Eating disorders, postnatal depression and miscarriage: Candid Abby Coleman reveals how she conquered her demons
“This was my worst nightmare.’’ B105 presenter Abby Coleman is turning 40 and never thought her life would turn out this way. She opens up about the battles she has faced along the way.
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Abby Coleman’s worst nightmare from her youth went something like this: get married, have kids, own a four-wheel drive.
The Brisbane radio personality, who celebrates her 40th birthday this week, has now been married for 10 years, has three young sons and drives a Toyota Prado 4WD.
Sometimes dreams don’t work out how you think.
Sometimes, they are better.
Coleman is also celebrating 10 years on air as a B105 breakfast presenter, with co-hosts Stav Davidson and Matt Acton (who joined the team in 2017).
Coleman is a self-confessed “open book with everything” who has shared some of her most personal heartbreaks and stories on air with listeners.
She says she talks to the microphone as she would talk to a friend on the phone.
Her personal experiences also leave her with “no judgment of anyone”.
She has shared past troubles of struggling with an eating disorder, drinking too much alcohol and suffering numerous miscarriages.
The morning program has been a sharing kind of medium for Davidson too – in 2017 he revealed his year-long addiction to methamphetamine in the year before he started on radio.
The breakfast trio have done well in the latest radio ratings survey by market research company GfK, with B105 coming out on top in the hotly contested FM breakfast slot and moving from fifth to second in breakfast radio overall, behind 4KQ’s breakfast team of Mark Hine, Laurel Edwards and Gary Clare.
Coleman has grown into her style, overcoming a lack of confidence to push past a persona of “girl about town” thrust on her by previous radio bosses.
“When I first started working in radio, I was told, ‘You’re a girl about town’ and they tried to paint me as this person. I don’t know if I was confident enough to be entirely who I was,” she says.
“I remember telling a PR person that eating disorders was a topic I was really passionate about. The response was that it wasn’t a really attractive thing to share, so we might not put that on the radio.
“I remember thinking, ‘What? I’m not a girl about town. I like V8s and I love my footy. That’s who I am’.
“It wasn’t that I was pretending to be something else but I just omitted so much from my life because it wasn’t attractive or something that I was supposed to talk about.
“Now, I enjoy radio so much more because we just don’t have those conditions put on us.”
Coleman thinks she is probably “an oversharer” but says she simply loves hearing other people’s stories and, in turn, being open and honest with how she’s feeling.
“I honestly get teary – and maybe that’s because I haven’t slept properly because my two year old is not sleeping – getting calls or messages from listeners telling me, ‘I have this’ and also sharing their own stories.
“It’s a one-way conversation but, for me, I always feel like it is two-way. People see through it when there is so much bullshit. We don’t have that anymore and we create a show that we really like and where we can be truthful.”
Coleman was born in Adelaide, the youngest of three siblings, with older brothers Ben, 45, an electrician in Adelaide, and Brad, 42, a pharmacist in Darwin.
Their father Peter, 72, worked as a banker, while mum Bev, 70, worked nights at a hotel to pay for the children’s extra-curricular activities.
Coleman begged her parents for ballet lessons which she began at age four and continued “every single day” until she was 16.
She also fantasised about becoming an actor (“a professional pretender seemed like a dream”).
She attended Mercedes College high school and had to “work so bloody hard” because of her dyslexia. She says: “I was one of those ADD kids at school and so dyslexic.
“Nothing ever came easily. But I believed if you worked hard, you’d have the results.’’
Coleman had her sights set on a drama course at Flinders University but wasn’t accepted.
She says she wasn’t bad at acting but was “hands down the worst at auditions”.
This period began what she describes as “a slow level of crumbling” and for about 10 years from age 16 to 26, Coleman says she suffered with an eating disorder, anxiety and depression. She spent time in a specialist clinic at age 19 when she was in a destructive cycle of restrictive eating and vomiting, as well as taking amphetamines.
She sought help from The Butterfly Foundation, a national charity for people impacted by eating disorders and body image issues.
“I don’t think I really had a normal relationship with eating from a young child and doing ballet,” she says.
