To be honest, I thought I will bounce back easily, coming in skinny and hoping to breastfeeding. I also used to work out six days a week, four of which at high intensity, so I thought I would still have that drive and energy twelve weeks after giving birth. I ate healthy and balanced. I thought I had it figured out.

Things didn’t work out well for me, obviously. Eleven months and twenty pounds later, I grew from extra small to double XLs. Even walking 10,000 steps on a daily basis is a challenge; let alone doing HIITs with the new state of my joints and knees. I chose to ditch my healthy plant-based life to increase my breastmilk. (Unfortunately, my breastmilk did increase… and so did my body size.) With these, and sleeplessness and stress, I am, physically, a new person and I do not like her.

It isn’t that I do not like being a mom. I love my daughter possibly more than anything I have loved in my life and will never not want becoming her mother. It is that I hate myself. I hate my body for not shrinking back to size 2 immediately. I hate that I had diastasis recti. I hate that I am now too weak to lift a one-pound dumb bell, to lift my upper or lower half more than five times in succession, to even do simple jumping jacks. I compare myself to my office mates who had recently become moms, too, and bounced back effortlessly. Me? I look horrible.

I am not being overly dramatic. My work mates say so. My relatives say so. I am barely recognizable. I have aged. And I feel bad that I hate this version of me, because this new body resulted from having and looking after my child, and I love my child, possibly more than anything. I will never regret being her mom. More than anything, though, I am scared that my body image issues will affect my child growing up – that if I do not recover from this mentality, my child, a girl, will grow up feeling the same, thinking she is worth less if she is not skinny.

Thanks to Diana Polekhina @diana_pole for making this photo available freely on Unsplash 🎁 https://unsplash.com/photos/iUfusOthmgQ