The Day I Was Excited To Have Gained Weight

[contents: fat-hate, weight loss/gain, medical, disordered eating]

You know, and I write that headline as if any other time I gain weight, it's a fucking tragedy, which is just not the case. Interesting to see how much that dominant narrative still sticks with me, though. For the most part with my body, my weight fluctuates and does its thing and that's fine, and I only notice based on how my clothes fit. I was pretty upset the time I gained 50 pounds in under a year, but not so much because of the weight as the fact that my doctor at the time didn't take it seriously. Still, it's unusual for me to have strong feelings about weight changes, so this day kind of stood out, partly for that reason.

ANYWAY. I've mentioned before that I lost quite a bit of weight early in my pregnancy. By "quite a bit", I mean "about 20 pounds in 3 months" a bit. There were a couple of weeks when I lost 3+ pounds, just that week.

Part of it I'm sure is just because I could not eat much my first trimester. I had really bad, constant nausea until not that long ago, so food sounded pretty much terrible all the time. Usually I could get one meal a day in, because my body would finally need food badly enough that I was capable of coming up with one thing that didn't make me want to vomit just thinking about it. This was McDonald's or KFC more often than I can count. I went through a stage where all that tasted good was chicken mcnuggets, fries, and a strawberry banana smoothie. I also went through a stage where all that tasted good was boneless chicken tenders, potato wedges, and biscuits. (Mostly, the theme has been CHICKEN AND POTATOES, PLEASE.)

Clementines have also consistently been delicious for me, so I have had a bag or box of them in the fridge nearly since day 1. I eat two to four of them a day. But clementines and some nuggets are not in fact sufficient calorie intake for the day, even when I'm not pregnant.

Another part of it I'm sure is just genetics. I've been talking to my mom a lot since I got pregnant, and she mentioned that she lost weight in her first trimester with all of her pregnancies. So while apparently my pregnancy has strangely seemed a lot more like my mother-in-law's than my mother's, this probably played a role. Plus, it's common for pregnant fat folk to lose weight anyway in the first trimester. (Well-Rounded Mama talks about that a bit here.)

The biggest factor for me, though, I think, is that I've been losing weight steadily since July, when I finally got appropriate treatment for my hypothyroidism, probably Hashimoto's disease. (I have the antibodies indicative of Hashi's, and it certainly matches my symptoms for the past TWENTY YEARS, I just haven't had the "gold standard" diagnostic done yet.) Turns out when I started taking iron supplements for the severe, nearly "wait how are you ALIVE" iron deficiency I had, I started losing weight. It accelerated when I started taking Vitamin D and B12 (turns out I was pretty "wait how are you ALIVE" deficient in those too). I did not change what I ate, I did not start exercising more (or at all). But suddenly I could fit in to jeans I had last worn just before I got married.

Tell me some more about your "calories in, calories out" theory.

So finally I was at an appointment around 15 weeks, got weighed, and FINALLY, I had gained two pounds. Watching my weight drop and drop through each earlier appointment, I had started to get worried. Part of it was just being up in my feels about changes to my body that were clearly not deliberate or under my control. Part of it really was "okay, at what point do we start worrying here?" Because I was pretty sure that if I'd lost weight again by that point, we would have reached WORRY.

When I saw the midwife, I mentioned that I was in fact really excited to have gained two pounds, FINALLY. Welllllll, she tried to quash that right quick. "You should only gain 10 pounds in your pregnancy." And the look on her face... you could tell that she was really displeased that I was excited. It was definitely "YOU'RE FAT ENOUGH, FATTIE."

I gave her a Look of my own while she blathered on. In order for ANYONE to only gain 10 pounds in pregnancy, they would have to either have a very, VERY small baby, or lose weight through their entire pregnancy. 10+ pound babies run in my family, and bigger people just tend to have bigger babies, so I'd have to continue losing a LOT of weight. Also in pregnancy, the placenta is another couple pounds, amniotic fluid is another couple pounds, your boobs gain a couple of pounds, your body stores some extra fat to prepare for childbirth and nursing, your uterus literally grows, you literally MAKE MORE BLOOD... there's a lot of things that are added to one's body during pregnancy. Even the IOM recommends "11-20" pounds of gain for "all obese [people]" during pregnancy. (warning: there is a LOT of BMI and fat hate and gender essentialist bullshit in that report.)

Plus, this idea of "only gain 10 pounds in pregnancy" is still based in the same "calories in, calories out", "if you just diet and exercise, you can be THIN HEALTHY", as if the functions of our body are completely within our control and if we would just use some WILLPOWER already, all of us fatties could stop being such a blight on society and an offense to people's tastes. There's a lot of research that thoroughly debunks that idea - Fat Nutritionist just posted another article about some of it here - and that idea directly contradicts the lived experience of me and most people I know, yet it persists. The fact that we already know that diets don't work, and weight doesn't usually stay off long-term, is one of the many reasons I know that the "diet and exercise" thing isn't about my health, it's about other people's aesthetics.

I also note that not once did she bring up the idea of disordered eating with me. (In fact, no medical professional ever has, even when I've disclosed that there have been times when I've gone four or five days without eating, and not because I was ill or couldn't keep food down - it was because I deliberately did not eat.) Any time someone loses twenty pounds in three months, that's an instance where you go "hey, let's figure out why, that's a big change." Moreover, eating disorders are incredibly common and incredibly dangerous. That shit can kill you. That shit can end a pregnancy real quick. And a lot of diets are pretty disordered eating. But no mention of it. In fact, she gave me recommendations for foods to avoid - which, if I were as bad off as I've been in the past, would quite easily lead to my going further down the "nope not eating" path.

This post is also long enough without getting in to the dangers of restricting weight gain in pregnancy - or inducing weight loss - but I really recommend you check out Well-Rounded Mama for some thorough write-ups of the problem. In short, restricting weight gain is associated with way worse outcomes than "excessive" weight gain, and what a bullshit term "excessive" is.

So I will not be seeing THAT particular midwife again, thanks for telling me I have to do something that most likely will be dangerous for me and The Kid. And I'm still gaining weight, I think - suddenly my loose jeans aren't as loose anymore HOORAY. So I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, which is try to eat on the regular, make sure to drink enough water and juice and milk etc., try to take more walks and shit but whatever if I don't I don't (especially given some of the pain I'm already in), and my weight (and The Kid's weight) are going to be what they're going to be.

Mostly I'm just glad that it seems like the extreme weight loss has plateaued. That shit was getting scary.