PANTS PANTS PANTS

[contents: some mildly NSFW pics]

Namely, what I am currently doing about mine.

I'm working on putting together a big post about what's commonly referred to as "maternity clothing", and what I'm referring to as pregnancy clothing or clothes, but in the mean time, shit, my pants don't fit. Since pants not fitting is often one of the first clothing-related side effects of pregnancy people experience, I figured I'd post what I'm doing about it.

I was actually in not-pregnant pants up until about 18 weeks, and comfortably. I could button them, they weren't super-tight, everything was cool. Then I'd have to unbutton them at the end of the day. Then it was more comfortable to go about with them unbuttoned, but I could still button and zip them if I had to. Then buttoning and zipping them was really tough. Now... yeah fuck it I'm not trying I give no shits anymore. They still fit my butt and thighs.

But since it's difficult to walk around just with one's pants unbuttoned all the time - not least because they will fall off your ass, and people kind of frown upon seeing one's knickers in public, here are two things I have been using:

• Hair ties. I haven't done this when I'm out and about, but when at home, I will take a ponytail holder/hair tie, loop it through the buttonhole of my jeans, then loop the other end over the button. That way I can leave the button undone and the zipper undone too, yet my pants stay up. You can also use a rubber band. If you need a bit more room, a bigger tie or band can give that to you. Here's what it looks like:





Upsides: Super inexpensive. You probably have what you need in your house already. Easy to expand, because you can use a bigger band or tie, or loop a couple together in a chain. If your shirt is long enough, this will be covered up.

Downsides: If your shirt rides up, everyone sees your knickers. This is less practical if you have to leave the house. It also requires some manual dexterity to do, so if you have e.g. arthritis or swollen fingers, this can be tougher.


• Bella Bands. Yeah, I know, these are super-hyped. And they're not inexpensive. I splurged and ordered two from Amazon. I was skeptical, and I'd read the occasional scathing review. And then I tried them, and oh my fucking gods, they actually work as advertised. I am still kind of in shock about this.
  
  What the Bella Band is is a tube of stretchy fabric that you wear around your waist/belly/hips that holds up your pants or skirt, smoothing out the bumps of the unbuttoned button, and also covering up any joys of a shirt that's now too short. The fabric is 84% nylon and 16% spandex, and the new versions have a bit of silicone around the bottom to hold it in place (If you've ever bought stay-up thigh-high stockings, it's the same stuff). They are machine washable and dryable. They look super small when you take them out of the package, and the fabric looks way too thin to accomplish what it's supposed to accomplish. I'm not really sure what witchcraft is involved that it's not.
  
  Sizing is from pant sizes 0-24, so not a huge plus-size range, unfortunately... but also better than a lot of other "neat product" makers, sadly. I also suspect that the 26-28 range might be able to get away with the largest size. They are very stretchy. I found their sizing chart accurate; I wear usually an 18 or 20 in pants, and have a narrow waist with wide hips, so I ordered a 3, which fits very nicely. You do have to go to the manufacturer's site to find the sizing chart. And yes, they are LONG. Again, I'm 6' tall, with a pretty long torso, and they cover my butt and come up to just under my bra.
  
  Getting it on can be interesting. I usually scrunch it up, then either step in to it, like a slip-on skirt, or work it over my head. It manages to be tight, without binding. Like, it definitely lays flat against my skin, and is tight enough to hold up my jeans generally, but I can easily fit my arm under there, pull it outwards, etc., and it's not compressing anything, like e.g. Spanx would.
  
  Here is what they look like on me, both "wear out of the house", and with my shirt off, so you can see how tall they are. Your model is 6' tall, around 285 pounds, and 20 weeks pregnant in these photos. Yes you can see my bra really clearly in one of them:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  You can also make Bella-Band-like bands yourself in custom sizes. Here is a great tutorial with pictures on how to do this with a regular sewing machine. Here is a tutorial for a no-sew version (although it relies on being able to buy a t-shirt or cami that would work). The only thing missing in the first tutorial is sizing information. But that's easy: measure around your hips. Subtract 2-3" from that measurement. This is how long to cut your fabric. As for height, measure from where you want the bottom to hit from where you want the top to hit on your body, then double that measurement (since this tutorial has you fold the fabric, making a double layer). Add 1" for seam allowance, and this is how tall to cut your fabric. You definitely want to get a knit with some lycra/Spandex in it. If you're not sure where to go for those, I recommend Fabric.com.
  
