I was originally planning to write this post over at Team Zoll, but decided to post here because well – let’s be honest: more of you are reading The Infertility Voice than my Team Zoll blog 😉 (And that’s totally cool!) And I’m in a bit of a very insecure place and could use the larger network of support here.
That said, this post talks about a very specific concern about my pregnancy so if you’re not feelin’ it right now, feel free to move on. It’s all good. I’ll have a nifty totally infertility-related post tomorrow that I can’t wait to share with you!
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I don’t know why I remember my weight from senior year of high school with such crystal clarity over a decade later, but I do: 118. When I was in elementary school, I was so skinny I *literally* looked like one of those starving Somalian children you saw on TV, distended belly and everything. I was a picky eater and we learned eventually I had severe anemia. I was on medication for years and finally filled out to normal child size.
Puberty hit and I got all the right padding and curves just where they should be. By eighth grade, I had pretty much stopped growing any taller, so any growth from there on out was simply “wider.” I was active in high school, constantly performing on stage. I was never an athlete by any stretch, but four-hour long rehearsals of dance routines and whatnot burn up the calories pretty fast. And I was still a picky eater.
By the time I had graduated college, I was pretty shocked at how much I had ballooned up: I weighed 140 lbs. My once rather angular face had become quite round, and the “bat wings” dangling from my upper arms refused to budge, no matter how much time I spent at the gym. And the weight just kept coming. The weekend of my final wedding dress fitting, I weighed 185 lbs. That was only 4 years later.
Turns out that mismanaged Hashimoto’s thyroid disease was largely to blame, plus a familial history of obesity. All the girls on my mom’s side of the family have the “Carter hips and ass.” I dieted, I lost a little, I gained a lot back. For a while I just kind of rolled with it. I ended up gaining another 10 pounds in 2011 and spent the latter half of 2012 losing it so that come transfer day, I was back to my wedding weight.
And then, it was like some kind of pregnancy/metabolic switch.
In the first 14 weeks of pregnancy, I lost another 10 pounds. A lot of it was due to the relentless nausea. I was never hungry, just sick to my stomach 24/7. I ate like a bird and clung to certain foods that I knew wouldn’t turn my stomach: dairy, LIFE cereal, orange juice, apples. I panicked that the Knish wasn’t getting enough food or nutrients. My OB said not to worry.
And little by slowly – very slowly – the pounds have come back over the last 10 weeks. I’ve managed to gain 9 of those 10 lost pounds back. But now at week 24 (I’m six months as of this past Monday!), I’m starting to worry again.
I haven’t been out much; my social calendar has been limited for a lot of reasons, and so every time I see friends, they always compliment me on how great I look. And then when they ask how far along I am, and I say “six months” – I watch their eyes flitter down to my belly then back up to me. “You don’t look it at all!” or “Aw, what a tiny little bump!”
Meanwhile, thinking back to other friends I’ve seen at six months I realize that yeah… I do kind of look small in comparison.
“You might be one of the lucky ones,” my OB said to me early in the second trimester. “Since you started overweight, I wouldn’t want you to gain more than 20 pounds. But once the baby’s born, you just might be one of those women who actually end up in the negative when it comes to weight gain.”
The very, very selfish part of me thinks, “AWESOME” which is then quickly drowned out by the Worrisome Mom in me that goes, “Your baby is too small! You need to eat and gain more weight!”
It’s a very strange place to be in when you look at the scale each week and see that your weight has only ticked up two to three-tenths of a pound… and you’re disappointed. Especially when for most of my adult life, I’ve been trying to lose weight.
On the one hand, I feel vain. I look at my belly and my flabby abs with zero toning, and I’ve got a little bit of this droopy bump thing going on. It’s definitely there, and it’s definitely getting bigger – I just feel like it’s got a case of Droopy Dog going on rather than Fit Pregnancy cover model perfectly shaped roundness. There are some days, standing in front of our full length mirror, that I can really see just how much my body IS changing and it gets me down. I suck in, I puff out, I try and lift my belly with my hands to change it’s shape.