“To look back now and think that I thought my life was over when I was 16 and 17 is kind of humorous but at that point I was so highly strung about what I wanted to do and how I wasn’t achieving it … I felt I had the world on my shoulders.
“I put all this pressure on myself to achieve. I was in such a hurry to do it all and there were so many things to do.
“I couldn’t even go out to dinner with friends because it would be a nightmare consuming food in a public place.”
In 2000, Coleman was runner-up on the Channel 7 reality show The Mole.
This led to Austereo asking her to be a “Black Thunder pilot” and on-air gossip girl. She was also writing and presenting for ABC TV’s national children’s show Couch Potato.
She later completed three years of study at the Actors Centre Australia in Sydney and went on to act in several plays, short films and commercials.
In 2007, she moved back to Adelaide to complete a university marketing degree and ended up staying when she met her husband-to-be Scott Burdon – the yin to her yang – at her brother’s 30th birthday party.
She credits Burdon, 43, a carpenter/builder, with helping in her recovery.
“I met Scott when I was 26 and on our first proper date I told him I’d had some problems with eating disorders and he said, ‘We’re not going to do that any more’.
“I don’t like saying this because I think people can find themselves on their own but it is not lost on me that my life started to fall into place when I met him.
“We are completely yin and yang but I love him for it. He is the most chilled, laid-back person you could possibly imagine and he married me. I will plan our whole week; he doesn’t know what he’s doing the next day.
“I’ve never heard him say a bad thing about anyone, ever. Someone could give us rude service at a cafe and I’ll go, ‘What is wrong with that person? And he’ll go, ‘What do you mean?’”
Coleman and Burdon married in 2010 and now have three sons – Finlay, 9, Jagger, 6, and Koa, 2.
Coleman is now happily a “soccer mum” driving her 4WD to training and games around the suburbs, despite her younger pledge.
“For anyone going through problems, you lose hope and that desire to make awesome plans for the future,” she says.
“When I was really deep in eating disorders and abusing substances, I didn’t even imagine the next year. I really lost hope and didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.
“I was always: ‘I’m never having kids, I’m never getting married, I’m never going to drive a 4WD, I’m never going to be old and boring’.
“Now, such a big focus for me is my beautiful boys. I never thought I would be a soccer mum driving around to different sports every night and I never thought I would be so happy doing it.
“When I was younger that would have been my worst nightmare. It would have been, ‘What are you achieving? Is that all you’re doing?’
“The only sadness I have now is for those lost years worrying about stuff, that I didn’t live my full life then, that I didn’t live with happiness or joy. The only time I really went out was abusing drugs or abusing alcohol. It didn’t really feel like I was living my life like I wanted to.”
Coleman loves being a mother and loves her sons to bits. Perhaps she loves them just that bit more because having her children has not been easy.
She believes she suffered postnatal depression after the birth of Finlay as she was finding her feet as a new working mother.
She had trouble settling him and he was later diagnosed with a dairy allergy.
“I didn‘t want to break down and say I’m not coping. I had my dream job and my husband and a beautiful boy but if I look back now I would say I had postnatal depression,” she says.
“It was not diagnosed. Now we are really close but I had a difficult time bonding with him. I had this overwhelming desire to protect him but I wouldn’t say it was an overwhelming consuming love.
“I couldn’t settle him, nothing we did would settle him. It was really hard. I used to put him down in the cot and walk away and just bawl.”
Then came the traumatic heartbreak of numerous miscarriages – too many to even know the proper number.
After happily having their first child, Finlay, the 13-week scan on Coleman’s second pregnancy revealed no heart beat.
Having never contemplated any problems and not knowing anyone who had gone through a miscarriage, the loss of the pregnancy “really destroyed me”.
Coleman says she blamed herself for stressing too much or drinking coffee or lack of sleep from getting up to go to work so early.
Happily, their second son Jagger was born and Coleman and Burdon began trying for a third baby when he was one.
But it was a difficult road and for two years they suffered numerous losses.
“We had a lot of miscarriages after Jagger,” Coleman says.
“When you get that positive test, the dream always happens. I download the app and fill the dates in and you see all the milestones.