  Downsides: yeah, it can be a challenge to get on, moreso than just a shirt. Also, I've noticed that after a while, I do have to hike up my jeans, which usually involves flipping the bottom of the band up, pulling up my jeans, then putting the band back down. Then again, I have to hike up my jeans all the damn time even if they are buttoned, so this is less the fault of the Bella Band and more the fault of gravity. It also doesn't deal well if I have to squat down and get something - jeans come down, band often comes up, readjusting happens. Also, they cover up my pockets, as well as my belt loops, so I can't put shit in my pockets easily, nor can I clip my keys to my back belt loops as I am accustomed to doing. And again, they're expensive. I dropped $50 on just two of them.
  
  Upsides: oh holy shit I don't have to buy new paaaaaaants. And I do personally find them really comfortable. It's also been about 20F here, so you know, I'm not in 90F with 90% humidity, which I suspect might change my viewpoint a bit.
  

If you have more tips on dealing with pants while pregnant, OMG, please share.

Things Happening To My Pregnant Ass This Week: Week 20

[contents: TMI]

HOW  IT ALREADY WEEK 20 HOW AM I HALFWAY THROUGH THIS ALREADY OH MY GODS

The Kid has discovered that kicking my bladder and cervix while I am laying in bed at night is possibly the BEST ENTERTAINMENT EVER. For The Kid, anyway. I am far less entertained. Because it means I have to get up every twenty freaking minutes to go pee. Awesome.

The Kid kicks and moves pretty frequently, actually.

My belly is way less squishy, just sort of all around. I have, for lack of a better term, a divided belly. There's a deep crease right at my waist, that sort of separates the belly fat into the upper and lower portions. The lower portion has been significantly less squishy for a while now, but suddenly this week the upper portion is less squishy. The fundus of my uterus is just barely above my belly button, so it's not that my uterus is under there. I think it's just that everything is starting to get noticeably compacted now as my uterus grows, so there's less room to squish things. It's weird.

Also super weird is yesterday both The Man and I noticed that my skin is... splotchy. Kind of all over. I'm usually super pale, and while the circles under my eyes got ridiculously dark pretty early on, the rest of me stayed pretty pale and even-toned. And now I have splotchy, slightly darker patches all over my skin. The Man noticed it on my hip. I noticed it on my boobs. It's tough to see in a picture, because the splotches aren't that much darker. But in person, if you look close enough, they're there. Hooray pregnancy hormones!

I also walk differently. I walk... heavier, is how I'd put it. More flat-footed, more stompy. I'm usually pretty light on my feet, just naturally and from dancing for so long. I mean, you'd hear the creaks of the floor as I walked down the hall, but not my individual foot falls. Now, you can definitely hear my feet hitting the floor. My weight is just in a different place, and my pelvis has definitely changed shape, and it's weird. I also have to be careful how long I'm on my feet. It's more difficult to keep the very good posture my back needs, and if I'm up too long, I get tired and slouch more and then my leg starts going numb. I'd be worried about it, except a, it's happened before, and b, it immediately stops if I sit or lay down.

My skin is also RIDICULOUSLY DRY. Oh my fucking god. The weekend before Thanksgiving it was very cold, and extremely dry, and suddenly I had patches of scaly skin in the vees between all of my fingers. I thought I'd spilled something while cooking and hadn't noticed it, and it had dried, but NOPE THAT'S MY SKIN. I had my OB take a look at it last week, and she concurs - it's just dry. Which I figured, since it's scaly, not itchy, not very red, not raised, etc. and so on. It's also responding well to copious amounts of lotion and body butter. It hasn't gone completely away, and I've kind of given up that it will, but it can be lessened. The matching scaly patch on my nose - just one side of my nose, mind you - has gone away. And then I saw flaky skin on my damn nipples the other day. *sigh* So basically I would like to bathe in a vat of moisturizer, please.

