The Elephant In The Room: Me.

Everyone expects to gain weight when they’re pregnant. That’s obvious. You can’t grow another human inside of you without adding on some extra pounds. My weight gain wasn’t too drastic in my first / early second trimester, but when I started packing on the pounds I resorted to Google (naturally). Here’s what the Internet tells you about pregnancy weight gain:

A normal, average sized person should gain 25-35 pounds throughout their pregnancy:
Baby: 8 pounds
Placenta: 2-3 pounds
Amniotic fluid: 2-3 pounds
Breast tissue: 2-3 pounds
Extra blood: 4 pounds (isn’t that kinda digusting? Four pounds of BLOOD?!)
Stored fat for delivery and breastfeeding: 5-9 pounds
Larger uterus: 2-5 pounds

My legs. 

Here is my pregnancy weight gain breakdown:
Baby: almost 8 pounds
Placenta, fluid, bigger boobs, extra blood, larger uterus: Probably the normal 21 – 25
Hips, ass, cankles, wrists, face, knees, extra chin, arms, fingers, etc.: approximately 38 pounds

THERE YOU HAVE IT, 72 FREAKIN’ POUNDS. Yes, that’s right, ladies and gents, I gained about 9 bowling balls worth of weight. I was always waiting for the (bowling) ball to drop at my doctor’s appointments, expecting them to finally tell me I was gaining way too much too fast. Spoiler alert: They never did. Sometimes I would step off the scale with my eyes darting toward their chart to see if they wrote something more than the numbers… maybe something like “may have consumed entire buffet before appointment”. They never said I gained too much and I never brought it up, mostly because I was paranoid that if I brought it up then they would be like “oh yeah! Duh! I forgot to mention! Stop packing on those pounds!” My resting heart rate was fine, my blood pressure was always normal, I didn’t have gestational diabetes, so by all accounts I was healthy. Huge, but healthy.

I remember thinking that the 25-35 pound weight gain seemed pretty reasonable, and it wouldn’t be THAT hard to bounce back. I don’t know exactly when I surpassed the 35 pound mark, but I waved it goodbye and never looked back. That’s the thing with pregnancy weight gain – at some point, you can’t stop the freight train. I talked to some women that gained 50+ pounds, but no one I talked to gained as much as I did (or they lied). I remember reaching each 10-pound increment thinking my monstrous weight gain would probably slow down soon… right? RIGHT? 50 POUNDS HAS TO BE IT, RIGHT? Nope. I gave up hope when I reached the 200 pound mark. I’ve never even been close to 200 pounds in my life, and they day it stared back at me on the stupid scale I just said screw it. I was really upfront about my weight gain, and no one ever told me I looked huge even though I did (I do own a mirror). Who in their right mind would agree with a hormonal pregnant woman when they call themselves huge? It was true, though, I absolutely ballooned up, especially in the last few weeks.

By all accounts, I was a pretty average pregnant women. I was less active than my normal self but that was to be expected. I made an effort to walk to work and take the stairs when I felt up to it. I definitely ate more and not always the healthiest, I gave in to cravings, but I didn’t go totally apeshit. What pregnant woman hasn’t found themselves standing in their kitchen shoving food in their face at 4am, anyway? We took walks around the neighborhood (more like slow waddles). So what happened??

"I cannot move...."

I wish I knew. I did have a lot of swelling in the last month, to the point where I could only wear Adam’s shoes and I thought the stitching on my jeans would burst from my tree trunk legs. I retained a lot of fluid and no amount of avoiding salt or staying hydrated helped it. Mostly, though, I was just plain enormous.

Within a week of having Noah I had lost 24 pounds and had ankles again. The next week I lost another 7 pounds. I decided I would only weigh myself when Noah was weighed so I wouldn’t obsess over it… and, also, I didn’t want to get batteries to replace the ones for our scale. I had to get weighed at my 6-week postpartum checkup, and I was excited to see what was sure to be another impressive amount of weight lost over a month. I lost 31 pounds in 2 weeks, I must have at least lost ten more in another month! Well, GUESS WHAT, I didn’t lose even one. I grudgingly accepted that I hit the plateau, I had lost all the weight that would be easy to lose. I still had 40 more to go.
I’ve never had to lose 40 pounds in my life. Truthfully, I’ve never HAD to lose weight in my life. I’ve tried to lose weight, successfully and unsuccessfully, but I’ve never had to do it for REAL. I expected to be in maternity clothes for a while after giving birth, but a lot of my pre-pregnancy things don’t have a prayer of fitting at the moment. I’m locked in that awkward phase where my maternity jeans are too big but my “old” jeans only go halfway up my newly gigantic thighs.

The postpartum body simultaneously incredible and useless. Your uterus shrinks back down from being a giant watermelon, your abs start to come back together (yes, they SPLIT IN HALF during pregnancy), you produce breastmilk which is a total other wonder of nature in itself. On the other hand, your skin hangs off your suddenly shrunken belly, the texture and color of your skin may be weird (like mine), your muscles ache for reasons you can’t pinpoint, and your sleep deprived brain is pretty much useless. In short, even though you’re a superhero that was able to give birth you’re not really equipped, mentally or physically, to freakin’ EXERCISE. I remember thinking my 6-week postpartum check-up seemed extremely short. Like, I couldn’t believe I got cleared for normalcy in less time than it takes to get an oil change. It was suddenly okay for me to submerge in water for long periods of time, aka take a bath (something I had been doing already, whoops), exercise as usual, and have sex (HA). I wanted to poke my head out of the door after my doctor left and say, “hey, wait, you remember the whole episiotomy thing, right? The stitches…. The epidural…. Me fitting a nearly 9 pound baby through my pelvis…? You sure I’m all set to be a normal human again…?”

Me.

So, there I was, finally ready to hit the ground running again, but I was stuck with a version of my body that I didn’t know. My hip muscles ached when we went on casual walks around the neighborhood. I looked down at my jiggly belly and wondered if it was even safe to run, or if my intestines would be sloshing around too much. I did what I always do in emotional crisis: I went shopping. I got some better-fitting spandex to stuff said-jiggliness into and hit the pavement. I allowed myself to indulge in crappy food, mostly because you really have to eat whatever you can, whenever you can when you have a newborn, but I decided to stop the excuses once my maternity leave was over. I had one last cupcake and committed to healthier eating. I finally got into a rhythm with our schedule – Adam would come home, I would feed Noah, pass him off, and go for a run. We finally got into this routine about 3 days before I came back to work. So now here I am, again, trying to adjust to a new schedule and see where exercise fits in with the following chaos: juggling drop-offs with the sitter, full-time work hours, feeding Noah, feeding us, diaper changes, playing with Noah, pumping, cleaning bottles, cleaning pump parts, giving Noah a bath, finding time to shower, general errands, remembering to brush my teeth, and starting my MBA. What am I forgetting? Oh yeah, finishing season 4 of Orange is the New Black. It was my go-to show for those long breastfeeding sessions in his early weeks, and now Noah and I need to know how Piper’s dirty prison underwear business works out.

All this is to say is that my body saw the 25-35 pound weight gain, laughed, and steered the train to donut-ville, and now I'm dealing with it. I've never had to lose so much weight in my life, and do with a body I don't even know how to use. Still, I'm not using it as an excuse. My goal is to not have a Santa-belly by Christmas. Ho-ho-ho.