I’ve been thinking about my weight for as long as I can remember.
I first joined WeightWatchers at 16, so I’ve spent most of my adult life somewhere between trying to lose weight, losing it, gaining it back, and deciding I really ought to try again.
There have been times when I’ve been skinny. There have also been times when I very much have not.
I lost a lot of weight during the pandemic. Then we moved to Texas, where queso and margaritas made gaining it back feel almost effortless. They were everywhere, they were delicious, and I had very little interest in resisting either one.
So before I got pregnant, I was trying to lose weight again. I had started making progress.
And then I got pregnant.
Which was amazing.
It was something I had wanted so badly. But almost immediately, I had to confront something I hadn’t really thought through: pregnancy meant gaining weight. After decades of thinking about my body in terms of making it smaller, suddenly the goal was the exact opposite.
The stage where you just look bigger
The beginning was probably the hardest part for me.
There’s a strange stage of pregnancy when your body is clearly changing—your clothes are tighter, your stomach is growing—but you don’t actually look pregnant yet.
You just look bigger.
At least, that’s how I felt.
I knew why my body was changing. I knew I was pregnant. I knew something incredible was happening.
But anyone looking at me didn’t necessarily know any of that.
My clothes got tighter, and my stomach got bigger. After spending most of my life hyperaware of my weight, I found the change much harder than I expected.
I remember getting ready for a work trip—my first big one since becoming pregnant—and having a full-blown freak-out.
These were people who had seen me before I was pregnant. I knew I looked noticeably larger than the last time they’d seen me, but I wasn’t far enough along for anyone to look at me and think, Oh, she’s pregnant.
And apparently, I cared about that. A lot.
I genuinely considered buying a T-shirt that said:
I’m not fat. I’m pregnant.
Not really as a joke.
I wanted people to know.
Looking back, that probably tells you everything about where my head was.
Looking pregnant helped. Sort of.
Once I actually looked pregnant, things got easier.
Not completely easy. But easier.
At least there was suddenly a visible explanation for what was happening to my body.
Even then, though, pregnancy didn’t look on me the way it often does in movies, adverts, or carefully selected Instagram photos.
I didn’t have a tiny body with a perfectly round bump attached to the front of it.
I got big.
Everywhere.
And I struggled with that too.
The strangest part was that, at the same time, I was completely amazed by what my body was doing.
There was a baby growing inside me.
My baby.
Something I had dreamed about and wanted so badly.
I could be in awe of that and still look in the mirror, uncomfortable with how much my body had changed.
Those feelings didn’t cancel each other out.
Pregnancy didn’t undo decades of thinking about weight
I would love to say pregnancy completely transformed my relationship with my body.
It didn’t.
I know my body did something extraordinary. It grew my baby, carried him, and changed in all the ways it needed to make that possible.
I’m enormously grateful for that.
But gratitude didn’t magically erase decades of thinking about my weight.
Pregnancy didn’t make me immune to body-image issues just because the weight gain had the best possible reason behind it.
And maybe that’s the point.
You can desperately want a baby and still struggle with getting bigger.
You can be grateful for your body and uncomfortable in it at the same time.
You can know that weight gain is normal and necessary and still have moments when watching your body change feels really difficult.
I loved being pregnant.
I loved growing my baby.
And sometimes, I really hated getting bigger.
All of those things are true.