Finally, speaking of my boobs, they're heavy. I mean, I wear - well, wore - a 40I before I got pregnant anyway, so it's not like they weren't heavy beforehand. And they did grow a bit in the first few weeks. But all of a sudden they just feel heavy and more solid, in a way they didn't before.

What Is Actually Complicating My Pregnancy

[contents: medical, tmi, fat hate, scare-mongering]

Before I get any further: YES, THE KID (AND I) ARE BOTH FINE.

Okay!

It's a really popular position to assume that all fat folks who get pregnant have high-risk pregnancies, and the resulting babies have tons of problems, and it's just oh my god terrible and WHY WOULD YOU GET PREGNANT IF YOU'RE FAT DON'T YOU KNOW YOU AND YOUR BABY WILL DIE. See also: pretty much any mainstream article about obesity and pregnancy published in the last ten-plus years, or so many entries on My OB Said What?! (seriously, that site needs major trigger warnings).

Except that position is not actually based in reality.

I'm not saying that there are no risks associated with (note: ASSOCIATED WITH) being fat during pregnancy. Fat pregnant folks are at higher risk of gestational diabetes and preeclampsia. The fetuses of fat pregnant people are at higher risk of being born large for gestational age, of having neural tube defects, etc. etc. etc.

What even the American College of Gynecologists doesn't tell you is that while yes, obesity is associated with higher risks (that is, we have no idea about what causes any of these), including things like OH MY GOD A FOUR-TIMES GREATER RISK of things... the actual, numerical risk is not actually that high. Not that you can tell from the ACOG paper, or indeed, many reports, because they don't actually include the baseline risk numbers.

The thing is, when you multiply a very small risk by four, the risk is STILL SMALL. And all of these things? Occur in very small numbers of pregnancies. Are they scary and bad? Absolutely. But even if your risk is elevated for them, that is far, so far, from a guarantee you'll get them. Even if you are "morbidly obese", your risk of any of these complications is less than 10% - in some cases, WAY less than 10%. For example, the CDC says that your risk of gestational diabetes is between 2-10%. (They also say here that it's between 2-5%, and that "some - but not all [people] with gestational diabetes are overweight before getting pregnant". Not even the CDC is telling you the fat causes gestational diabetes, y'all.) Is your risk higher than in folks that aren't fat? In some cases, yeah. Is it ever YOU WILL DIE AND SO WILL YOUR BABY high, as it's often presented? Not. Even. Close. Fact is, the vast majority of fat pregnant folks have perfect fine, healthy pregnancies, and give birth to perfectly fine, healthy babies. But that doesn't sell diets and papers and ads and shit.

These also aren't the only complications of pregnancy though. (And I have my theories about why they're what we hear about... namely, WE CAN LINK THEM TO THE FAT OMG). Last week, I was referred to a maternal-fetal medicine specialist. Not because of my weight, thank fuck, because it really isn't complicating my pregnancy. I mentioned here that there was a finding at my midpoint ultrasound just before Thanksgiving that resulted in a referral. The finding wasn't about The Kid - The Kid looks fine, is measuring spot on for the due date, is extremely active, everything seems to be going well. The finding was that my cervix was a bit on the short side.

(Here is where I spent an hour trying to find how common a short cervix is in pregnancy, and found no good answers. Basically, judging by this study and a few others, at least 95% of all pregnant folks do NOT have a short cervix. It's actually pretty hard to find baseline risk information for any condition. So frustrating.)

