How Motherhood Changed My Relationship With Food and My Body

**Content warning: This is one person’s story; everyone will have unique experiences in recovery and beyond. Some stories may mention eating disorder thoughts, behaviors, and symptoms. Please use your discretion when reading and speak with your support system as needed.

Alleigh Colleran is a Seattle-based writer and mother of one, currently pregnant with her second. This essay draws from her lived experience with eating disorder recovery, pregnancy, postpartum, and motherhood.

For most of my life, food has felt loaded. It has never been just food. Even when I tried to convince myself otherwise, there was always something more attached to it: control, shame, discipline, temptation, comfort, punishment. I spent nearly two decades moving in and out of the grips of bulimia and anorexia. Some years, the eating disorder whispered. Other years, it took over completely. But whether it was loud or quiet, it was always there, shaping the way I moved through the world.

When I was deeply consumed by it, my inner life narrowed into negotiation. What had I eaten? What had I earned? What would I allow myself next? What did I need to undo? Hunger felt suspicious. Fullness felt dangerous. And pleasure, simple, unguarded enjoyment, felt perhaps most scary of all.

For years, I thought that when I was ready to let it go, I simply would. I thought I was choosing it. I thought the control still belonged to me.

It began during my freshman year of high school. I can still remember the first time I purged, standing at a cold and dreary spring track meet. What I remember most is the relief: the terrible, immediate relief of feeling that I had undone something I could not bear to carry. After that, I kept going. What began as a secret that seemed to offer comfort and control slowly became its own private architecture. I learned how to live inside it: the hiding, the planning, the private choreography of appearing fine while quietly disappearing from myself.

In college, the disorder changed shape but not substance. Restriction gave way to binge drinking, late-night food, and mornings steeped in shame. My then-boyfriend’s rigid ideas about “healthy” control tightened the grip even further. Around him, workouts felt less optional, meals came with expectations, and certain foods seemed to fall outside the rules of being “clean.” I told myself I was disciplined. I told myself I was fine.

And in many ways, I looked fine. I was never alarmingly underweight. I graduated at the top of my high school class, set tennis records, earned a full-ride scholarship to a Big Ten university, moved to Seattle, and landed a promising job at a startup. Achievement became its own kind of camouflage. As long as I was still succeeding, I could tell myself my eating disorder was not really that bad.

That illusion held until I was twenty-four.

By then, I had been in Seattle for nearly two years. I was still finding my footing, deciding if the move was the right decision for me, and a falling out with a close friend, a broken lease, and a loneliness I could no longer outrun pushed me into anxiety and a depression that stripped away whatever was left of my denial. The eating disorder, as it always had, stepped forward and offered me what it had always promised: control. Only by then, it was no longer offering control. It was taking it.

I remembered something a college therapist had once told me.

“If you ever need support out there, go to The Emily Program.”

I had kept the card tucked away in a drawer, as if some part of me had always known I might need it. In June 2017, I finally walked through their doors.

I thought I would set up weekly therapy and move on. Instead, my intake recommended Partial Hospitalization.

Six days a week. Seven hours a day. Meals on-site. Group therapy. Individual therapy. Dietitian appointments. Psychiatry. Weight checks. No bathroom trips alone. Finish the plate or supplement it. Rate your hunger. Name your feelings. Stay.

It was gritty and exhausting and far more humbling than I had prepared for. For the first time, I could not outrun what was happening inside me. I had stepped away from work and spent two months in PHP before stepping down to intensive outpatient, and in that time, I learned very quickly that I could not simply decide my way out of a decade of habits and fear. Those months did not cure me. But they gave me something sturdier than willpower. They gave me a foundation.

Leaving treatment felt like stepping back into the world carrying tools I barely knew how to use. Grocery stores felt like obstacle courses. Dinner invitations tightened something in my chest before I had even sat down. But for the first time, I had language for what was happening inside me. I had people I could call. I had at least begun to gather evidence that my body was not the enemy I had spent so many years believing it to be.

