Relationship to Your Body through Motherhood

Hey, Villagers! Today we get to have a raw conversation with the gal who leads the world of Raw, from Raw Beauty Talks we have Erin Treloar! She is hanging out with us to chat about the relationships we have with our bodies, and how that relationship changes as women experience motherhood.

Erin is the founder of Raw Beauty Co, which exists to support women in feeling confident and calm and connected to their body. She is a health coach by trade and has had a long journey with her own body in coming to a place of self love. She struggled with an eating disorder in high school and was admitted into an in-patient program for 3 months, which acted as her springboard into the world of self-development. When she left the hospital she was at a healthy weight physically but was still struggling mentally. While she never again dropped down to an unhealthy weight, she spent the years following in this dance between restrictive eating and dieting and cleanses. 

“I struggled a lot with anxiety but it was labeled as an eating disorder.” 

“Throughout this whole process I was really disconnected from my body,” Erin tells me. “ I didn’t get my period for years, and my overall sentiment was that my body just won’t do what I want it to do. I was told when I was 18 that it was unlikely I would ever be able to have kids because of the damage that was being done to my organs by this disease that I had.” Now, Erin has two kids, a 2 and a 4-year-old. She has been pregnant four times, including two miscarriages. 

“I am at a place where I realize and understand deeply that my body is on my team. My body is working for me, not against me. The more that I listen to my body, nourish my body, and speak kindly about my body, the more that I thrive. And the more that it gives back to me.”

I agree with Erin, that idea of really trusting that your body is serving you and the ability to listen to it is really hard—especially if you’re living with anxiety. Our work here is in emotional development and we have this idea that you can listen to your intuition, but if it’s coming from a place of anxiety then it is really hard to tune in to.

We live with these deep-seated beliefs about what our bodies should look like and how we should show up in the world as women, how we should show up as moms, and so the work to replant those seeds takes time and energy. There’s no quick fix for this process. So often when we struggle with our body we look for the quick fix, the juice cleanse or intermittent fasting, we treat our bodies as if they are the issue. So much of this work is trying to identify what the issue actually is, whether it is trauma from their past or not living in alignment with their true values.

“I have been struggling with this my whole life, and the last thing I want to do is pass it along to my kids.”

“We love to change our body and control our food, or stuff our feelings down with food hoping that will solve the pain we are feeling.” Erin continued. “Really, when the healing starts is when we can identify and address the deeper stuff. Which often is not as complicated as people think!” I completely agreed with Erin here, especially with how my response to my body reflected where I was in my pregnancy journey.

There is so much that we set expectations around in regard to our body and what it should do. It is exhausting to take the perspective of: here is the expected result for my body, here is how it should be pregnant, here is how it should miscarry, here is how it should look, here is what your cravings should be. What if we change that dialogue to one that is softer on our body? What would we be able to accomplish if we were able to change the narrative around our bodies?

“Try to find some sort of belief that is more empowering than limiting, and start there.”

In this episode, Erin and I spoke earnestly about the struggles of growing up in a woman’s body and the expectations that are placed on us. But more importantly, we spoke about how we overcome these expectations and build a healthy relationship with ourselves. For our full chat, listen to the episode above. For more of Erin, you can find all of her resources at RawBeauty.co and @rawbeautytalks over on Instagram. She loves getting messages from her community and wants you to pop over to her ‘gram after you listen to this episode and send her a DM with your biggest ah-ha moment from this interview!

Then, send me a DM over @seed.and.sew and let me know what you’ve named your own Fearful Friend. Because babe, you are in control of your own narrative. Thank you for joining me in this beautiful village as we navigate the journey of reparenting our adult selves together!