Having a short cervix around this point in the pregnancy is associated with a higher risk of delivering early, and the shorter your cervix is, the higher the risk. I'm not in the highest risk category, but my cervix was short enough to up my risk, so I was referred to a specialist to be evaluated and see what, if any, treatment would be necessary. So I got a second ultrasound in a week, which again confirmed that The Kid looks just fine. The ultrasound was pretty entertaining. I'm pretty sure The Kid was napping when it started. Then after a minute or two of wand-on-belly, I started seeing hand-waving and kicking... and was kicked pretty constantly the rest of the day. Thank you for expressing your opinion, Kid. But the ultrasound also confirmed that yeah, my cervix is a little short.

No one is really sure why some cervixes are short. Theories include natural variation, inflammation, previous cervical trauma, and more. (Nobody links it to OMG THE FAT, SORRY HATERS.) There's also a difference between just a short cervix and what is called an incompetent cervix (and isn't that just a lovely health term). Some people will tell you that any cervix sufficiently short is incompetent, while others will say no, there has to be early dilation. Like many health topics, it can get somewhat confusing, but long story short, HAH, my cervix is just short, not incompetent.

I also mentioned earlier this week that I'd been all over Cochrane, checking to see what the actual risk was and what the treatment plans were. Cochrane kindly confirmed my assessment (higher than usual, but not panic time), and that of the two treatments (cervical cerclage, which is literally stitching the cervix closed, and progesterone supplementation), for people like me, who just have a short cervix, no signs of pre-term labor, and no history of pre-term delivery, progesterone is the way to go. It's associated with better outcomes all around, including reducing the rates of pre-term birth and neonatal complications. As I mentioned previously, the specialist I saw was on the same page as me - thank FUCK for doctors that read and understand research. And thank FUCK for doctors that love when their patients read the research. And a final, super-hearty thank FUCK for doctors who don't engage in fat shaming - my weight came up exactly ZERO times in this appointment, which is exactly how it should have been.

So I am now on supplemental progesterone. I go back in about a week for another special ultrasound to check my cervix, and so long as it hasn't gotten worse, then I get to go back in a month or so. Is it considered a complication? Yes (but technically, so is my well-controlled hypothyroidism ALSO NOT CAUSED BY FAT, THANKS HATERS). Is it a big one? No, and I'm thankful for it. I just have to take some additional meds and see another doctor once in a while, and that's okay for me.

A Brief Primer on Research

[contents: fat hate]

I wanted to write a little bit about how I find and evaluate research related to my health and health care.

Being able to find, understand, and evaluate research is a very useful skill, most especially when it comes to being a fat person in the doctor's office - or a pregnant person. (Or ANY person.) Yes, you should be able to go right in to the doctor's office and get appropriate, correct care. Aaaaaaand I and many other fat people have run in to the exact opposite. I also have problems with the public health campaigns about being informed patients, etc. and so on. Do I think it's amazing to be informed about your treatment? ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY. However, these campaigns put nearly all of the responsibility on the patient, and that's not where it belongs. Doctors need to step up their game (and yes, I realize they're as much a part of the system which incentivizes the exact opposite as anyone else... but that doesn't mean they're completely powerless. And yes, the system absolutely needs to change).

That being said, pretty much the only way that I've gotten appropriate treatment is doing my own research, and going in armed with it. But doing research on medical conditions, symptoms, treatments, can be really tough. Sure, the internet is great... and also filled with a lot of misinformation. Plus, getting access to the actual research journal articles is difficult and expensive for most people. I can get many of the actual articles... if I physically go to my alma mater's library. Then you have to evaluate whether the research was actually any good, then you run in to websites that purport to have information and it's rubbish... sorting through the utter flood of information can be tough.

But there's a couple of rules that can make it easier. Here's some of the ones I use:

Science reporting is shit.

If it is reported in a magazine, newspaper, whatever, it's shit. There are some blogs that actually do some good reporting - I link to some in the sidebar. But in general, science reporting in the media is terrible. Few if any reporters understand the difference between correlation and causation, few if any reporters are equipped with the skills to evaluate the quality of the research, and some of them will straight up report things that were not actually found in the study. Scientists are biased. So are journalists. Never doubt that they're selling you a narrative, not science.

