Tuning Out the “Baby Bump” Media madness: How Prenatal Yoga helped me find real body image balance
Claire Mysko
The walk to my prenatal yoga class at the YMCA took me through Brooklyn neighborhoods full of brownstones and Bugaboos. I would cross the honking, blaring buzz of Flatbush and head over to Atlantic Avenue, where the spicy scents from the Middle Eastern shops quickly gave way to “artisanal” aromas wafting out of cafés selling overpriced coffee and scones freshly baked with locally sourced organic ingredients. It was a relief to be able to smell food and not immediately feel waves of nausea. My Summer of Ginger Beer was officially over. I had made it to my second trimester and the crisp fall air made everything feel fresh and full of possibility. I was expecting! I could finally ditch my don’tpukeohpleasedon’tpuke mantra and come up with something a little more cheerful and life affirming. This was all kinds of awesome.
On that trek, which I made twice a week for the remainder of my pregnancy, I would pass by a tiny magazine shop. It was bigger than a sidewalk newsstand but not big enough to offer much of a selection. No artsy titles or imports, but they had all the tabloids. Propped up in the window, the headlines read: “Baby bump or too many burritos?” “Pregnancy cravings revealed!” “How she got her body back after baby!” I had just finished coauthoring a book about how our culture’s obsessive fixation on weight before, during, and after pregnancy is profoundly damaging to women and, by extension, to our children. I had spent months in the role of “body image expert,” interviewing women about their personal stories. And now I was preggo.
As a recovering perfectionist with a history of disordered eating, I was determined not to stress about having the perfect pregnancy. I wasn’t going to drive myself nuts ruminating over whether it was okay to get a pedicure (the chemicals!) or how much I should scale back on my cappuccinos (the caffeine!). But there were some toxins I did stress about—the toxins that caused nearly 80 percent of the women my coauthor and I surveyed for our book to say that the fear of gaining weight and not being able to lose it after delivery was their number one body-related pregnancy concern. I knew there were specific things I could do to protect myself from being in that 80 percent, so I did those things by the book—the book I wrote. I took my own advice and took weight out of the equation. I allowed my obstetrician to weigh me, but I never looked at or tracked that number myself. I continued to eat intuitively. I packed up my skinny jeans and pencil skirts soon after I saw that plus sign on the pregnancy test, lest I be triggered by the experience of trying to squeeze into anything when my body started rapidly expanding. I set boundaries with my nearest and dearest. I had a solid support system at the ready. I journaled. In an actual journal. Of course I couldn’t plan for everything, especially living in a city like New York, home to high-end gyms that charge memberships equivalent to a mortgage and where the beauty-is-thinness mindset is so firmly entrenched that the images and messages are a daily assault to the senses. It quickly became clear that in order to have a body-positive pregnancy, I needed to bolster my inner resources and find a way to detox from the external pressures. My prenatal yoga practice served both purposes.
The Power of Doing
In every yoga class, I took a moment to survey the room filled with women at various stages of their pregnancies. Some, like me, teetered and swayed until they found their roots for tree pose. This was a space where the purpose was to find balance with our changing bodies. Struggle against the added weight and you will falter. It was a truth that steadied me inside the yoga studio, and in my life outside of it.
Pregnancy is a time when our bodies work some serious magic. Unfortunately, we’re living in an environment where the hyper-focus on how we look—how much weight we gain, how we’re dressing our “bumps,” how we should be racing to get our bodies back as soon as that little bundle of joy arrives—can make it all feel a little less magical. The diet, fitness, fashion, and beauty industries have woken up to the fact that stoking women’s prenatal and postpartum appearance anxiety adds up to mucho dinero. Enter the Spanx maternity collection and multimillion dollar contracts for stars such as Mariah Carey, who described her pregnant body as “rancid” and then became a spokesperson for Jenny Craig, and Jessica Simpson, who was publicly shamed and body-snarked for her pregnancy weight gain and soon after signed a contract that had her stepping on a Weight Watchers scale made of pure gold.
Pregnancy offers a valuable opportunity to tune in to our own power and tune out all the other B.S. Piles of research point to the fact that girls and women benefit from learning to appreciate what their bodies can do. This internal knowledge can steer us away from the dangerous path of valuing ourselves based on what we look like or what size we can fit into. For me, yoga was a visceral way to honor what my body was up to. At the start of class, the instructor asked each of us to share what was going on that week. One by one, the aches and pains would be revealed, the sleep disturbances aired, the milestones marked. And then we would move on to the practice of working with those bodies, in all their messy, baby-growing imperfections. For me, each movement was a purposeful move toward making peace, not waging war.
Breaking Out of Battle Mode
As women, we have learned to see our bodies as adversaries—entities to be conquered and controlled. We grow up hearing that dessert is sinful and that we should satisfy our every craving with fat-free yogurt. We absorb the lie that “thin and pretty” will get us a hell of a lot more in life than “strong and powerful.” In a culture that makes it nearly impossible to feel confident in our bodies, it is perhaps not so shocking that 65 percent of American women admit to being disordered eaters.1 Their behavior might not fit the diagnostic criteria for eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating disorder, but their fixation on food and weight is a supremely negative force in their lives. Obsessive calorie counting, chronic dieting, over-exercise, and secret eating are some of the many damaging patterns that make up our national epidemic of disordered eating. And let’s face it: if two-thirds of women fit somewhere on this spectrum, it stands to reason that a good number of us are or will become mothers. It would be a lovely Utopian fantasy to imagine that pregnancy would be a blissful respite from all the body pressures, a time to bask in some goddess-like glow that would eclipse all those nasty whispers of “not good enough.” And you know what? For some women, pregnancy really is effortlessly like that. I swear. I have met these women. They’ve been lovely and wonderful and kind of awe-inspiring. I am not one of them.