“I never really put a number on it (how many miscarriages). I would always get pregnant straight away but never keep it.”
The heartache led to Coleman falling into the habit of drinking a bottle of wine a night to cope with the stress.
But uncomfortable with her level of drinking, she sought help and now will only drink alcohol with Burdon or friends, never by herself.
In her bid to have a successful third pregnancy, Coleman turned to a controversial Chinese medicine program with “a guy who has since been delisted” of fasting, acupuncture and massage.
“If you had told me to drink cat’s urine, go naked in a rainforest and jump upside down, I would have done it to get pregnant,” she says.
Baby Koa – whose impending arrival was announced on air when she was well advanced in her pregnancy – was born in November 2018.
And Coleman hasn’t closed the door on the possibility of another child.
“I feel very conscious that I’m getting older – i.e. 40 – and I wouldn’t want to push it,” she says.
“But if my husband would have another one, then I totally would. I love kids. I never thought I would love kids as much.
“I might be pushing my blessings. I’m not sure. But never say never.
“I’ve been wearing baggy clothes because Scott and I just had fun during COVID – making cocktails together and eating. I went back to work and I looked like I was pregnant. I swear people have been waiting for me to make an announcement.”
Turning 40 deserves some special attention.
And Coleman did have some grand plans – before COVID – with her girlfriends to celebrate their 40s with a Sex and the City-style holiday in New York.
Their plans, of course, will have to wait and Coleman is happy enough to now plan for a “massive 45th”.
“It’s not just turning 40, it’s also 10 years working at this station, that’s a big thing for me. I always thought I’d be fired after a couple of years,” she says.
In what she admits may be her midlife crisis, she has started an online interior design course (but has realised designers don’t buy their furniture from Kmart).
Coleman is also a marriage celebrant (“I get so obsessed with love”) mainly for her friends and family, and officiated a dozen ceremonies last year.
She has found peace with her eating disorder struggles and now believes she is at her most content.
Her focus has turned away from her appearance and she says her decision to shave off her hair in 2019, in support of the Leukaemia Foundation, was “liberating”. (She also raised $75,000).
“I was way too much into looks when I was younger,” she says.
“Since having my last baby, I would say I’m the biggest I’ve ever been but also the most content. I’ve still gone to the gym but I don’t really engage in conversation about losing weight. I’ve got clothes I can’t fit into.
“One day I’m going to get my boobs done – I want to get a breast reduction. Scott says I’m kicking God in the teeth, he doesn’t agree.
“I don’t feel any pressure to do anything else but I think do whatever makes you happy.”
Last year, Coleman shared her eating disorder experiences in a podcast with eating disorder recovery coach Millie Thomas.
Thomas was a friend of Jaimi Lee Kenny – the daughter of sporting champions Lisa Curry and Grant Kenny – who tragically passed away in September last year.
After the podcast, Coleman received a message from a close family member of Kenny, thanking her for being honest about her struggles.
Coleman is also proud to be an ambassador for Small Steps for Hannah, a charity set up after the horrific domestic violence murder of Hannah Clarke and her three young children in Camp Hill, in Brisbane’s east, in February last year.
Coleman lives at nearby Carina Heights and remembers seeing Clarke at the local IGA.
As the mother of three sons, she is conscious of raising good men.
“I get so concerned that there are damaged boys who grow up to be men who are never taught to be loved and to love correctly,’’ she says.
“It’s more important to me than ever. We’ve gone past the stage where it’s not just about helping women get out of a domestic violence situation, it’s making sure it doesn’t happen in the first place.
“And the Me Too movement has done so much good but it has also confused so many people. It is not a girl movement … we need to start conversations where men chat to their mums, sisters and wives and hear them out about things that have happened to them.”
Coleman says raising her sons as “gentlemen” means the world to her, ensuring they are proud and respectful.
And, learning from her own experience, she doesn’t want them to feel too much pressure to achieve.
“I’ve learnt it’s not a race to achieve goals by a certain time,” she says. “I just want my sons to do what makes them happy.”
The Butterfly Foundation National Helpline: 1800 33 4673
Lifeline: 13 11 14
Kids Helpline: 1800 55 1800
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