Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Excerpt from I Want A Healthy Pregnancy – journal entry, pregnancy week 25: “I’m so excited about my baby. I feel lots of kicks these days and I can’t wait to see my unborn child. But I can’t help it sometimes; I look in the mirror and realise my waist has gone and it has been replaced with a huge bulge. People keep telling me I look cute, but I feel like a hippo.”
Like it or not, pregnancy means putting on weight. For many women, that is a scary thought.
How will my figure change and how will I get my figure back are two of the most frequent questions I get as a nutritionist. The fear of weight gain is deep-rooted and it’s made worse by society’s pressures to maintain a slim figure.
All you have to do is look at magazines with pictures of celebrities who look amazing two days after they’ve given birth. It’s a tough ideal to live up to!
What I don’t understand is how women are expected to bear children and not gain weight. I see so many women afraid of gaining weight during pregnancy. They either start dieting just before getting pregnant, or they starve themselves during pregnancy for fear of putting on the extra pounds.
And then, of course, there are women who lose control completely and gain tremendous amounts of weight or even use pregnancy as an excuse to eat as much as they want. Needless to say, neither of these extremes is good.
So the question remains: what happens when you get pregnant and look in the mirror to see a fat, bloated, disproportional version of your old self?
*Quick weight tip tame your desserts. Naturally, pregnancy makes you want to eat more. However, eating more of the double fudge killer dessert won’t help you and you know it. Keep desserts to once or twice a week as a maximum.
Do you gain a lot of weight when pregnant? Get great tips from my book I Want A Healthy Pregnancy, sold in bookstores around Bahrain or online at Amazon, iTunes or Kindle store. The Arabic version is due out this month so stay tuned! For more info, visit www.IWantAHealthyPregnancy.com
