Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
This post was previously published in my newsletter, Food Psych Weekly. Sign up to get more like this in your inbox each week, and check out my new Rethinking Wellness newsletter, too!
Welcome back to Food Psych Weekly, the newsletter where I answer your questions about intuitive eating, disordered-eating recovery, and how to navigate diet culture without falling into its traps.
I’m finally back from maternity leave(!) and slowly easing into working again after what feels like a lifetime away, so I won’t be answering a reader question this week. Instead, I want to share a bit about what’s been happening for me these past 3-4 months, and what it means for my work going forward. (Content warning: I’m going to be discussing my experiences of birth trauma, postpartum struggles, and the joys of having a young baby; if those topics are loaded for you, maybe skip this one.)
As I’ve mentioned here, I had a long and pretty difficult fertility journey before finally, thankfully, getting pregnant last year. The pregnancy itself was surprisingly easy, given all the complications I’d had leading up to it. I struggled with a lot of nausea in the first trimester, but other than that I felt pretty good—I even managed to write a book while pregnant.
Then I went into labor, and everything changed.
Despite all my best-laid plans, I had an extremely traumatic birth experience (as so many people have, I’m realizing). My due date came and went, followed by three days of excruciating early labor, during which my doctors basically said there was nothing they could do because I wasn’t having contractions at close enough intervals. After the third exhausting day and sleepless night, I finally got the green light to go to the hospital, but then it was another 20 hours of labor and 3.5 hours of unsuccessful pushing before my beautiful baby was born via unplanned C-section.
That was already a lot, but then I had complications from the surgery that kept me in the hospital for several extra days and required some terrifying medical procedures. And for most of that time, I couldn’t even hold my baby or get out of bed to care for her.
Going through all that, and the weeks of recovery that followed, while navigating my new role as a first-time parent was truly one of the hardest times of my life.
I’m profoundly grateful to have had the support of my partner, family, and friends—and access to psychotherapy, physical therapy, and great medical care—to get me through the toughest parts, but I’m still feeling the reverberations months later.
That birth experience, and the overwhelming love I feel for my baby, have fundamentally changed me in ways that I wasn’t prepared for (even though literally everyone who’s been through it tells you to be prepared). I have no words to describe it that don’t feel both cryptic and cliché. My love for her is unlike anything I’ve ever known. The saying that having a child is like wearing your heart outside your body doesn’t even feel close to capturing the vulnerability, the intensity of this experience.
It’s an odd time to be writing about this, with reproductive rights in the U.S. hanging in the balance. My experience has emphasized for me in a visceral, embodied way that I don’t want anyone to be forced to have a child against their will, and that I’m incredibly grateful to have been able to choose it. Even with a deeply wanted and planned-for pregnancy, giving birth broke me open in every way imaginable.
While that all might sound a bit dark, I’m also maybe the happiest I’ve ever been. There’s another saying about parenthood, “all joy and no fun,” that I sometimes very much identify with—the deep joy of raising a beautiful little human and the repetitive, boring, poop-filled nature of many of the day-to-day tasks involved. But we’ve actually been having a lot of fun around here lately, too. She’s smiling and laughing and making the funniest faces and sounds, and it’s been incredible to see her start waking up to the world and delighting in her surroundings. Having a kid is also a great excuse to make up silly songs, which we’re doing with wild abandon.
Now I’m slowly adjusting to this radically altered, sleep-deprived, joy-filled life, and trying to figure out which aspects of it can connect to the life I had before. I’m only working part time because my husband and I are both working from home and sharing childcare duties, and it’s become very clear to me that I can’t work like I used to. So I’m reimagining many things about my professional life, and I’ll be implementing some big changes that I’ll share with you in the coming weeks and months.
The one that I can announce now is that after more than 9 years of hosting my podcast, Food Psych, I’ve decided that our upcoming season will be our last. I’m sad to be ending the show, but also excited to be shifting my energy to other things, including my baby and my new book, and the broader critique of wellness culture that I’m focusing on there. Stay tuned for more about all of that, including the premiere of our final season in a few weeks.
The good news is that this newsletter isn’t going anywhere for now! I’ll be back to answering your questions here next week, though likely in a less polished way than I did before, at least for the foreseeable future. I’m excited to get back to it soon!
Ask your own question for a chance to have it answered in an upcoming edition of the newsletter.
Podcast Archives
In Episode 222 of Food Psych, fellow anti-diet dietitian and podcaster Heather Caplan joined me to discuss her experience with orthorexia (aka obsession with “healthy” eating), how to bring joyful movement into eating-disorder recovery, the intersection of pregnancy and diet culture, sports nutrition from an intuitive-eating perspective, and so much more.
Plus, I answered a listener question about how to know if you’re TRULY craving something or just eating it to rebel against diet culture.
Check it out right here, and be sure to subscribe to the pod so that you get fan-favorite episodes from the archives while we’re on hiatus, and a brand new season of the show when we return.
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Here’s to changing and growing,
Christy
P.S. If you’re looking to break free from the diet mindset and heal your relationship with food, check out my newest project, The Making Peace with Food Card Deck. Therapist Judith Matz and I co-created it to help support you in rejecting diet culture, honoring your hunger, practicing self-compassion, and so much more.