Is It Normal to Feel This Way? Food, Body Image, and Pregnancy
Yes, body image during pregnancy can feel far more complicated than you expected, even for women who’ve never thought twice about food or their body before. Pregnancy asks your body to change in a way you can’t fully control, on a timeline that isn’t yours, and that alone is enough to bring old patterns closer to the surface. You might catch yourself avoiding a mirror, dreading a weigh in, or noticing a thought about weight or food that you thought you’d left behind years ago.
If any of this sounds familiar, we wrote something for you. Is It Normal to Feel This Way? is a free guide from Katie McKeown, psychotherapist and founder of Modern Psych Counselling & Psychotherapy, built around the questions we hear most from women navigating pregnancy alongside a complicated relationship with food, weight, or control.
Why does pregnancy bring old food and body image thoughts back to the surface?
Old patterns tend to come back during periods of stress, uncertainty, and change, and pregnancy comes with plenty of all three. The routines that once helped you feel steady might look different now. Foods that used to feel predictable might not sit the same way. Your body is changing faster than your calendar can plan around, and for anyone who has ever felt safe monitoring food, exercise, or weight, that kind of unpredictability can be hard to sit with.
None of this means something has gone wrong or that you’re back where you started. Recognizing an old thought is very different from being consumed by it. Often it’s a sign you understand yourself better than you did the last time around. If you have a history with disordered eating specifically, our post on pregnancy after an eating disorder goes deeper into what that overlap can look like.
What does the guide walk through?
The guide is built around thirteen of the questions we hear most often in session, including things like:
- Worrying about gaining weight, or dreading the number on the scale
- Missing the body you had before pregnancy, even while wanting this pregnancy completely
- Feeling disconnected from your body, or not recognizing yourself in the mirror
- Feeling uncomfortable with unsolicited comments or touch once a pregnancy becomes visible
- Noticing old food or body image struggles resurface, even years after you thought you’d moved past them
- Feeling anxious before appointments, or rehearsing what you’ll say if the scale comes up
- Already worrying about your body after the baby arrives, before you’ve even given birth
Each chapter is built around one question, followed by a short reflection you can sit with if it’s useful, or skip if it isn’t.
Who is this guide for?
This guide is for you if pregnancy has made food, weight, exercise, or your changing body feel more complicated than you expected. You don’t need to have a history of disordered eating or a diagnosis for these changes to feel hard. Maybe you’ve never thought much about your relationship with food or your body before, or maybe pregnancy is bringing old patterns and worries back to the surface. That can look like:
- No history required. You don’t need a diagnosis or a history that feels “serious enough” to find this useful. If that’s a thought that’s held you back from reaching out before, our post on “I’m not sick enough for help” speaks to exactly that.
- A past with dieting or disordered eating. It can be especially useful if food, exercise, or body image have ever felt complicated for you.
- Planners finding pregnancy won’t cooperate. A lot of the guide is written for anyone who likes having a plan, feeling prepared, or knowing what’s coming next, and is finding that pregnancy doesn’t really work that way.
Because understanding is only part of it…
Understanding why a thought is showing up is helpful. But let’s be real, knowing why it’s happening doesn’t always help when you’re standing in the kitchen second guessing what you just ate or getting stuck in a spiral about your changing body.
That’s why this guide also gives you some practical tools for those moments. There’s a short grounding exercise for when your thoughts start to spiral, reframes for some of the thoughts that tend to get stuck on repeat, and a simple check in you can come back to when you want to get a sense of just how much mental space food and body thoughts have been taking up lately.
There’s also a section specifically for partners, siblings, and close friends. Because when someone you love is struggling, the instinct is often to reassure them, fix it, or try to convince them not to feel the way they’re feeling. Instead, we share a few concrete ways you can actually support someone and be a steady person in their corner.
And if you’re already finding yourself worrying about what your body will look or feel like after pregnancy, you’re definitely not alone. Our post on why new motherhood can feel like losing yourself takes that conversation a little further and explores some of the identity shifts that can come with becoming a mom.
How can therapy help with body image and food anxiety during pregnancy?
At Modern Psych Counselling & Psychotherapy, we’re interested in understanding what’s driving the pattern rather than handing you another coping skill to add to your list. That can mean exploring what a number on the scale has come to represent, understanding what your body is asking for right now, or working with the discomfort that shows up when your usual ways of creating certainty stop working the way they used to.
A guide can be a helpful first step. Sometimes it’s also the thing that makes reaching out for support feel a little less overwhelming.
Where can I find prenatal or postpartum therapy in Ontario?
Modern Psych provides prenatal and postpartum therapy virtually to clients across Ontario and the rest of Canada, working with women navigating anxiety, perfectionism, food, body image, and the major life transitions that come with pregnancy. Our approach is practical and collaborative, with a focus on understanding what’s underneath the pattern rather than handing you another list of rules to follow.
If you’d like to talk it through before deciding whether therapy is the right fit, we offer a complimentary 15-minute consultation to answer your questions and see how we can help.
If you’d rather look into peer support or community resources alongside individual therapy, PSI Canada is a good place to start.
If you’ve been reading this and recognizing yourself, you don’t have to wait until things feel unmanageable to reach out.
Katie McKeown, RP and the Modern Psych Team
