Last week, I gained weight. A lot of weight. Okay, not tons and tons, but it felt like a lot. It depressed me a lot. I felt fat and ugly. Thursday morning, I tried on three different shirts before I found one that fit right. My regular clothes are beginning to not fit me but my maternity clothes are still too big. It's a difficult, frustrating stage that did nothing to help the depression I felt for gaining so much weight.
Friday night, grateful to be in a bed after a very long, activity-filled week, I started moaning a little to my husband. He listened patiently and said soothing words to try to comfort me. The he said something that made me think long and hard. He said it didn't seem like I was very excited or happy about being pregnant.
To be honest, I haven't been as excited or as happy as I could be about being pregnant because I'm too focused on my weight. Gaining weight scares me. I've been morbidly obese before and swore not to go back. Seeing the numbers increase gradually was hard but I was dealing with it; seeing them go up so much in one week terrified me.
Like I said, it made me think pretty hard about this experience of being pregnant and even how I was affecting Steve's experience. What a bummer to be excited about having a baby just to have your wife moan and groan all the time about her weight. Steve is actually excited about having a baby! That makes me so happy and I don't want to ruin it for him...or for me. We will probably have just this one kid, so this is our one time to experience being a part of such a miracle. I am letting numbers on a scale get in the way of enjoying this experience to its fullest.
Saturday afternoon, while walking the dog, I made the decision to stop weighing myself during my pregnancy...maybe even for a bit after. I will still exercise once or twice a day every day and will do my best to choose healthy foods over junk more often than not. I still don't want to gain any more weight than I have to, but I'm trying to accept that I probably will gain more than I want to, especially now that my band is empty. My hope is that by not weighing myself every day and watching the numbers on it increase, my focus won't be on what I weigh but on the wonderful experience of nurturing a growing baby inside my body. I'll still see my body change and more and more of my clothes will stop fitting, but I won't have the added self-imposed pressure to try to gain as little weight as possible.
I may gain more weight than if I kept weighing myself; however, the price I was starting to pay by obsessing over my weight is too steep and not worth the pounds I might not gain by continuing to weigh myself daily. I'll use my OB appointments to track my weight gain, so I'll still have some indications of whether I'm doing okay or if I need to work a little harder to be healthy. So far, there has been no comment on my weight, so I'm guessing I'm in a normal range. They'd say something otherwise, right? Maybe I'll ask at my next appointment, just to make sure. It's in one month exactly.
Losing weight is hard, but I know I can do it, especially since I already have such a great tool in place - my lap band. Once the time is right, I'll slowly have it refilled and can receive its help to get to a weight that feels good to me - even if that is a different number than it was before I was pregnant.
Maybe being pregnant will help me overcome the lingering body issues I have. It's making me accept and grow to love a bigger body, one that is considerably smaller than when I was morbidly obese, but one that is larger than what I worked so hard to achieve. An imperfect body. My body. It is capable of so much, more than I could have ever dreamed of when I weighed 300+ lbs. It is healthy and, according to my husband, it is beautiful. What else really matters?