I won't say "OH NEVER READ STORIES ABOUT NEW STUDIES", because shit, I do, and besides that, they're pretty unavoidable. But please, please, be super skeptical about them, and if you want to check them, go to the source - read at least the abstract of the study yourself to see what it actually says. Abstracts are usually available for free (and are the short summary of the research, usually about a paragraph long). Google Scholar can often help you find them. Another good place to check is PubMed.

For more information on how mainstream science reporting is usually crap, see this post on Well-Rounded Mama.

Most research does not - and CAN not - find the cause of something.

Following on from that first point, how many articles have you read about "OBESITY CAUSES X!", or similar? Probably a lot. The problem is, the vast, vast majority of research doesn't actually find causes. At best, it finds a correlation.

Doing research to determine the cause of something is actually quite complex. It's one of the things I learned to do in graduate school. It's not impossible, but it's also not often done. There are very strict conditions that have to exist in order to do it, and so many things you have to control for and account for and it's just really complicated. To get an idea of the complications, I link to Hills' criteria of causation in the sidebar. In order to prove causation, you have to meet those criteria. Most research doesn't. So any time you see "WE HAVE FOUND THE CAUSE OF X" in health research, be suuuuuper skeptical.

As for what research does usually find, it's a correlation - that is, "we find these two things occurring together pretty often, more often than we figure we would with random chance". You might also hear "is associated with" - that still means "correlation". The problem is, two things can be correlated, but that correlation tells you absolutely nothing about whether one causes the other - or if there's a third factor, unknown or unmeasured, that causes both. Shorthand that's popularly used for this concept is "CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION"; you might have seen that on Twitter. It's pretty key in research, and it gets forgotten a lot.

That's not to say that research that finds a correlation is useless - far from it. We can make some pretty good guesses based off of correlative research. But research that finds a correlation does not ever prove we have found the cause of something. So any time someone tells you "well X causes Y medical condition or biological effect", feel free to give them all of the side-eye.

Research, researchers, and publishers are biased - just like everyone.

A whole lot of research doesn't meet the criteria of good research design. Without taking extensive courses in research design, just keep this in the back of your head. There's also a fair amount of research that gets published that is straight up made up. Then there's the bias in publishing - a positive result, as in, "this thing we tried showed an effect", is way easier to publish than "we tried this thing and it didn't work". The latter does get published sometimes, but not as often.

There's also dominant narratives in research - it's why you don't hear about the numerous studies that show that weight loss really is difficult and doesn't last long term, and you DO hear about all of the studies that show that oh this new thing causes weight loss! The acceptable story right now, in medicine, research, reporting, is that OMG FAT IS BAD and WEIGHT LOSS IS GOOD, and things that are contrary to those notions don't get the press. It's also why you often see studies about obesity that say one thing in their results section (e.g. "no significant reduction in weight was found in the study population") and another in their conclusion ("this intervention is an effective weight loss treatment and should be recommended") I WISH I WERE MAKING THIS UP.

Then there's my next point...

Follow the money.

Conflict of interest is a real thing in science, and it's a big way that bias gets introduced. Check out who funds studies - chances are, if it's a study that trumpets weight loss, or a weight loss program that works, it was funded by the person or company who invented said program, or who benefits financially from weight loss. Similarly, studies that find that sports drinks are effective are almost always funded by companies that make sports drinks. Isn't it funny how that works out?

Well, no, it's not funny, because it's bullshit, and it leads to a lot of really crap research. And it's also not to say that, say, federally funded research isn't biased. But it's more likely to be more biased if the funder benefits financially from it.

Check Cochrane.

The Cochrane Collaborative is an independent, international organization dedicated to cataloguing and evaluating health-related research. They are highly respected, and very reliable. I won't say they're completely unbiased, because no one and nothing is, but they work really hard to NOT be.

You can probably find what they call a "Cochrane Review" on just about any health topic. What they do is they comb the lists of all research trials related to a topic, evaluate the quality of the trials, then combine them all to come up with what they are all in general saying. They provide this in multiple languages, and also do a "plain-language" summary. For free.

