First You Have to Row a Little Boat

I know this is not a topic of conversation that makes me the most popular person, especially with my lady friends, but you know what?  I'm doing it anyways... my blog...my rules.  Feel free to stop reading or hate me, but here goes.

It is impossible for me to gain weight in pregnancy (commence the throwing of rotten tomatoes).  And I lose my pregnancy weight + some within about five days of delivery ("Draw and quarter this B!"...yep, I know).  This is something I do not tell many people, because people tend to not feel too bad for you when that's your story.  And when you have friends who are pregnant/post partum, or trying to lose weight, they tend to want to horse kick you and say "oh poor baby, shut your stupid face".  

But spare me the eye rolling and the unsympathetic "Mhmm's" for one second.  My distress over this actually has nothing to do with the nine months that I am pregnant.  I know that I am a small-ish pregnant person (as is every woman in my family) and that doesn't concern me, because my children are born small mooses.  Asher was a whopping 8 pounds 8 ounces, that weasel stole all of my food for nine months and was born an enormous hee-baby.   And if everything after hee-baby was born had gone fine, I wouldn't stress at all about the fact that at four and a half months pregnant I am still two pounds below my pre-pregnancy weight... but everything didn't go fine.  My distress has nothing to do with pregnancy, it has everything to do with what is going to happen in the months following the birth of my children.  And with whether or not I will be able to feed them.

With Asher I crashed after my pregnancy with postpartum thyroiditis that wasn't diagnosed because we were in the middle of our cross country shuffle.  The dramatic, immediate weight loss that resulted from this rendered my boobs completely ineffective.  I have written at length about our trials and tribulations with breastfeeding... but here is the key.  When you lose a stupid amount of weight in less than a month, you don't have a flippin' chance.  The "on switch" for your boobs gets turned off.  The result is a very unhappy baby and a very stressed out mama & daddy.  As bad as other women want to lose the baby weight, I desperately, whole-heartedly want to keep it on.  Every last ounce.  Until I have had a chance to feed my child.

So where we're at now is me trying to fight my body and bulk up as much as possible in the next four and a half months.

Which is not easy.

Michelle, if you've been reading, stop now.  After trying to do this as au natural as possible, I have thrown in the towel.  The name of the game is calories.  And I'm employing a strategy taught to me by my sisters first love and one of my favorite people from my past, Mike Brooder.  Broods was a 280 pound football player at Lewis & Clark College.  He was incredibly athletic, but had to eat like a horse to keep his furnace going (especially during the season).  He would enter eating contests where you got a free beer for every 6 wings you ate with the bones and he would have to quit because he was drunk (I mean, in retrospect we probably should have called a vet to make sure it was okay that his belly was full of five dozen chicken wing bones, like what we would do with our dog, but we were in college at the time...and drunk... meh he always survived).  When we went through drive thrus he would get twenty dollars worth of dollar menu items and eat them all in about a minute.  The name of the game was calories.  But at his yearly physical, the doctor told him he was pre-hypertensive at the ripe old age of 19.  They counseled him on the importance of eating fruits and vegetables, and balancing his meals.  The next time we went to McDonalds he got 20 dollar menu cheeseburgers... and a side salad.  It was adorable.  We explained that the doctors probably didn't mean that adding a side salad was going to help lower his blood pressure... and eventually he arrived at a healthier way of eating.  But I am in linebacker, screw pre-hypertension mode (p.s. I am not even close to hypertension, so that's a joke) and am employing the Broods Method of eating.  For everything I eat that is not-so-good for me, I add something healthy so that the baby is still getting the good food they need too.

Oreos?  How about oreos dipped in peanut butter?

MICHELLE!  I told you to stop reading, I can hear your healthy eating heart breaking from here! 

Chile relleno burrito?  With an avocado salad?
Cheeseburger & fries?  With carrot sticks.

My lunch today: cheeseburger, fries, carrot sticks, prosciutto, meatballs, tuna salad, noosa, and whole milk.

It helps with this strategy tremendously that because I am hyperthyroid, I'm really hungry all the time.  When I sit down to eat, I always think of the scene in Jurassic Park where the goat is in the T-Rex pen.  Things go dark for a minute, then the girl shrieks, "Where's the goat?".

Where's the goat!

So that's that.  Please don't be embarrassed if when we go out I order two entrees, or ask for my coffee drink to be made with half and half instead of whole milk.  I am on a mission, and if you get in my way, I'll eat your face.