Eating for one or two?

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

I'm a hypocrite. So sue me: Another Nicole Ritchie post

So yeah. Maybe a few days ago I said how annoyed I was that everyone and their mother was expending way too much brain power on the pregnancy of Nicole Ritchie. However, I am finding myself uncomfortably fascinated by her publicists' ability to manufacture answers for her to the 'hard-hitting' Diane Sawyer questions that continually repeat she has 'never had an eating disorder' (because after all, you would have to be eating at some stage to have one) and that she was never 'close to death'. So even though Nicole was pushing more drugs than Corey Haim, revealing an eating disorder is ostensibly much worse for her career.

"I eat all the time, especially now. I'm constantly hungry. I'm eating at least every hour," she said. "And just like any mother, you want to take the best care of yourself, especially while you're pregnant. I'm definitely eating healthier now."

With pregnancy comes weight gain and Richie says she's prepared for it, saying she has already gained 10 pounds. "It's what my baby needs and to me, numbers don't mean anything. If I gain 40 pounds, if I gain 50 pounds, then that's obviously what my body needs to do. I'm totally OK with that," she said.

Ritchie is quite possibly more vacuous than Paris Hilton. Why she deserves a three part series on the state of her health on American television really astounds me (and of course I continue to be a part of her media campaign by continuing to write about her. For shame!).

Source: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3443916&page=1

How in the world did Nicole Ritchie get knocked up?

Is anyone else confused? How does a girl (and I call her a girl because she looks like one) who fluctuates between 38-45 kilos become pregnant? Surely, Nicole isn't having regular periods!

Women who are very underweight before they become pregnant are 72% more likely to miscarry in the first three months of pregnancy. Given that Ritchie has a sort of sketchy history with eating disorders, I wonder how she will cope with the inevitable weight gain associated with pregnancy. In my own research, I have found that women who have long-standing obsessions with their body weight pre-pregnancy find it very challenging to grow bigger in pregnancy. In more extreme cases, such intense bodily dissatisfaction can lead to antenatal or postnatal depression.

According to the American Pregnancy Association, eating disorders that are not looked after properly during pregnancy can lead to:

Premature labor
Low birth weight
Stillbirth or fetal death
Likelihood of Cesarean birth
Delayed fetal growth
Respiratory problems
Gestational diabetes
Complications during labor
Depression

Miscarriage

Preeclampsia

Let's hope Nicole can make it through safely (if she is indeed pregnant and not avoiding jail time!)

Sources: http://www.americanpregnancy.org/pregnancyhealth/eatingdisorders.html

http://www.tmz.com/category/nicole-richie/