Pregnancy and postpartum are the subjects of best-selling books, product lines and an entire economy of expertise. But when it comes to nutrition after pregnancy loss, that umbrella collapses.StockPlanets/Getty Images
Joanna Tymkiw is a food journalist and grief educator.
When I was pregnant, it felt like the last person my body belonged to was me.
Every bite, sip and movement was governed by an unspoken set of rules, enforced through heavy looks and long pauses. It wasn’t just that I was no longer allowed to do a growing list of things. I also wasn’t allowed to talk about wanting them.
“You’re eating for the baby now. It’s not about you any more,” our neighbour barked when I admitted that all I wanted was a fat glass of red wine.
I imagined a smooth Gamay sliding down my throat, followed by the warm hug of a buzz. In fairness, the craving was triggered by the sight of him in his backyard, feet kicked up on his hose box, beer in hand, watering his lawn from a seated position. After delivering his impressively nuanced feminist lecture, he sprayed me in the face with his hose. Briefly. A little whoopsie, if you will. Humiliating for me, but not harmful to the baby, of course.
This was my introduction to the rules of pregnancy. Nourishment is essential, but only if it serves the right outcome. Feed the baby. Feed the future.
There is no shortage of guidance for how to do this. Pregnancy and postpartum are mapped, studied, and packaged into advice that can be widely shared. No one can replicate your exact experience, but enough similarities can be gathered to place you under a single umbrella. One large enough to produce best-selling books, launch product lines and sustain an entire economy of expertise. But when it comes to nutrition after pregnancy loss, that umbrella collapses.
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No meal trains. No best-selling books. No influencers selling healing supplements for bodies like ours. Just a handful of vague blog posts and government pages repeating the same hollow advice: eat a balanced diet, take care of yourself.
One of the most widely circulated postpartum nutrition books, The First Forty Days: The Essential Art of Nourishing the New Mother, frames food as medicine. It emphasizes warm, nutrient-dense meals meant to heal the body after birth and support lactation. The food it imagines is slow, soft, and rich: simmering soups and broths, stewed fruits, warm grains, slow-cooked meat that collapses at the touch of a spoon. Fat is not a garnish but a philosophy, stirred generously into everything.
The goal is clear: to help women seek the care and nourishment they deserve after bringing a baby into the world. But for bodies like mine, where does that leave us?
My body never reached the stage where sleep becomes impossible, and every movement feels like labour because you are the size of a house. But it still worked. It attended appointments and hospital visits. It spat sour vomit at the smell of once-loved foods and heaved in public toilets. It expanded and rearranged itself, making space for another human.
Even if it does not feel true in the moment, this is when nourishment matters most.
This is where the language of postpartum care becomes exclusionary. It assumes an outcome and rewards completion. Nourishment is framed as a way to restore function, to return the body to usefulness. There is little room for bodies that change without producing something to show for it. And yet these bodies still need feeding.
After trauma, the habits that sustain daily life evaporate quickly. Hunger becomes erratic. Thirst slips by unnoticed. The body is not malfunctioning. It is doing threat math, choosing survival over nourishment.
Around 90 per cent of serotonin is produced in the gut. In the presence of profound stress, it’s balance is disrupted, and mood regulation, sleep, and emotional resilience begin to falter. As stress weakens these systems, their weakening feeds the stress. So you survive on scraps. Junk food. Alcohol. Whatever dulls the edges. These choices do not fix anything, but they are not failures either. They are what happens when a body is left to fend for itself after being told its only purpose was to produce.
Alcohol can feel like mercy, a brief easing of a brain that has been working overtime, rearranging everything you once believed to be true. But the relief is short-lived. As it leaves your system, your brain scrambles to rebalance, tightening its grip on the feel-good reserves you are already running low on.
Against this backdrop, food that supports the gut becomes quietly important. Fibre-rich and fermented foods do not promise recovery, but they can help stabilize systems thrown off-balance by hormonal shifts and prolonged stress. By supporting the gut, they offer one of the few ways to support the brain without asking the body to perform, improve, or justify itself.
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Perinatal loss aftercare is avoided not because it is unnecessary, but because it disrupts the story we are comfortable telling about women’s bodies. Nourishment is readily prescribed when it serves reproduction or restores usefulness. It becomes strangely optional when there is no baby to feed and no future outcome to optimize.
To nourish a body that carried life but did not deliver it requires something harder: care without productivity. Attention without outcome.
And so the subject disappears. Not because the body does not need feeding, but because we do not know what to do with a woman whose body worked, changed, suffered, and did not produce something we can point to.
This is when the food should arrive anyway. When people should sit with you, bring something warm, soften the edges of the day, and help however they can, just as they would have if there were a baby to pass around. Even if it does not feel true in the moment, this is when nourishment matters most. You are entitled to care, to fuss, to meals that are warm and soothing and replenishing, because you are still here.