Still, recovery remained uneven. There were better stretches and harder ones, months that felt hopeful and months that felt frighteningly familiar. Over time, I began to think that perhaps the most healed I would ever be was being neutral with food. Maybe the thoughts would always hum quietly in the background. Maybe food freedom belonged to other people.

Then, in 2023, my husband and I decided to start trying for a family. And when I saw that positive test, something in me shifted with a force I still do not fully know how to name.

From that moment on, I knew I had to nourish my body. Not because I suddenly loved it, and not because years of disordered thinking vanished overnight, but because it was no longer just mine. For the first time, nourishment felt tethered to something beyond fear. So, I asked for blind weight checks at appointments. I leaned harder on my therapist and dietitian. I did my best not to spiral when my belly grew faster than I thought it should, when my clothes stopped fitting, when my body began changing in ways I could not manage or predict. Pregnancy became an unexpected teacher in surrender.

Birth was, too.

As someone who had feared the medical system and distrusted my body for most of my life, I chose an unmedicated birth as a way of reclaiming both. After everything I had put my body through, I wanted to believe in its wisdom. I wanted, maybe for the first time, to experience my body not as a problem to solve but as something powerful and knowing. The experience was not about perfection or performance. It was about trust. And it remains one of the most profound experiences of my life.

Postpartum was quieter, but tender in its own way. Without pregnancy, old thoughts tried to return. My body was softer in places I had once kept rigid. Clothes fit differently. I would catch myself in the mirror searching for some earlier version of myself, as though she might still be waiting for me there. But by then, motherhood had already begun changing the stakes.

I breastfed my son for nearly two years, and that required continued nourishment. But the deepest shift in my relationship with food came later, when I began introducing him to solids.

Food, which had so long been a source of fear and negotiation, began to feel relational. It became part of how I cared for him, how I connected with him, how I moved through the texture of our days. I cut fruit into tiny pieces. I baked muffins, spooned yogurt, buttered toast. I sat beside him and watched him reach for more.

What moved me most was the trust with which he approached it all. He did not moralize food. He did not earn it. He did not question whether he deserved to be hungry or satisfied. He delighted in sweetness, softness, color, texture. He ate when he was hungry and stopped when he was done. Watching him felt like watching a kind of freedom I had spent years trying to find my way back to.

And somewhere inside those ordinary moments, something softened.

I realized I could not teach him trust while quietly waging war against my own body. I could not ask him to listen to his hunger, to enjoy food, to feel safe in his body, if I were to return to treating those same things as dangerous in myself. Loving him sharpened the truth. But it also made another truth possible: that maybe food could become something more than neutral to me. Maybe it could become joyful.

Over the last two years, I have fallen deeply in love with being in the kitchen. Baking and cooking from scratch have become some of the greatest joys of my life, especially because I get to share both the making and the eating with him. There is something healing in that rhythm, in the small domestic intimacy of stirring, chopping, tasting, and offering. After so many years of experiencing food as a threat, I have begun to know it as comfort, creativity, connection, and care.

Motherhood did not magically cure my eating disorder. It did something quieter and, in some ways, more enduring. It shifted my center of gravity. It gave my body meaning beyond appearance. It showed me that control was never the same thing as safety, and that nourishment can be an act of trust as much as survival. Motherhood has anchored me and brought me back to the body I had spent so many years trying to escape.

Recovery, I have learned, is not a switch that flips. It is not one triumphant moment after which the voice disappears for good. It is built instead out of thousands of small decisions: to eat, to stay, to reach out, to tell the truth, to choose trust over control again and again and again.

And now, as I move through my second pregnancy, I feel something I once thought might be impossible.

Not perfection. Not certainty. Not the total absence of fear. But peace. Not because the voice is gone forever, but because I know how to answer it. And because, finally, food has become more than something to fear or manage. It has become one of the ways I participate in love.

If you or a loved one is experiencing an eating disorder, help is available. Reach out to The Emily Program today by calling 1-888-364-5977 or completing our online form.

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