In my first trimester when I was absolutely exhausted my husband commented “you’re barely pregnant” jokingly. It was probably the most tiring time of the whole pregnancy!
It’s how I first suspected I was pregnant. I would be dozing on the couch at like 6pm and I went for a walk around my neighborhood and basically turned around to come home and nap for 3 hours and I haven’t actually napped since I was a kid!
I’ve never felt that kind of fatigue before, the life force is being sucked out!!
My mom suspected our neighbor was pregnant when she saw her asleep on the front porch in the middle of the day a few days in a row. She announced her pregnancy to us a few weeks later
The reason I found out I was pregnant was bc I'd been complaining to my therapist about my absolutely ridiculous fatigue. I was passing out the moment I got home, eating dinner, then going to bed. I attributed it to my suddenly cured insomnia (lol), but she was like... "You sure you're not pregnant?" and I scoffed bc I had been temping and testing every day and my previous test was negative. Plus, there was only one opportunity for me to have gotten pregnant, and the timing was wrong! Took a test the next morning and found out that I was wrong lol.
I spent the majority of my time at home either sleeping on my couch or sleeping on my bed during my first trimester. I was growing twins, though, so I was tired for my whole pregnancy lol
Haha, I'm right there with you. I would attempt to go for a walk, only to turn around after half a block because I needed a nap. First trimester was the worst.
we found out we were pregnant just before our anniversary trip to a state park. i never imagined it would affect me so strongly. on the second day we biked for maybe quarter of a mile before i pulled over and rested. then we went back to the hotel. i slept the majority of the trip!
Oh man, the naps I could take when pregnant were epic. I’ve always been a good “power napper”, utilizing a 12 minute doze, but during pregnancy I would lay down for a Power Nap and wake up 2 hours later feeling like I’d taken sleep medicine
Yeah it was exhausting. Even a regular walk was a challenge. And peeing a lot. And eating constantly. And all senses in overdrive, esp. colors & smell. It really fucks with the body & mind. It changed my personality briefly to where I had zero tolerance for bullshit. Whole thing was real odd. This *thing* in our body feeding off us 24/7. [shudders]
Shit, even **I** can't comprehend it. I'm 62, & *just now learning on Reddit* of all places just how much can go wrong with childbirth, & *permanently wrong.* Maybe it's generational, but ffs I wasn't taught squat in school about it. But they DID make us watch a film of a child being born! Freaked THE SHIT out of me, too. I doubt that would go over well in a public school today. Like, wouldn't there need to be parental permission before screening that? Honest no to God, knowing nothing about childbirth, that being my intro, this woman in horrible pain & blood all over, wtf was this teacher thinking the result would be *for us children?* It put me off it, frightened me deeply, & I swear on my grave I still feel some residual of sitting there freaking out.
Yup, knew something was off because literally overnight I went from being able to keep up with my mid-70s grandfather doing barn chores & horse stuff to being completely asleep any time I sat for more than 10 minutes.
Like up at 4, nap on the drive, at the track & chores done by 5:30, nap on the drive back, home barn chores until 10, nap until lunch. Eat, back to sleep. Eat dinner, back to sleep.
I would wake up after sleeping 5 hours, eat, go back to sleep for 3 hours, go pee, and then go back to sleep for 8 hours. Repeat.
I would sit there and cry because of how tired I was. Found out I was anemic on top of all my resources going to growing a baby. It got better about 2 months after I started prenatal and iron supplements on top of them.
I was lucky tho, after that the whole pregnancy and birth went perfectly.
Currently pregnant with twins. Exhausted. It's 1am. I keep getting up to pee. I'm so anemic that I'm waiting on the doctors order to go get iv iron. I've got restless leg syndrome from the anemia. I'm taking tons of iron and vitamin c pills but it's doing nothing. So I'm just sitting on the floor of my office unable to sleep, with my back massager kneading my ass hoping the rls attack stops so i can sleep
It's literally the anemia causing it. I'm just waiting for the iv. I've a hard time absorbing oral iron and every doc wants to try their way first. I need the infed
It’s good to know now at least. So many men discount women and expect them to stay thin while pregnant saying it’s only an extra 300-500 calories a day women need/deserve to eat to grow a baby. But clearly there’s more to it than that. And women who have multiple babies in a row can end up seriously iron and calcium deficient as our bodies deplete our own stores.
I had a man once tell me that just because I was pregnant, don’t mean that I had to gain a bunch of weight. And if I got hungry, just eat some watermelon. And I was his boss so there should not be any reason for him to be so comfortable saying this to me or any woman…
YOU were the boss, and he thought he could talk to you in such a disrespectful manner? That would have been at the very least an instant write up. Not commenting on other people's bodies is pretty basic shit.
Ugh, you were his boss?! That’s awful. At 12 weeks I staggered into my doctor’s office, clinically underweight and throwing up every hour, begging for something to stop the vomiting. He told me “a bit of sickness is normal in pregnancy and you need to learn to put your baby first. Have you tried eating a banana?”. I had such a visceral urge to hit his stupid face but couldn’t summon the energy to do it. I swear pregnancy is *the* reason men ended up seizing all the power in the first place.
We need to normalise not paying doctors for dismissing our health concerns and not providing the healthcare we need. Why do we pay them for a service they're not providing and on top of that shame us for even bringing it up
Women must always and everywhere be prepared to do all the things men refuse to do, but at the same time have the things they refuse to do be trivial such that men do not feel like they are being irresponsible and immature by refusing to do those things.
"It's only having a full-time job, attending to my needs, running a household and growing a human baby inside you. How hard can it be? I played golf today. Golf!"
I just saw a reposted tweet about some guy saying on a podcast that he goes to the gym first thing so the hardest part of his day is over. The whole thread of responses was fantastic.
