I have spent so much of the last week feeling like a gd hippopotamus, and now I see why. I ballooned! Even my face got more pudgy.
I need to remember to give myself grace in these last few weeks. It's rough right now. I can't move as much as I want to. I have to remind myself that my body is gaining weight because the baby needs it.
I've spent so much of this pregnancy afraid to eat because I'm diabetic. The doctors spent so much time scaring me into believing I'll have a 9+ pound baby that I can't deliver. When they started doing weight measurements, he was under 50th percentile every single time.
What the doctors didn't know was that I've spent much of my life swinging between over and under eating because I was afraid of food.
In young adulthood, I struggled with healthy eating habits. I would go without eating much and then I would binge like crazy. I spent the beginning of this pregnancy eating less than 1200 calories because of fear.
I kept being told I needed to keep my blood sugar under control for the baby. When I got pregnant, my a1c was a 5.8 (aka I was well controlled). During pregnancy I slipped to a 4.4 because of how little I was putting into my body.
It didn't help, mentally, that I was immediately put on insulin despite my 5.8 a1c. I felt treated like a 16 year old with an oopsie baby. Many of my first appointments with maternal fetal medicine had me leaving in tears because many of the check-ins turned into "you should've known better"'s and "how dare you"'s. It was heart wrenching. It was also insanely triggering. I stopped eating.
I thought I was keeping the baby healthy by not eating as much as I wanted. It was supposed to keep him a normal, healthy size.
I guilted myself everytime I ate. On top of weekly check ins, I also got a Dexcom. I had real time updates of my maintenance failures. (Full disclosure: I asked for the Dexcom not knowing how badly it would impact me.)
Help with the blood sugar maintenance is what the weekly check ins with the MFM doctors are for. As I get later into my pregnancy, I have had to keep reminding myself of that. They know what is healthy, and they adjust me as needed.
Insulin resistance increases as the due date nears. I don't have much control over that (if any).
I need to eat. Baby needs me to eat.
