How giving birth impacted my lifelong eating disorder.

Words by Kailey Buchanan

A psychic medium once told me that in a past life I was a baker. I lived in a small colony in Europe and made bread and desserts. I could have been the best pâtissier in the world, but I never saw my 21st birthday. My colony was sick. People were dying and babies were born deformed because the soil we grew our food in was contaminated. She explained this is why I don’t like being barefoot in the dirt. Why I have a troubled relationship with food and it sometimes tastes like poison.

In this life, I’ve been in therapy for years to treat the eating disorder I’ve had since I was 15. 

I was in awe that someone who I paid $100 to read my palm and look into my throat chakra was helping me understand myself deeper than any therapy session ever had. Maybe it was just that her explanation helped excuse my behaviour rather than make me take responsibility for it. I’ve always been this way. 

She told me that my mission in my current lifetime was to heal my relationship with myself and my body. 

“How?” I asked.

She smiled. 

“Eat,” she said.

I wasn’t always sure I wanted kids, but when I met my husband my whole perspective shifted. I knew I wanted his babies, with his nose and blue eyes and crinkly smile. 

I got pregnant on our wedding night, on our first try without using any contraceptive. Our nine-month countdown began faster than we both expected and we realized we hadn’t thought about many things.

We agreed that mixing our gene pools would undeniably create something cute, but we were also afraid of shifting our predispositions onto our future children. Our issues and misgivings that we carried with us through childhood and adolescence. 

I also wondered the usual things like, Where would the nursery go? Would I be able to hold a baby properly without looking like I was handling a slippery fish? I hadn’t had a lot of practice with babies, did this matter? Would I accidentally raise a monster if I didn’t sleep train? But underneath all the existential fretting was a shallower worry. Something that had nothing to do with my mothering abilities or being in charge of another human life or potentially fucking them up, and everything to do with knowing my body would change. 

I hate myself for admitting this to the Internet. I’ve been controlling the size of my waist and what I put in my mouth for as long as I can remember. I knew how many calories were in anything before the Calorie Counter app. I knew how to restrict myself before I ever really let myself ever feel full. I praised myself for the discipline.

In my early 20s, I was diagnosed with anorexia and compulsive exercise disorder. When I got pregnant in my late 30s, I was significantly better than I was in my 20s, but I still carried the same fears and tendencies with me. I still over exercised and obsessed over being able to easily zip up my favorite blue jeans. I still stopped myself from going for second helpings even if I was still hungry. 

Being pregnant meant the mandate was to grow and I had to give up that control. This thought alone was more terrifying than preparing for the birth itself.

At my 12-week check-up, my doctor urged me to consume as many calories as I could in a day. She knew from my history of missed menstrual cycles and fluctuating weight patterns that she needed to tell me how important it was to eat. She alluded to what might happen if I don’t. The complications I could create for us. Me and the baby. Mostly the baby. 

She told me to enjoy pregnancy. “You should enjoy this time in your life where you have the permission to eat as much food as you want.” 

Her offer triggered me. Why did I need her permission? 

This is the narrative I’ve always been trapped in. I’ve always needed someone else's permission, or the reminder, to look and be a certain way. Like the time my childhood friend's father told me I was growing into my legs. Or when a boy in my grade nine class said I would never be beautiful because my ass was too fat. Or when I worked as a hostess in my early teens and my manager told me to wear a tighter shirt and a shorter skirt.

In pregnancy, it was the same. Everyone seemed entitled to opinions on me and my body: “You’re carrying high.” “You’re carrying low.” “You can’t even really tell you’re pregnant from behind!”

When I got home after the check-up, I ate a BLT sandwich, made with white bread, a bowl of soup with crackers, and a side dish of probiotic yogurt. I waited a somewhat reasonable amount of time to digest before riding the Peloton for an hour even though I had such bad lightning crotch it felt like I was being electrocuted.

I’ve never felt love so intense as when my son was laid on me for the first time. He was the most perfect thing I’d ever seen. I spent the first few days cradling and smelling him, intoxicated by his milky, baby breath. The entire world melted away. I could have sat in the hospital bed with him forever, both of us melded together. I felt weightless and whole all at once. 

But then we came home and reality set in.

Milk leaked through my shirt. My clothes stretched and sagged. My skin didn’t feel like mine. Every part of me was damp with sweat, tears, and other mystical fluids I couldn’t name. I couldn’t control anything my body did. 

