"Eating for Two"?

Although we are constantly bombarded with information on nutrition, new studies on how food makes a real difference in your health, and countless books on diet and the chemistry of food, I find it striking how little emphasized is the effect of what you eat on your pregnancy among health care authorities. "You're not really eating for two," they say. "All you need is 300 extra calories a day." In a country in which 60% of the population is not only overweight, but OBESE, this advice seems to make sense.

Except to my midwife.

"You haven't gained enough," she said at my last visit. I tipped the scale at 177 pounds, 17 pounds over my ideal ("skinny pants") weight. "Even if you have a seven pound baby," she went on, "you've got two pounds of placenta, three pounds of extra fluids, at least five pounds of fat for nursing, and with the extra blood volume--you've got to put on 26 pounds, minimum." Geez, I thought. Just when I can't fit anything else in my stomach. I said as much. "You need more calories and fat. Why don't you just go out and have a Whopper?" she said. "Most women would be glad to hear that." Then she recommended Haagen-Daz ice cream.

Now, I love my midwife, she's an incredible lady--I wouldn't trust my births to somebody who didn't exude competence. But I don't think she understands how against the grain her advice goes. I mean, it's one thing to add extra protein, fiber, and supplements to your diet when you're pregnant, but it's nearly impossible to add fat. Your stomach just isn't big enough and doesn't empty fast enough. I call this phenomenon the "pregnant lady gastric bypass," which is caused by having your stomach squished into the size of a bonbon by a squirming basketball-sized future quarterback (as this baby is turning out to be). If I ate a Whopper, I not only would be unable to eat any vegetables or fiber, but the fat would sit in my stomach for the next six hours. Ditto for danishes or Haagen-Daz. My only choice would be to give up all pretense of eating "healthfully," and to smack down regular doses of cream-cheese slathered Otis Spunkmeyer muffins--which just sounds disgusting.

The other problem with her advice is the cost. A fast-food burger is three dollars. So is a pint of Haagen-Daz. Danishes, which I keep mentioning because I actually have a craving for them, cost at least five dollars for a package of six to eight. When you consider that I buy my bread six loaves at a time for 33 cents a loaf, and make all my other baked goods from scratch, you can see how hard the tightwad mentality is on high-calorie foods. The exceptions are dairy products, which pretty much cost the same no matter if they're skim or whole. So I promised to buy the whole dairy products and eat them. The dilemma is amusing to my husband, who wouldn't miss a few pounds if he mislaid them. "Get thee to a Burgerville, woman. That's an order," he said. "Think of it as medicine for the baby." He had a point. I remarked on the irony that I'm willing to spend $37.00 on a bottle of fancy vitamins for my pregnancy, so why should I balk at a few extra dollars in my grocery cart?

It all comes down to habit. Once you've made the effort to change your diet, and once you've made the effort to switch to a money-saving mindset, you don't want to go back and undo all that work. You don't want to risk backsliding into old patterns. A solution might be on the horizon, however. I explained my dilemma to my neighbor. "Why don't you eat those Marie Callendar's meals?" she said. "We have a pregnant lady at work and she eats them. They have, like, 600 calories, and 400 of those are fat." Ah, I thought. This might work. Convenience foods do go on sale fairly regularly, and at least in a whole meal I would be getting vegetables and protein. TV dinner portions are always smaller, plus--I would not have to cook!

(I did buy the danishes, though.)