For an example, here is their review regarding weight loss in pregnancy for obese women. WELP SORRY MIDWIFE YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS ARE WRONG AND NOT BASED IN THE SCIENCE WE HAVE.

You can also view the Cochrane Summaries, which are the short, versions of the reviews. They can be really helpful to print off and bring to your doctor's office. I was recently all up in them because of a finding on an ultrasound I had last week (and helpfully, they confirmed what I thought - that it's not that big of a deal, and if we wanted to do anything, what I got recommended was the thing to do - the finding was about me, not The Kid, btw). I went to my doctor's office with the relevant summaries printed and SHOCKER, did not even need them, because she was as up on the research as I was. But if she had recommended something that I knew from my reading wasn't going to be effective, I could whip out the summary and go "okay but that's not what the research says", and have the relevant research right there.

Seriously Cochrane is what policy-makers, health care professionals, pretty much everyone uses. Your doctor has probably heard of them, and if you say "Well here's the Cochrane review about that", most will actually listen. If they still say "well that's nice but" after you give them evidence like this... probably find a new doctor if you can. Seriously.

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So those are the rules I use when reading research. Anyone else got helpful tips to share?

Shit Fat Pregnant People Get Told: The What (Not) To Eat Edition

[contents: diet talk, disordered eating, medical, food restrictions, fat hate]

Everyone and their mother has advice on what to eat when you're pregnant. It's in every book, every provider I've seen so far (and I've been rotating among people in the practice, so that's three so far) has told me what (not) to eat. Random strangers give you advice. Seriously. EVERYONE.

Some of this advice falls under "what to do for morning sickness", which... is another topic entirely and so annoying. I'll probably cover that at some other point. What I wanted to talk about is the recommendations you get for your "pregnancy diet".

A lot of the books and sites you read are.. yeah, okay. The "YAY YOU'RE PREGNANT HERE'S THE INFORMATION ABOUT THE HOSPITAL" book I got at my first midwife appointment has this type of recommendation. Eat a variety of foods, heavier on the fruits and veg, try to get some stuff with calcium and protein, etc. and so on. Fairly reasonable so far as it goes, even if it does completely ignore people who have varied needs or dietary restrictions, and completely ignores folks for whom regular food is not a thing.

In fact, all of these recommendations are like that, whether the generalized ones you read in the books, or the ones most doctors and midwives will tell you to your face. On food stamps? No room for that here. Limited income? Food desert? No time to cook (or no energy to cook)? WHATEVER. These recommendations don't give a shit about your "problems". In fact, my care providers have never tried to see if I'm food insecure, beyond a single question on the intake questionnaire (which was FIVE PAGES LONG and had NO ROOM TO ACTUALLY ANSWER QUESTIONS) about if I were worried in any way about "money". Not actually about food or housing, just "money".  And with one line to try to cram an answer in. An answer you're giving to someone you haven't met yet and aren't sure you can trust. Super.

So yeah. Then you get to the stuff that's said to you in specific. In theory, these should be better! They're coming, usually, from people who know you, some of whom know your medical history in detail! HAHAHAHAH WHAT A FUNNY JOKE. These examples are all drawn from what I've been told so far. Please share your own in comments!

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Try to get some protein and a fruit or vegetable together at every meal.

On the scale of 1 to "are you trying to kill me", this is like a three, at least for me. The explanation was that fruits and veg are good for you, and having some protein with it would make sure that your blood sugar was more even and you stayed full longer. Which... the staying full longer is, yes, straight-up diet language. On the other hand, when you get nauseated as hell when you start getting hungry, not getting hungry after twenty minutes is a definite feature.

The blood sugar thing, I'm not entirely sure if that was "you're fat so you'll get the diabeetus", or just general good advice. I do know from past experience that if my blood sugar drops, bad things happen. If you've ever heard the term "hangry", yeah. THAT. So things that can help me not get to hangry are always appreciated. (Interestingly, this happens approximately not at all now that my thyroid is being treated. So many interesting things that I just took as my normal seem to be turning to be "nope your thyroid was fucked".) But there is some research showing that you'll probably be in a better mood, and overall feel better, if you're not riding a blood sugar roller coaster. So... yeah okay.

