Whitney Port Wants To Help Women Get Real About Motherhood

The former Hills star, who gave birth to her first child, Sonny, in July 2017, knows exactly how overwhelming it can be to embark on the life-changing journey of becoming a mother, and she wants to make things a little easier for other moms like her. That’s why she’s launching her very own line of products for pregnant women and new moms, complete with various foods and drinks geared towards the various stages of motherhood.

Port’s line, called Bundle Organics, is set to hit shelves at Buy Buy BABY this month, and includes bars, bites, smoothies, and fizzy drinks that aim to support fertility, pregnancy, and breastfeeding efforts. With so many options out there (and so much contradicting advice), it can be tough for soon-to-be and new moms to know exactly what to buy. “Google can be our best friend and sometimes it can be our enemy,” Port tells Refinery29, adding that Bundle strives to “be a supportive, educational, best friend to women who need that help.”

Bundle Organics is broken into three stages: fertility, pregnancy, and nursing. Within each stage are products that contain ingredients designed to address the changing needs of new and expecting mothers. For the fertility stage, Port worked with a nutritionist in order to identify and select ingredients that contain folic acid, vitamin E, D, zinc, selenium, essential fatty acids, and antioxidants, in order to aid in improving hormone balance and protect against inflammation. Likewise, the pregnancy and nursing products contain specific ingredients designed to support women in those stages of the journey. (None of the claims have been evaluated by the FDA at this time.)

Port’s business venture is in line with her overall mom persona: being as open and honest with her fans and other women as possible. The 33-year-old even has her own YouTube series titled I Love My Baby, But…, where she talks about all the things she felt no one told her about.

Refinery29 had a chance to catch up with Port to learn more about her new line, her journey through motherhood, and the lowdown on the upcoming Hills reboot (spoiler alert: she’s pretty much sworn to secrecy there — but the tiny bit she did share made us even more excited than before).

Bundle Organics originally started as a pasteurized juice and tea company for pregnant and nursing women...unfortunately when you're pregnant, you can't drink unpasteurized juices. Then we started to realize that women who were pregnant and nursing were really yearning for more nutritional products, because it’s a questionable time. People don't know exactly what to put in their bodies, what's safe, what's good for them. So we decided to create products in order to guide the woman throughout her pregnancy and nursing, and give her what she needs at the specific period that she's at.

Definitely. In the fertility section, the raspberry white chocolate bites are to die for. Then we have an amazing smoothie drink mix that is supposed to help with nausea, and we have a lemon ginger flavor that's really tasty. For the smoothie powder, the chocolate milk is my favorite. It's a really good booster to the smoothies that we're all making all the time.

We looked at each specific stage, and our nutritionist gave us a list of all the best things for that time in a woman’s life. We then started to craft the flavors based on that. I also have really sensitive taste buds, so I was the official taste-tester for everything. Having been pregnant, I knew what [might] make someone nauseous, and what someone [might be] craving at a specific point. There was a lot of taste-testing and experimenting.

It’s been a huge look in the mirror. It highlights all of your best and all of your worst qualities. The first year was really, really challenging for me. There were extreme moments of highs and wonders and amazingness. But there were a lot of really, low lows which I didn't know I was capable of having. It's something that completely puts your life upside down, and it really tests your resilience. It tests how much you can get done [with] no sleep. And it really shows what your priorities are. It makes everything a lot clearer, and puts a lot of things into perspective. I don't sweat the small stuff as much as I used to because, one, there's no time, and two, it's just not as important as keeping a baby happy and healthy, and alive. I feel like I've grown more in the past year than in any other phase in my life.

The best thing that someone told me is that everything is just a phase. When you're really down about something, know that there’s soon going to be a light at the end of the tunnel. Whenever that happens for me, if Sonny goes through a two-week period of time where he's waking up at 4:00 and 5:00 every morning, I'll say to myself, ‘Whitney, this isn't going to be forever. Soon this is gonna come to an end.’ And it does. Then he wakes up at 6:30, 7:00 for the next two weeks and it’s like, okay, this is a phase now. I'm gonna live in this moment, and be present in this moment and not worry what the next phase is going to be.

I would say: Crazy and exciting.