I’ve never been on a diet except when I was pregnant.
That seems ironic, since people usually look at pregnancy as the once chance in a woman’s life to indulge and to “eat whatever you want”. This seems particularly prominent in American culture - “You’re eating for two!” etc.
I’ve always been very active - I was a basketball player in both high school and college. Played volleyball and also picked up rock climbing in grad school. Then got into triathlons when I moved to San Francisco. With the amount of exercises I do, I eat whatever I felt like and managed to maintain a healthy figure (I wouldn’t say slim, but definitely not big in American standard). I eat relatively healthy but don’t count my calories at all.
The nausea, UGH.
When I became pregnant in late 2017, I started to develop nausea rather quickly. Pretty much within a week of getting the (very faint) second line, I started feeling sick. It was quite strong and it actually started to affect my work. I work as a data scientist who is customer-facing, which means I had a lot of meetings where I have to be on the phone, being relatively sharp, and being able to think/talk quickly and manage to sound smart. That was really hard to do while morning sickness is basically all-day sickness. I had to tell my team pretty early about my pregnancy, and let them know that I couldn’t take any morning customer calls. It was a pretty dark period of my life at work since I’ve always worked really hard and enjoy the intensity of a tech startup. (We were acquired by then, but still functioned like a startup.) I was constantly gagging, occasionally vomitting, and super exhausted. I would lay on the sofa after the work day and wouldn’t be able to get up for hours.
Unfortunately, even though my nausea was strong, I did not loset any weight. Instead I gained a little bit of weight. It was a mystery for me, since I really didn’t eat that much during that period of time. I hated most foods just from the smell of them. The only things I could tolerate were crackers, and white noodles with wasabi.
What was worse is that after I felt a little better after 16 weeks mark, I was happy to eat normally, and my weight started to go up rather quickly :( I guess it was because I didn’t have the energy to exercise anymore. So with eating “normal”, I was still not burning any calories, and that put some extra weights on me. The only good thing was: the baby was growing well, he had a normal weight, generally around 35 or 40 percentile.
In fact, at 20 weeks, where most people’s nausea would have subsided, I was still having nausea. And I gained about 11 pounds already, which was more than the 8-10 pounds recommendation that the guidelines say. This made me a bit nervous as I didn’t want to gain a lot of weight and have a hard time losing that weight after the pregnancy!
The Taiwanese Guideline
As I got more and more concerned about my weight gain, I started researching on dieting. I found that the American guidelines were too loose and ambiguous for me. I started Googling diet guidelines in Mandarin, and mainly following the guidelines in Taiwan (my home country) where they target a total weight gain of 12 kg (26 pounds) for the entire prengnancy, and a target of 3000 g (6.6 pounds) for the baby. The main philosophy is to control the baby’s weight so it’s the easiest for a vaginal delivery, and to optimize the transfer of nutrients so most of the extra nutrients are on the baby, not making the mom fat.
So I started a diet for the first time in my life.
Their suggested diet is very simple:
- Low carbs. When you’re pregnant, you eat even less starch than you normally do. These are the weight that don’t help the baby grow and it only makes you fat.
- No sugar. Especially no refined sugar. Note that fruits and juices have quite a bit of sugar, so they actually don’t go into the “unlimited veggies” category.
- Unlimited protein. These are the building blocks for the baby. When you’re hungry, eat protein - nuts, meat, quinoa, etc.
- Unlimited veggies. This is fiber, eat as much as you can.
I started following these rules at about half way through my pregnancy - 20 weeks or so. After that, I managed to control my weight gain to about 25 pounds at the end of my pregnancy, with the speed of 1 pound or less than that per week.
How this “diet” made me feel
To my surprise, this diet wasn’t very hard to follow at all. I was never really hungry, since I was still allowed to eat unlimited protein and unlimited veggies. It’s very simple - just control the starch intake (bye pasta, and bye bread) and sugar. I wasn’t even that strict to myself - I occasionally would have a dessert here and there. But I was very aware of the indulgence and would ask myself: “is this worth it?”, and if the answer is yes, I was ok having a milk shake once in a while.
After cutting down carbs and sugar for a while, I actually felt very good most of the time! My second trimester was a breeze - getting bigger without gaining much weight felt quite nice, I was able to move around. The third trimester was rather uncomfortable, but didn’t have anything to do with this diet.
Exercises
I walked a lot during pregnancy. I also kept the habit of swimming.
I tried to continue cycling but it got more difficult on the uphills, and also I was concerned that I might lose balance more easily. Decided it was not worth it just to prove a point.
I hate it when people say things like “Pregnancy is all so natural and so beautiful” and it’s a time that you should “enjoy”
Pregnancy is a very crazy process to put our body through. I honestly don’t think there’s anything “natural” or “beautiful” about it. You get big, uncomfortable, nauseated, doubting yourself, worrying about your baby, etc. I had cried multiple times during pregnancy because I was so uncomfortable. What is even worse is people try to ask how you’re feeling, then you lie and say you’re feeling great.
It’s really not that great of a time in my life. I personally view it as an endurance test on our mind and body to see if we can handle stress-test. The best way to get through it is to be mentally as relaxed as possible, but try to optimize as much as possible physically.
Results
I wasn’t very optimistic about my figure during pregnancy. I actually was so sad that I looked so big and wanted to get rid of some very tight clothes (like my wetsuit for triathlon).
When I came home from the hospital, two days after giving birth, I looked 5 months pregnant and felt horrible about my body. This is TMI, but I was extremely bruised, had hemorrhoid and could not control my urine.
Miraculously, with the combination of the low weight gain, the natural walking that my husband insisted that I do, and my mom’s family’s Chinese traditional medicine, I lost almost all my pregnancy weight in 3 weeks. The rest (about 3-5 pounds) were gone by 2 months mark. I was SO HAPPY the first time I was able to fit into my pre-pregnancy jeans.
Honestly, I am SO GLAD I’m not pregnant anymore. And I’m very thankful that I’m able to recover to the level that I’m comfortable with and feeling like myself again. It’s really a great feeling.