I wrote about my early weight gain journey in a forum for pregnant women a few weeks ago. For the purposes of this blog, I’m removing the weight gain amounts. The reasons why? Because it doesn’t matter. Because my experience won’t be your experience, or your sister’s, or cousin’s, or friend’s. We are all different. And there is absolutely no reason why we should be putting numbers in our heads to compare ourselves to.
Here’s the post:
My OB Team is Obsessing Over My Weight
I’ve been athletic and active my entire life. I love reading about nutrition and healthy cooking, and have practiced healthy eating and education for nearly fifteen years. A little over a year ago, I was diagnosed with POTS and had to change my diet – you’re supposed to increase salt intake, decrease caffeine, manage (but not eliminate) carbs, small and frequent meals, and very very very carefully navigate exercise routine. Stay active, but not so much to cause over exertion.
I changed my eating habits when I got pregnant – but only slightly. I increased my whole grain intake by one or two servings (I also have a genetic mutation that prevents me from processing vitamin B and iron as well), and through the advice of my high risk OB, I now stop exercising at the first sign of lightheadedness. I walk and do yoga every day, strength train three times a week until symptoms arise (which is sooner and sooner).
My first appointment, (I was considered a healthy weight) the midwife on the team told me I should gain roughly 20 lbs at 20 weeks, 30 at 30, and up to 40 at 40. My very next appointment, the same midwife told me I’d gained too much, and that I shouldn’t be gaining anymore than 10 pounds at the end of my second trimester. No where close what I was told in the beginning. She told me to “cut back on carbs and sugar – stop eating cake!” (I don’t eat cake, but I stopped eating carbs for a week, and I lost two pounds) I asked my high risk doc, and he said no, my weight is fine, and gaining 35-40 lbs is expected and healthy. He was actually kind of mad that they even had me worried about my weight. I figured my next regular appt with the reg OB doc would clear things up.
It didn’t. She also said I’d gained too much, and that I shouldn’t gain anymore than 25 lbs over the course of my whole pregnancy. [She said I shouldn’t gain any more than 2 or 3 pounds per month, at most.] The third version of weight gain advice I’d gotten from the same clinic.
I’m frustrated and confused. I eat healthy when I’m hungry. I exercise as much as I can. I’m high risk, and with the concerns over POTS, MTHFR, and covid-19 and not being able to get groceries delivered in a good time frame and keeping my little guy safe, I’m angry that I feel so helpless where my diet is concerned and that I can’t seem to get a straight, realistic answer out of my medical team. Like a normal American woman, I don’t need help feeling bad about my body, but I don’t want to ignorantly stick my head in the sand when medical professionals are telling me I should be concerned. It just doesn’t comply by any research that I’ve done, nor does it fit with any of my friends/ family experiences.
I’m not asking for medical advice on healthy weight gain – I know that’s against the rules. What I wonder is if any of you had a medical team that had contradictory weight gain advice, and if you have experience on how it impacted the health of your pregnancy/ baby.
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The feedback I got was overwhelming, over 50 women replied. Women telling me about their doctors saying their pregnancies would be more difficult because they had strong abdominal muscles (???). Women sharing that they had to tell the nurse to stop telling them what the scale said because they struggled with eating disorders in the past and the constant obsessing was bringing back old anxieties. Women saying they were body shamed through out the course of their entire pregnancies, medical professionals smirking as they said “you’ll never lose it all afterward, you know.” Women from Australia and the UK saying their doctors literally never spoke of weight, and actually only ever weigh their patients twice – once in the very beginning of pregnancy, and once at the very end. “They can tell by looking at you if you are gaining healthy weight or not. You can’t tell that by a scale.”
Now that I’m a sociology student, I want to study this. I want to dig into this stigma that America seems to have over weight gain and pregnancy. Is there truth to what the medical professionals say? Is there any validity at all to constantly bringing it up to moms-to-be, like pregnancy during a pandemic isn’t stressful enough? (For the record, from what I’ve read so far, no, there’s not much truth to it at all.)
But, more than that, I want to make sure that other women don’t have to lose sleep over worrying about minutia like healthy weight gain during pregnancy. I don’t want the body shame issues that we have to work so hard to overcome to creep back right on the cusp of bringing new life into the world, and facing a new body forever changed by that process with this guilt hanging over our heads that we’ve done something wrong.
I told my doctor I was unhappy with their conflicting and unrealistic advice. I requested they forward my records to a new clinic so I could get a second opinion. She argued with me, first that I had never been told that my weight gain was unhealthy, then that I misunderstood, then that I wouldn’t be told anything different by any other office.
Thanks to my 14-month battle for a diagnosis with POTS, I was able to stand my ground and not be intimidated by this woman who seemed to believe herself superior to me because of a few extra years in college. Not to demean the medical profession – there are a lot of really incredible, hardworking, compassionate, and intelligent people out there who truly do everything they can to provide excellent health care. But for those of us who have met a few too many who are so jaded that they don’t care to sit down and ask “so how are you?” And look us in the eye, and treat us like scared human beings whose bodies are turning against us – it’s not necessarily the norm. Not for us. So I knew that trust goes a long way, especially for this job – the job of safely delivering my baby. And I knew that trust was broken here. And I knew I had to find that trust somewhere else.
I have an appointment at a new OB next week. When I spoke with her nurse, who was reviewing my file, she asked why I wanted to leave the previous clinic. I was frank, and honest. Her response?
“Oh that’s ridiculous. Your weight is perfectly healthy, and you are beautiful just the way you are!”
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Read about being diagnosed with POTS here.
Read about my first trimester here.
Coming soon: My first meal-prep-for-nugget session with French Toast Casserole
