Well. It's been a few days and I've had a think about everything that people have been posting about prenatal nutrition and exercise. In fact, that's pretty much all I've been thinking about because I've been trying to finish a chapter on this very topic in my dissertation this week.
In a nutshell, pregnancy is experienced differently by all women and popular culture does not make it any easier for women who are constantly bombarded with contradictory messages about how to 'do' pregnancy in 2007. On one hand, pregnant women are encouraged to 'eat for two' because having a large maternal body has always been a sign of fertility and historically symbolises a mother's selfless devotion to the unborn. Women are socially rewarded for participating in eating behaviors that contribute to the development of a large maternal body. Whereas it is socially unacceptable for non-pregnant women to eat excessively or to eat large quantities of food in public, in pregnancy, eating a lot of food has been highly regarded. Historically, in order to ‘naturalise’ the gendered division of labour and the relegation of women to the ‘private sphere’, the denial of the self and the feeding of others became inextricably linked with cultural constructions of motherhood.
On the other hand, doctors are now suggesting that pregnant women should not gain too much weight and should be even more vigilant when it comes to consumption. Although pregnancy is culturally and biomedically defined as a time when women are supposed to selflessly surrender their bodies and by proxy, their appetites, to the well-being of the fetus, most women are extremely aware of the impact of ‘eating for two’ on the postnatal body. Even though the tenets of acceptable female body size are redefined in pregnancy, pregnant women are not absolved of the overall maintenance of normative femininity. Although previous sociological and medical research argues that pregnant women are not required to submit to the normative standards of feminine beauty as objects of a male gaze and are liberated to gain weight and eat excessively, as the recent spate of comments on this blog suggest and many women in my study acknowledge that eating excessively in pregnancy only make its harder for women to conform to societal expectations that they look exactly the same as they did prior to pregnancy after birth.
With the new biomedical view that pregnant women should monitor their intake of food even more closely to the effect of consuming only 200-300 extra calories per day, the worry is that many women will swing too far in the opposite direction and actually start to ‘diet’ or develop eating disorders during pregnancy.
A new study from the UK suggests that pregnant women are under so much stress in the transition to motherhood, many women are more likely to develop eating disorders:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/30/nmum130.xml
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It's a big issue and a tough one that I struggle with every day.
I am 25 wks preg with my second baby. During my first pregnancy I gained 50 pounds, not by eating junk food but by eating large portions (and frequent ones too) of healthy foods. I am a health nut and could not control my appetite. It was SO easy to lost the weight afterward, I was nursing and it literally fell off without having to do anything extra. BUT my baby was 10 lbs at birth and although I gave birth to him without drugs, it was excruciating to do so.
In this pregnancy I have gained much less and fight with my appetite all day every day to do so. The motivation is to try to have a smaller baby this time, as suggested by my midwife. As some of the drs you mentioned are suggesting, babies that start out bigger are more prone to obesity. I am worried about that with my son, who is now 2. I realize not every woman who gains 50+ lbs is going to have a 10 lb baby as it's a combo of genetics and weight gain, but I still think it's very important to try to grow a healthy baby by making healthy food choices and gaining weight at a MODERATE pace. In my last pregnancy, from the 2nd trimester on I'd easily put on 5 lbs in a week. There's no way that's healthy weight gain.
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