Fruits and veg, I'm one of the people for whom those sorts of things are really good. I know people for whom fruits and veg in general, or extra fruit and veg, would be absolutely detrimental to their health. From fucking up your potassium levels, to aggravating things like ulcerative colitis, fruits and vegetables are not actually good for everyone! Sure, many people benefit from the whole "five a day" thing that has been a feature of US public health campaigns for years (recently replaced with "More Matters")... but not even CLOSE to everyone. Turns out people are individuals! SHOCKING I KNOW.

But what makes this really less annoying for me was the "try to". Because it signals to me that this recommendation is coming from someone who understands that eating "perfectly", whatever that even is, is really not an attainable or reasonable goal. And that if I reported that I hadn't done this more often than I did, the follow up would more likely be a gentle reminder along the lines of "well keep trying", rather than straight-up fat shame. It's really the only recommendation I've gotten that has even a hint of awareness that everyone is different.

Eat a small meal every two hours.

You hear this in dieting, you hear this sometimes in HAES, and WOOOO I heard it in pregnancy. Some of the thinking behind this one is the same as the previous recommendation - try not to ride a blood sugar roller coaster. Some of this is to hopefully prevent nausea - which is less useful when both eating and not eating make you nauseated as hell, as happened to me the first, oh, three months or so, but it's a nice thought.

But this ignores the fact that sometimes you're really just legitimately not hungry, and that is okay too! When trying to unlearn disordered eating patterns, it can be incredibly helpful to present food to yourself on a schedule. And even then, it's okay if you're not actually hungry at that time. Eating well isn't about adhering to a strict schedule, or limiting food intake, or restricting in any way, it's about meeting your body's actual needs. Eating a meal every two hours, no ifs ands or buts, is not actually a way to do that.

At this point though, this has become extremely practical for me, because I just cannot fit much food in my stomach. I can be super fucking hungry! And then I take like SIX BITES AND I'M FULL. It's intensely frustrating. If you follow me on Twitter you'll occasionally see me post things like "and for second dinner", because I eat... and then I need to eat again two hours later. It is so frustrating for me right now.

But again, that's me... it's common in pregnancy, especially later on after the uterus has grown significantly, for the pressure this exerts on one's internal organs to make it more difficult to eat. Not guaranteed though. And eating every two hours isn't always the best plan for everyone. Even for me, where this does work pretty well, it varies day by day, as well as by time of day (I tend to be way hungrier in the evening). So again, shocker, PEOPLE ARE INDIVIDUALS. Not that this is reflected in most advice.

Avoid white foods.

This shit alternately makes me laugh and seethe. This was from the same midwife who told me to "only gain 10 pounds". When she said this to me, I nearly blurted out "so... white meat chicken, pork, navy beans, apples, cauliflower... right?" I then thought "so... are you telling me I should be eating the things that in the US we stereotypically associate with Black people? Or I should be eating only Indian food? What?"

I mean it's just a bullshit recommendation on its face.

Usually when you see this what it means is "eat whole wheat bread, not white bread, eat brown rice instead of white rice, avoid potatoes and starchy things" etc. and so on. The rationale is usually OH REFINED FLOUR HAS NO NUTRITIONAL VALUE AND WHOLE GRAINS HAVE FIBER AND MICRONUTRIENTS.

Look.

There is literally no food that has zero nutritional value. I will repeat that. THERE IS LITERALLY NO FOOD THAT HAS NO NUTRITIONAL VALUE.

Literally none.

I mean, did you know you can get 10% of your RDA of iron from a serving of potato chips? And that anemia is ridiculously common in pregnancy, so it's important to get plenty of iron? Seriously. Potato chips have iron in them. Lots of things do. Every single food you could possibly eat has some nutritional value, both in terms of calories (which, you need calories, they are literally units of fuel), and vitamins/minerals. Every. Single. Food.

