuss).
It sounds like those messages really aren’t helpful to you—and in fact, they’re posing a challenge to your eating-disorder recovery, which is more important than ever to maintain right now. You need to be able to gain weight to support your pregnancy without spiraling back into restriction, so it might be best to shut out those unhelpful sources of weight and calorie information whenever possible. That could mean skimming past that info on pregnancy apps if you can—though I know how hard it is to forget about it once you’ve seen it. You might ask a partner or friend to read you the important information and skip over the weight and calorie content, and consider deleting those apps from your own phone so that you don’t feel compelled to look. As much fun as pregnancy sites can be sometimes (now the fetus is the size of a grape! Now a fig! Now a large onion!), there’s a lot of diet-culture-infused information about food and weight to wade through, too. You might try to figure out what kind of info feels fun and/or essential to know, and then try to cut out the rest.
For me, “the rest” has included images of other pregnant people, particularly maternity-clothes models and people who post bump photos online, as well as unrealistic AI or CGI images. I’m fine being around other pregnant women IRL, but something about seeing static images of idealized pregnant bodies triggers unhelpful comparisons in my brain, as I shared in our recent episode with Amanda Hess. After that great convo with Amanda, I made the commitment to stay away from those images as much as possible, and since then I’ve felt a lot more accepting of my body and its changes.
Here are some other things I’ve found helpful in navigating this landscape throughout my two pregnancies, especially when it comes to dealing with gestational weight gain—and of course, I’ll share what I’ve found in my reading of the science as well.
