Weight Gain Blues

Weight is a really sensitive topic for me.  Anyone who knows me knows that this has always been so, as it is for many females.  I wish that I could tell you that I’m one of those women that embraces pregnancy with a “bring-it-on” excitement and mentality, but I’m really not.  And it also doesn’t help seeing supermodels who get pregnant with a barely-noticeable bump returning to their pre-pregnancy weight a mere 2-3 months after giving birth.  Give me a break---seriously???   

I’m only about 8 weeks along, and pants are getting a little snug.  I still have not had the courage to jump on the scale as I’m scared of what I’m going to see, but I have a feeling that my doctor will slap some sense into me quickly because I really can’t act this way for the next 8-9 months of my life.  I’ve never been one to religiously weigh myself, but rather, I have a set of “fat clothes” and “skinny clothes.”  I get a very strange sense of accomplishment and pride when I can fit into the latter, and when I have to resort to wearing the former, I get overwhelming feelings of failure and sadness.  Yep, I’ll have to get over that pretty quickly too, huh?

So there are obviously things I can’t control like my expanding uterus, increase in blood volume, amniotic fluids, etc., that will just gradually increase my weight.  But things I can control like my food intake and exercising, I’m doing my best to make sure that I’m on top of them.   The exercising has been a little rough of late because I have been traveling so much for work and when you’re pregnant, all you want to do is sleep.   The shift from running 3-5 miles per workout to briskly walking 2 miles has been mentally hard as well.  Because of my history (which I’ll get in to at a later point in time), I was ordered by doctors to not have too strenuous of workouts for the safety of myself and Baby Fanntastic.  If I don’t feel the burn and sweat, I don’t feel like it’s a good workout, so that’s another mental shift that I’ll have to make over the next few months.  As for eating, I’m doing my best to eat healthy, but with my nausea, it’s been really hard to do so as a lot of healthy foods taste/smell foul to me, but if I don’t have anything in my stomach at all, the nausea is amplified.  Hopefully once I’m out of my first trimester, the nausea will go away and I’ll be able to eat in a more healthy manner without the urge to purge all the time.

I’m taking this day by day, and I’m trying to just tell myself that if I gain weight, it means that the pregnancy is going well and that it’s for the benefit of little Booger Fanntastic.  I can’t beat myself up if I’m staying active and watching what I eat—some women react to hormone changes differently from others.  When I hear two of my other girlfriends who are also pregnant right now saying that they didn’t gain an ounce during their first trimester, I kind of want to scream at them and crawl into a fat hole and hide.  It also doesn’t help that the raging hormones are making me very emotional, so I also feel like every feeling I have is amplified and exaggerated!  Hopefully once things cool off going into the second trimester, I’ll be more accepting and welcoming of the weight gain.  Until then, I’ll keep walking my buns off, and I’ll stop talking to my more positive, skinny and sane pregnant friends. :-)