Additionally, a non-specific recommendation like this to NOT eat foods, to avoid an entire category of foods (even a category as loosely defined as "white foods") can be incredibly dangerous. I've talked about eating disorders and disordered eating before - blanket recommendations to avoid foods can be incredibly triggering for folks in those situations. Additionally, when a recommendation is based not on nutritional needs, but, as I have to figure in this case, the fear of the FAT and the DIABETES, it's not actually helpful, and can in fact be very harmful. Furthermore, the entire idea behind this is based in the notion that some foods are not "real" foods or are "OMG POISON" which... ugh, I don't even have the words for the contempt I have for those ideas. They're straight up diet culture and fat hate. And usually some racism and classism mixed in for good measure.

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So yeah. That's what I've heard so far. Mostly a bunch of one-size-fits-all, based-in-diet-culture-and-fat-hate, utter crap.

In the mean time, I'm working on eating when I'm hungry, and satisfying what I'm hungry for. Because I need to eat.

Perfect Pregnant Bellies

[contents: body image, fat hate, racism, ableism, trans hate]

So when I say the words "perfect pregnant belly", what do you think of?

Is it something like this?

Chances are, it is. The epitome of "perfect pregnant belly" belongs to a white woman, relatively small-framed, who looks like she has a basketball for a belly. It has smooth, firm skin, no stretch marks in sight, certainly no extra fat anywhere to be seen. And that's what's in that picture.

When you google "perfect pregnant belly", images like that one are an AWFUL lot of what comes up. There's more variety than I was expecting - some people showing their C-section scars, some with stretch marks, some with henna. I had to scroll some to find someone with dark skin though, and there was only one. All the rest were light skinned. 90% or thereabouts were headless pictures.

What I didn't see were any pregnant bellies that looked like mine.

Sure, I'm a (very pale-skinned, although it's funny how not being "how are you alive" anemic has changed that) white woman. So I saw lots of skin tones like mine, which is typical for media. White and light-skinned folks are way, way over-represented, thanks racism. But I didn't see any fat pregnant bellies in that search. I didn't see any bellies on people who have big thighs like me, and arm fat that hangs below their triceps like me, who had stretch marks on their bellies and breasts long before they were pregnant, like me.

I didn't see any pictures of people who have dark body hair on their arms and legs and lower abdomens like me. I didn't see any pictures of people whose breasts were never "perky" or "firm", but pretty much always looked like a cantaloupe in a sock, like me. I didn't see pictures of pregnant bellies on people who have what their mothers call, not unkindly, "junk in the trunk" like me, with dimpled flesh and back fat and jiggliness all over, like me.

And that's just like me. There's way more things that aren't represented in that "perfect pregnant belly" imagery we get.

That's deliberate.

People will try to tell you that the kind of bodies you see most often represented aren't the result of deliberate choice, that it's all just "how these things work" and nobody is really at fault and it just happens, like the world is a fucking vacuum and culture has no influence on this sort of thing. They're full of shit. The fact that "perfect" is attached to thin white cis able-bodied people with no visible "flaws" is not an accident. It's not an accident in modeling, it's not an accident on tv, it's not an accident in pregnancy. It's not an accident ANYWHERE.

Racism is not an accident. Fat hate is not an accident. Trans hate is not an accident. Ableism is not an accident. What society tells you is "perfect" is not a fucking accident.

And fuck all of that.

Because you know what? My fat pregnant belly IS perfect. It's MINE. There's A FETUS GROWING IN THERE. All of a sudden two weeks ago I saw myself in profile in the mirror and went HOLY SHIT, I LOOK PREGNANT. This is a very wanted pregnancy for me, and that was EXCITING. No, I don't have that "smuggling a basketball look", and I almost certainly never will. But what I DO have, is MY pregnant belly. And MY pregnant belly is fucking perfect.

You know what? If you are pregnant and want to be, and you have a pregnant belly? YOUR PREGNANT BELLY IS PERFECT TOO.