Читать книгу Blooming Birth: How to get the pregnancy and birth you want - Lucy Atkins - Страница 29

Pregnancy eaters divide roughly into two extremes: neurotic self-abnegators, who take the books literally, cut out anything fun and start weighing out grams of fat and protein. And self-indulgers, who think ‘Wey hey! Eating for two!’ and start deep frying their Mars Bars. Ideally, you want to be somewhere in between the two. ‘Before you close your mouth on a forkful of food,’ says the pregnancy book that tyrannized me the most in my first pregnancy, ‘consider “is this the best bite I can give my baby?”…if it’ll only benefit your sweet tooth or appease your appetite, put your fork down.’ Now, forgive my selfishness here, but satisfying my appetite, and even – gasp – my sweet tooth are, I believe, not an insignificant part of my overall well-being. This kind of nutritional fascism should really be outlawed by publishers of pregnancy books. You are pregnant. You are not on a diet. You are not sick. You are not going to harm your baby if you have the occasional bag of maltesers. However if you start eating in earnest for two, three or four, polishing off an entire tub of Haagen Dazs on the sofa, and generally throwing caution to the wind you will put on extra weight (just as you would if you weren’t pregnant) and you might produce a slightly bigger baby. Being really too heavy will not help you feel good later in pregnancy, and of course it’ll be harder to shift afterwards. Perhaps most important of all, you may not be giving yourself and your baby adequate nutrients if you’re eating a lot of junk.

Most pregnancy books tell you that you only need to eat about an extra 300 calories per day when you are pregnant. This in itself is shocking news if you were expecting to be wolfing down the cream buns for the next nine months. Brace yourself now because many experts say the reality is even harsher than this. The most recent Department of Health guidelines conclude that (partly because of our reduced levels of activity, and partly because our metabolism alters) pregnant women don’t strictly need any extra calories whatsoever in the first two trimesters of pregnancy. In the final trimester – hooray – we need about an extra 200 calories a day (a couple of large bananas).

Most of us, of course, eat loads more than this – because it’s socially acceptable to do so when pregnant – and so we get a bit fat. This does us, and the baby, no harm. Most of us lose it afterwards if we eat sensibly and are reasonably active. (I put on 45lb with Sam largely as a result of moving to ‘supersizing’ America. My weight gain was technically 10lb or so ‘too much’. I felt lardy afterwards, but the weight slowly came off and I was back to roughly my normal weight after maybe nine months.)