‘Take it day by day’: Influencer Leah Itsines reveals baby health scare

A Queensland influencer has opened up about the moment her joy following the birth of her first child quickly descended into three weeks of terror.

Leah Itsines. Picture: Nigel Hallett

They say becoming a mum cracks you open in ways you didn’t know it could, but that it rebirths you just the same, and Leah Itsines is one mum who has felt that to the furthest extent.

She might be best known as the entrepreneurial sister of fitness powerhouse Kayla Itsines, but there’s more to her than most realise, from her impressive career as a cookbook author and founder of supplement start up Yes Please Health to her deep love of motherhood.

Sitting at the kitchen table in her gorgeous rented Gold Coast home, sipping on a bubble tea and calming the chaos of her two pups Reggie and Wally, the 30-year-old coyly reveals she and husband Mitch Caon are expecting their second baby, but their journey to get there was not easy, with Leah open about her emotional struggle with quite significant birth trauma.

Leah, Mitch and Gigi.

On March 7, 2022, the couple’s lives changed forever when their daughter Gigi entered the world, via emergency caesarean section, bringing them more joy than they thought possible.

But within moments, that joy was overshadowed by fear, as Leah noticed Gigi making strange gurgling noises just after her first feed, prompting the new mum, still unable to move following the C-section, hitting the emergency call button.

What followed was three weeks of terror for the couple as Gigi was admitted into the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, placed on oxygen and eventually diagnosed with severe reflux, and some significant breathing concerns.

“My memory of it is very vague … I was like, losing my mind,” Leah says.

“I felt like I just wanted to rip her off those machines and take her home … I wasn’t ready for that.

“As a young, new mum I just honestly thought you just take your baby home and it’s fine, but instead I was like ‘why are we choking?’ ‘what is happening?’, I just didn’t understand how to fix it.”

Leah had been prepared for the long nights and lack of sleep, but she hadn’t been prepared for the feeling of helplessness that came with not being able to help her baby.

She says that with the reflux, Gigi would cry and cry and nothing she did would soothe her.

So it is unsurprising that for quite some time, the idea of having another baby was Leah’s “biggest fear”.

Leah Itsines. Picture: Nigel Hallett

“I think my biggest fear was will I be scared again to have another baby … I was talking in therapy about it and I would say really stupid things like ‘I’m just really scared I’ll be a bad mum again’ and she (the therapist) was like ‘why are you scared of doing what you ‘did’ to Gigi, when Gigi is great, how is that correlating?’ and it was so nice to just be able to get that off my chest.”

After unpacking her fears, the couple made the decision to start trying for a baby, and while she thought she would “freak out” at seeing a positive pregnancy test, instead felt calm and in control, doing everything she can to change her mindset and take control of her birth experience.

But, just months into the pregnancy, and before she had announced it to the world, Leah had a genetic carrier screening test that revealed that she was a carrier for cystic fibrosis, something she didn’t know.

After five weeks of anxiously awaiting test results to find out if Mitch was also a carrier, they were relieved to find out they were clear, and Leah says she was proud of how well she coped with that wait.

“If I had been told that news with Gigi, I would’ve been sent into a panic … but this time around we agreed not to turn to Dr Google and just take it day by day.

“I feel like my therapy has really helped … I did feel in my mum soul that it was going to be okay, but I didn’t let myself go down the rabbit hole!

Leah, Mitch and Gigi.

“I feel so at ease, and its been really nice to have that excitement instead of fear. I can’t WAIT to meet him.”

Now, well into her second trimester, Leah has battled the pregnancy exhaustion and fog, and is out the other side, in good time too, as she embarks on some incredible new projects.

In those harrowing early days of motherhood, there were few things that would calm Gigi, with one of the them being a story that Leah would make up on the fly each night.

That story, which follows the escapades of a bear in a zoo on the search for a monkey to return a banana, has just been signed for publication by Booktopia.

“It’s nice to be able to say where that story comes from … and to tell mums that it’s (motherhood) actually not great all the time,” she says.

Leah Itsines and Mitch Caon on their wedding day. Picture: Instagram

“Some people have babies who sleep through after a week … but there might be a mum sitting there wondering why her baby isn’t like that and to reassure her that yeah, its totally normal.

“Its nice to be able to open up that conversation.”

The already successful cookbook author has also revealed she has another cookbook in the works, set to release late next year.

Meanwhile, her other business, supplement brand Yes Please Health, which relocated from South Australia to Burleigh in Queensland along with its founder, is about to start over from scratch, rebranding, relaunching and bringing some “incredible people” on board.

“I know how crazy it’ll seem to people,
but once we launch, we will just have so much more opportunity to reach more people, be anywhere and everywhere and truly help people,” she says.

Leah Itsines with her sister Kayla. Picture: Instagram

The family (and their brand) made the shift away from their close-knit family in Adelaide to their new Gold Coast digs less than a year ago, to be closer to Leah’s sister and now they don’t think they’ll ever leave.

Classically Greek in every way, the Itsines’ family has always been by each other’s sides, with both Leah and Kayla growing up surrounded by extended family, never straying much further than a few blocks from their family home, right into adulthood.

But as both siblings moved across the country, their family bond remained as strong as ever with Leah joking that her mum calls her every other hour to chat, and that both her parents regularly come and stay.

“I laugh and say I’m due (with baby) in October, Mum will be here in August and she’ll leave in February, she’d totally do that.”

Originally published as ‘Take it day by day’: Influencer Leah Itsines reveals baby health scare