Lauren Alaina Says Pregnancy Has 'Transformed' Her Mindset After Struggling with 'Body Image' (Exclusive)
Alaina has been vocal about her struggle with body image and an eating disorder in the past
Terry Wyatt/Getty
Lauren AlainaPregnancy taught Lauren Alaina a thing or two about self-love.
Now 22 weeks pregnant, Alaina is amazed by what her body is "capable of" — and the experience shifted her perspective on body image.
"My love and appreciation for my body has transformed in the last five months. Just what a miracle it is. The female body is insane," Alaina, 30 — who's expecting her first baby with husband Cam Arnold — tells PEOPLE exclusively.
She continues, "I have really struggled with body image in my life, and now that I have this baby, I'm like, 'How could I have ever thought something negative about this body of mine that can do this?' It's unbelievable."
Alaina has been vocal about her struggle with body image in the past. In August 2023, she opened up about struggling with eating on Bachelorette star Hannah Brown's Better Tomorrow podcast.
“I started having problems with [an] eating disorder in middle school and then in tenth grade, I go on American Idol,” Alaina admitted. “And I was in my very awkward, chubby phase.”
Laura Moll
Lauren Alaina and Cam Arnold“I was always confident on the stage; the one thing I wasn’t confident [about] was my weight, probably my whole life," she continued.
Then, during her 2011 run on American Idol, she received an overwhelming amount of backlash about her body, as she was shifting “between a teenager and a woman.”
“People commented a lot on my weight… What kind of evil humans can comment on a 16-year-old child is beyond me now. But as that 16-year-old child, it got very bad for a while,” Alaina recalled. “I suffered with such a severe eating disorder in those years where nothing was connecting. It wasn’t only because [I needed] to work hard, I lost who I was completely. Everything - my light... it was dimmed quite a bit because of the TV aspect.”
Elsewhere in their conversation, she shared that going to therapy helped and she was "happy and healthy" in her life.
Alaina revealed she was pregnant to PEOPLE after teasing her pregnancy in her "These Kind of Women" music video, which premiered on Wednesday, Jan. 22.
"[I didn't know] I can love something that I haven't even really held yet. I feel the baby inside me, and it's kicking me and doing all of the things. It's like I was the Grinch or something, and my heart grew," she says.
The couple didn't plan on trying for a baby until the end of 2025 — but Mother Nature had other plans.
"Now I'm scared because I don't feel like I passed any sort of test. They don't make you take a test on being a mom. It's crazy. People are like, 'What's your plan with the birth? And what's your plan here?" And I'm like, listen, 'God's plan. It wasn't my plan,'" she says, adding that she's been asking her own mom and friends with kids for advice.
Still, as they await the baby's arrival, the news has been a source of joy for the family after Alaina's father died in July.
"I do think that my dad passed away and got a stair up in heaven and was like, 'Hey, we got to work something out down there to send the family something good.' And it has been such an unexpected blessing," she says. "We obviously still talk about and are dealing with the grief of my dad, but this baby has healed a lot of that for us ... like it's a little piece of my dad that will live on."
Read the original article on People