I had been recovered from my eating disorder for over a decade when I first found out I was pregnant. I was in a pretty good place with my body image too. I had a few rough days here and there, but for the most part I felt solidly happy with the way I looked—it was a world of difference from the near-constant self-doubt I lived with for so many years. I had no way of knowing how or if pregnancy would upset that healthy balance I had worked so hard to reach. But if I wasn’t going to feel like a glowing goddess (which I didn’t), I wanted to make damn sure I didn’t slip back into that dark, familiar place where I felt like utter crap about my body. So I let my body do what it was doing. I was okay with the transformations most of the time—and I let myself have moments of not being okay too. I made a promise to myself that I would reach out when I found myself on those “not okay” curves so that they would not turn into downward spirals. And they didn’t. I realized that I was hardest on myself when I was most worn down by the stress of the scary “what if?” medical tests, the agony of being on the verge of puking from morning sickness (which is one of the world’s most egregious misnomers, as mine was certainly not limited to the hours before noon), or the exhaustion that came from schlepping my pregnant ass all around town on NYC public transit. (People, look up from your iPhones! Offer a seat, for the love of all that is holy.) I tuned in to my real-life triggers, and I did my best to tune out the media messages that make it so easy for us to turn on ourselves. We are sold the idea that “managing” our appearance with products, food, and B-list-endorsed plans will help us manage the feelings and fears of pregnancy and new motherhood that often seem so messy, untenable, and—yes, I’ll say it—shameful. We are not supposed to be vulnerable and freaked out about this enormous life event that will change nearly every aspect of our lives. But weight-conscious? Well, of course that’s okay. In fact, it’s expected.
Want to know the pregnancy-related buzz phrases that make my skin crawl the most? It’s the insidious, oppressive directive to “get your body back.” It’s the obligatory laundry list of “how she did it” that accompanies every women’s magazine profile of every celebrity who happens to have given birth within the last twenty-four months. It’s the incessant onslaught of “post-baby bikini bodies.” The reason these empty promises are so effective is because marketers and media makers have successfully identified that many women do experience a loss of who they are (you know, existential-style) when they make the move into the mother hood. And with dollar signs twinkling in their eyes, they have advertised and proselytized to the point where we are quick to believe that the key to regaining it is to lose the weight. It’s not just our self-worth that has become tied up in what we look like—it’s our very sense of self.
Being a media-literate mama has helped me keep my critical eyes open, especially when passing newsstands or clicking through guilty-pleasure entertainment blogs. Being in therapy has helped me talk it all out and work through the vulnerabilities that used to lead me to restrict, binge, or purge. It was my prenatal yoga practice that brought me to a place where my physical movement intertwined the threads of who I was with the person I was and am becoming. It’s still, and always will be, a work in process. Yoga was decidedly and definitely not about weight I was gaining or when I would lose it.
Silence and Savasana
I’ll say it. Savasana was my favorite part of the prenatal yoga package. Not just because I was so dead tired that the whole “corpse pose” thing made a whole lot of sense, but because the quiet of it sustained me. Pregnancy comes with an insane amount of noise—questions about our choices, expectations about who we should be and what we should look like.
The sirens are blaring: don’t gain too much weight, eat this but not that, get your plan in place to take off the baby weight. And then the internal alarms kick in: I’m too smart, too feminist to be worrying about how my butt looks in maternity jeans. Holy crap, how will I protect my child from the body image struggles and eating disorders that ate up so many years of my life? The static is paralyzing, but we lose out if we just try to keep moving through it. Yoga taught me that the remedy is to find stillness, to listen to what silence will tell you. Lying on that cool, wood floor with the lights off, propped with more and more cushions as the months wore on, I would hear the breath of other women in the room, each of them facing their own onslaught of pressures. In and out. Some sighs. Some coughs. I was not alone. Later in my pregnancy, I would feel my baby—then my daughter—swimming around, her kicks and movement gloriously louder to me there in that room than in any other space. I was not alone.
Prenatal yoga was never a solitary practice for me. It was about connection, with the women around me and with my child. The ever-present messages about molding and shaping our bodies to meet some manufactured ideal are effectively disconnecting us from what really matters about pregnancy and motherhood. They disconnect us from each other too, keeping us far from the conversations that will move us to healthier place. Imagine if instead of “You look great! You barely look pregnant! I wish I could have had such a cute little bump,” we started with a simple “How are you?” That question framed my prenatal yoga experience. It was verbalized. It was internalized. It was practiced.
1. UNC School of Medicine. “Survey Finds Disordered Eating Behaviors Among Three Out of Four American Women.” UNC School of Medicine, April 22, 2008, www.med.unc.edu/www/newsarchive/2008/april/survey-finds-disordered-eating-behaviors-among-three-out-of-four-american-women (accessed March 2014).
Claire Mysko is an award-winning author and an internationally recognized expert on body image, leadership, and media literacy. Her book for girls, You’re Amazing! A No-Pressure Guide to Being Your Best Self, was named to the Amelia Bloomer List, a project of the American Library Association that recognizes outstanding feminist books for young readers. She is also the coauthor of Does This Pregnancy Make Me Look Fat? The Essential Guide to Loving Your Body Before and After Baby. www.clairemysko.com. Author photo by Kate Glicksberg.