Dear Laura... How do I stop wishing for the past and accept myself now?

Hey team - welcome to ‘Dear Laura’ - a monthly column where I fashion myself as an agony aunt and answer the questions that readers submit. If you’d like to submit a question for me to answer next month - then you can leave it as a comment below or submit it here.

I’m happy to answer Qs about anti-diet nutrition, developing a more peaceful relationship to food and weight-inclusive health, body image challenges, and, of course, challenges with feeding your kiddos. Please give as much detail as you’re comfortable with and let me know if you’d like me to include your name or keep it anon.

Just a reminder before we get to this month’s Q that, although I am a Registered Nutritionist, I am not your nutritionist. These questions are intended for information and education, and not meant to replace individual care.

Here’s this month’s question:

Dear Laura,

I started healing from my disordered eating and giving up dieting and restricting foods or food groups and over exercising a few months before I got pregnant. During my pregnancy I let go of so much diet culture and did a lot of healing around food and seeing how disordered I had been. I also gained at least X lbs (I didn’t weigh myself all pregnancy and didn’t weigh myself until recently, now a year postpartum). A year postpartum I haven’t lost any of the weight and though I have immersed myself in anti-diet work and intuitive eating and I BELIEVE in it in my mind, losing my previously straight sized body and the thin privilege and the IDENTITY I had as a thinner person has been the hardest thing I’ve gone through.

How do I stop wishing for the past and accept myself now? How do I grapple with the fact that becoming a mother for me and healing from disordered eating for myself but also my child also meant losing all sense of my previous identity and not being able to even recognize myself anymore? How do I contend with all the friends around me who also had babies at the same time and whose bodies have returned (or never even changed!) to the pre-pregnancy weight.

I feel like I’m the only one.

First up, I’m just sending you a big hug - because all of this is hard. Really hard.

Secondly, you’re not alone. So many of us here have experienced similar feelings - confusion, grief, loss, sadness, ambiguity, conflict and more.

Some reflections on a changing body

Feeding yourself and your family with less fear and anxiety.

Can I Have Another Snack?Laura Thomas

Something that might be helpful here is the concept of Ambiguous Loss - a concept I first learned about from my friend Nikki Haggett, and which I have started incorporating into my own work with clients. I think it can apply both to becoming a parent, and losing body privilege. Here is a great primer from family therapist and researcher Pauline Boss who coined the term in the 1970s.

Often in the anti-diet space, you’ll hear the idea that you have to ‘grieve the thin ideal’ - that it’s an important and necessary step in healing your relationship with food and your body. And while I think that’s true, it may not be the linear ‘7 Stages of Grief’ that was described by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross where there is a beginning, a middle, and an end.