During the night feeds, I scrolled Instagram. My new algorithm was filled with mom-fluencers who shared their best baby hacks and how to be good moms and raise kids who were good inside, along with weight loss and two-minute beauty routines. 

“I lost all the baby weight just by breastfeeding and walking five kilometers a day!” One said. 

“You can do it, too, mama.”

“All you need to do is comment ‘MOM CLUB’ in the comments and I’ll send you a 10-week fitness regime and diet plan.”

I felt the sagging skin where my baby had been and felt a sad emptiness I couldn’t explain. I felt like an alien who had inhabited someone else's body. My body felt and looked foreign to me. I felt foreign to myself. 

I closed my eyes and pictured my favorite blue jeans, folded in my bottom drawer, waiting to be squeezed back into. A shroud of who I used to be. I wriggled my hand free from under my baby’s neck and typed into the comment section.

One morning, I pushed the stroller with no destination planned. I was four months postpartum and still in the thick of recovery. Movement had been my religion for as long as I could remember, but walking further than three kilometers suddenly felt hard. For the first time ever, I didn’t want to move. But the baby wouldn’t sleep during the day unless I kept moving, so I had to try.

My therapist asked me to practice moving through some of my “mom-rage,” as she calls it. She said it would be good to process things while I was out walking. To literally move through them. I thought about how angry I was that motherhood was so hard for the mother. There were so many sacrifices we needed to make and bear the impossible toll on our bodies, psyche, routine, life—all of it. I was angry, too, because I was constantly ravenous while breastfeeding. I suddenly couldn’t stop eating. 

In divine timing, I stumbled across a bakery with golden pastries in the window. 

I wish this epiphany could be more ceremonial or compelling. Truthfully, I have no idea what clicked inside my brain at that moment. Maybe it was the hormones. Maybe it was the sleep deprivation. Maybe it was the insane breastfeeding cravings. Maybe it was because I truly had no control over anything anymore, my time, my schedule, my body’s responses to postpartum, that I suddenly felt like I had the permission to give in. My own permission. 

I stepped inside and ordered a croissant without hesitation.I ate it in a frenzied rage, standing at the cash register, while my payment was still processing. Flaky shards flew onto my shirt, into my bra, onto my son’s blanket. 

The person behind the counter stared at me with wide eyes, seemingly asking, “Are you okay?”

I didn’t care. 

For the first time in years, I ate without calculating, without planning how to erase it. I savoured the warm dough melting into the corners of my cheeks. I pushed my son back there the next day. And the next after that. The walk became my new ritual, my new way of movement, and those small steps slowly softened something inside me. 

Over those next months, I focused on movement as medicine that helped me heal rather than lose the baby weight. A daily croissant became my reward. Something I earned. Something I wanted. Slowly but eventually, I stopped thinking about fitting back into my old jeans.

I bought a new pair instead.

My son is now three. On the weekends, we go for a “special treat,” as he likes to call it, at a bakery of his choice. We pick our pastries (usually something chocolate for me and a scone for him) and have a coffee (steamed milk for him). I like to watch him savor his, sometimes with his eyes closed, swaying back and forth in an innocent bliss. The way food is meant to be enjoyed. 

I admit that this new stage of my life has not fully healed my relationship with my body. But it did crack it wide open. 

I have started listening deeply to my body’s cues of hunger, pain, and rest. Not for self-love or to prove anything. But because a tiny, blue-eyed boy depends on me now. Because I want to model better relationships for him around his own self-perception, health, food, and exercise. In this lifetime, and all future lifetimes. 

Sometimes I wish for a version of myself that didn’t ache or sag. A version who felt small enough to be praised. But then my son reaches for me with both arms, heavy with love, and I realize he doesn’t see my stretch marks or softness. He doesn’t see me, before or after. He just sees me.

I think my work now is to see the version he sees, too. Not the version I was, or the one I thought I should be, just the one that holds him and loves him. This version is more than enough. More than the kilometers on a treadmill or the size of her jeans. Who deserves to eat the croissant without anyone’s permission but her own. 

Kailey Buchanan (@kaileykristineb) lives in Vancouver, Canada with her husband and son. When her toddler isn't running the show, she tries to write a little. She is currently working on  her Substack and getting all her messy motherhood thoughts out of her Notes app.