Pregnancy & Weight Gain

When I was pregnant with Little Chub, I gained an exorbitant 60 pounds! After she was born, I looked FAT. I noticed at the end of my pregnancy that I looked "just fine" in my pictures at 22 weeks, but the pictures by the end looked so bad that I didn't show them to anybody because it was embarrassing. I had gained a steady amount of weight, it was just more than twice what I should have gained (since I was a bit overweight to start with). Since then, I've managed to come down to 10 pounds less than I weighed before I got pregnant with Little Chub, and I am DETERMINED not to gain so much weight this time around! I'm planning on exercising much more frequently, and eating much less AND much healthier.

With Little Chub, I let pregnancy be an excuse for being lazy and for eating whatever and whenever I pleased, which was not so good. On top of it, I didn't drink enough water, and my edema at the end of pregnancy was so bad that they ordered hypertension blood tests just to make sure I didn't have pre-eclampsia, since my blood pressure was always just fine. My feet were SO puffy that I didn't really even fit into the bigger sized shoes I bought when I first started getting puffy! It was a pretty bad ordeal. Also by the end of pregnancy, I could barely squeeze into a lot of my maternity clothes (that were huge when I got them), and I completely outgrew some of the others.

This time around, I have unrealistic hopes of not having to use maternity clothes until I'm 5 or 6 months along, and of actually liking the way I look all through the pregnancy. I want to post pictures on this blog regularly, as a kind of monitoring system for how I'm doing. If I'm embarrassed to put it up, something needs to change!