Going through pregnancy and the labor and delivery process is far from an easy feat. No matter how many months you spend planning and prepping. Welcoming a child into the world can be a miracle, beautiful, and wonderful. It can also be traumatic, exhausting, and overwhelming, especially if all that hard planning work has to shift at the last minute. The labor and delivery process doesn’t always go exactly as you may have imagined it would. You’re not alone if you’re struggling to deal with how your labor and delivery went.

Whether from friends, family or the internet - we get a lot of messages that having a baby is supposed to be one of the happiest times of your life. But it’s often not that simple. Being a new mom can be an incredibly challenging time as you navigate the lack of sleep, a body that needs to physically recover from birth and the difficulty of trying to take care of a newborn who depends on you for their safety. With all of these changes, postpartum anxiety can also show up.

While ups and downs with self-esteem may be common, struggling with body image to the point of disordered eating shouldn’t be something that you have to deal with day in and day out. Help is available to you. Working with a trained mental health professional or intuitive eating counselor may be exactly what you need to get to the root cause and figure out ways to increase your self-esteem again.