Eating Disorder Talk

Today, I ran into a blogging friend while returning some movies. We chatted for a couple of minutes before we parted ways and our conversation, it inspired the following narrative:

I’ve talked before about being pregnant with my daughter. And I’ve read at length, both before getting knocked up and afterwards, about women who get pregnant after a significant struggle with anorexia. There tends to be an even bigger struggle, regardless of state of recovery, during pregnancy for a lot of women.

Some find themselves lapsing back into old habits after years of healthy living, some fight everyday to eat the foods that they know their baby needs. Some women have even made the tough decision to not continue a pregnancy, if they know that they will not win the fight for health - they are choosing to not negatively affect another’s health and development and for that, I think respect is due.

I’m selfish, I’ll admit that right away. I’d been through the ringer with miscarriages and had also been told I could expect to never have children - I could get pregnant but not carry to term - due to my history with eating disorders. So when Zoë the Zygote came to be, I took five pregnancy tests. Then deciding that no one gets that many false-positives, I didn’t even need to consider whether I could continue the pregnancy. Someones, three to be exact, had said I’d not have children and here was another one, trying to prove them wrong!

So instead of the accounts I’ve read and heard about every morsel becoming a huger hill to climb, overexercising in “safe” ways, gaining only the minimum weight recommended and in recommended time periods, etc., I gave up. My body didn’t belong to me anymore, I’d decided. And you know, once morning sickness passed - the horrible, all-day vomiting that made me live within 10 feet of a porcelain god at all moments and allowed only for the consumption of onion soup, chocolate milk and mandarin oranges - I enjoyed a freedom I’d never had, it seemed.

Milk was whole and so very creamy. I visited McDonalds at least once, daily - baby’s fault, not mine, really, I was a vegetarian before that! I ate so often towards the end of pregnancy that a box of cereal lasted a week and a large container of yogurt two days. I finished meals in restaurants - both mine and other people’s.

I very seldomly considered myself fat or a whale or anything I’ve regularly heard non-disordered women say of themselves. I looked, rarely, but still, for stretch marks but didn’t see any. Apparently the joke was on me, because they were all hiding underneath my belly button, where my feet were apparently hiding, as well.

I even remember crying at two different doctor’s appointments because I felt that I wasn’t gaining enough weight and that I was a horrible mother already because I obviously wasn’t eating enough. I was. And then some.

To describe a normal day’s menu would be entirely too gluttonous for me at the moment, but rest assured, most days, especially in my last trimester, I was taking in over 6,000 calories. Double the recommended amount. All in all, I gained a total of 37.5 pounds in about six months - 50 was recommended. Because I’d lost six pounds during the first trimester of morning sickness, I basically started gorging on the world at 99 pounds. The photo above? I still gained another seven pounds after it was taken.

It took five months of breastfeeding, thrice-daily walks with a Snugli, four months of colic and the unempty-handedness that goes with it, and a diet of whatever I could eat while breastfeeding to bring me back to my pre-pregnancy weight.

And after it was all gone, I’ve really only a little bit of sagging skin and some stretch marks as damage. Oh and my hair has been replaced by some hippy’s, but that is a different story. It amazes me still how relaxed I was about the weight gain and morphing of my body and in hindsight, it was one of the more enjoyable aspects of the entire pregnancy. I wish that all women could feel as fine about it as I did.