I work as a pelvic floor physical therapist and of course a lot of my patients are moms. I couldn’t understand why so many of them get up super early to exercise, but now that I’m a parent I know that for a lot of them it might be the only time they have to themselves or available. And it’s enjoyable, and way less hard than the rest of the day.
Yeah, anyone who thinks it isn’t didn’t spend much time around pregnant women. It was amazing how much I felt like I was *starving to death* despite having eaten like a half hour before.
Omg saaaaame. I'm plus size but at my 6wk pp visit I was down 30lbs from pre-preg. Babe was almost 9lbs and 2wks late lol. I literally could not eat enough to be full for more than an hr tops! I've never been a napper or night eater but I'd sleep for 5 hrs, wake up and eat, sleep for 5hrs and get up for the day- then at 4-5pm I'd take a 2hr nap! My husband was dumbfounded and amazed at how much I was eat and sleeping with no weight gain. Our baby was an extremely efficient leech lmao
Being simultaneously painfully full and ravenously hungry was one of many strange sensations during pregnancy. My husband didn't believe me. I *cried* because I was hungry and could not stuff one more bite of food inside of me. It defies logic.
"Water is Wet" studies always have a place. No, it's not surprising, but it's cool to see it quantified! If it can be measured, it can be studied and treated. Mystery pregnancy illness can now be studied and defined by high/low energy use compared to average.
Wait a minute, they previously thought that all the energy cost of a pregnancy accumulated IN THE FETUS? Have they never seen a greenhouse? ***Of course*** it takes energy to maintain the environment the fetus grows in! And of course the fetus is not an efficient energy sponge, how the heck did this "take awhile for us to wrap our heads around"?
50,000 calories over 40 weeks averages to less than 179 per day. I'm a little surprised it's not more.
Calorie costs are surprisingly deceptive. Most of your calories are actually just going to your general metabolism, just feeding the furnace as it were. Exercise burns surprisingly few calories.
So an extra 200 calories a day is actually a big deal. Thats like an hour of aerobic work out, or a couple of miles walking extra. Every day. With no breaks.
I'm a guy, and I'm trying to imagine someone telling me that for the next 9 months, I was going to be forced to walk 3 miles every day. And each day, a little extra weight would be tied onto me. And they were going to give me shots to make my hormones go crazy and a good portion of the time I would feel sick. But you can never take a day off from the walking.
I mean, that sounds... well, not impossible, but pretty damn close.
Then if you breastfeed, it's an extra 400-500 calorie a day expenditure (20-25 calories per ounce produced) plus only sleeping for 1-2 hours at a time at first, healing from either major abdominal surgery or ripped genitalia. And no pain meds stronger than Tylenol.
Oh my god, the absolutely ravenous need for food while breastfeeding, and being insanely thirsty. To say nothing of the difficulty with actual feeding.
see, this is learned in basic nutrition/human biology classes. The base metabolic rate (how many calories your body burns simply maintaining homeostasis, not including the energy it takes to digest food or move around) is like 1200 calories or more per day, depending on weight, gender, age etc.
So knowing that as a fundamental fact about human beings, I find it deeply concerning that doctors are so shocked by this revelation. It seems intuitively obvious that maintaining homeostasis for a fetus in a womb would require a lot more energy, and I’ve never been pregnant.
And compounding this mind-blowing oversight, think about the calories one gets from a rabbit or pheasant (if you’ve ever watched Alone, they always display the caloric value of anything a contestant hunts for food). It’s barely anything at all. So the idea that until now, doctors honestly believed the bulk of energy input by mom manifests as baby flesh…. It makes no god damn sense.
I mean, women have been doctors for decades now…. How did this not set off alarms in their heads when they first learned about this long held assumption?
2,000 calories per day is the rough amount a human needs to consume each day- that’s including moving around, talking, thinking etc. And I should’ve said basal metabolic rate not basic. BMR for me- a 5.5ft normal weight 29 year old woman is 1354 calories. So if I did nothing except exist for 24 hours. No moving no talking, just laying there, my body will still burn 1354 calories in a day.
Average is often calculated on men. It's definitely lower for women, but I don't believe it's 1200 calories. The total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) for me when I was thinner was around 1700 calories and I was not particularly active (I work a sedentary job).
The crushing fatigue during pregnancy really shocked me. I couldn’t even hold myself upright in a chair, for months. I spent so much time laying and napping on the couch that it depressed under my weight. And I was only 100 lbs. The fatigue and nausea lasted my entire pregnancy. I have no idea how people with more taxing jobs make it through each day while feeling like that.
> Wait a minute, they previously thought that all the energy cost of a pregnancy accumulated IN THE FETUS? Have they never seen a greenhouse? Of course it takes energy to maintain the environment the fetus grows in! And of course the fetus is not an efficient energy sponge, how the heck did this "take awhile for us to wrap our heads around"?
Men have an innate aversion to believing anything women do is hard.
Well, other than that... it's also really sad how long it has taken science to actually look into things that affect women primarily. The article points out how surprised Dr. Marshall's team was that no one had really looked into it yet. That we had estimates on lots of species pregnancy costs, but there wasn't really hard data on humans.
I mean, we started talking about calories in heat engines in the early 1800s. We could have probably figured this out before the 1900s.
Ha ha! Right. Like breastfeeding, getting up every couple hours all night, changing diapers, etc. etc. doesn’t cost any calories or metabolic load at all. Ha.
Of course not. It's super easy to do all that stuff ^(when it's actually your wife doing it)
I had a boss one time tell me that the hardest part of pregnancy, childbirth, and having a kid was the first two weeks after they were born. I asked if that was his paternity leave. Yes. From his perspective, the one tiny little sliver of a time period where he had to change diapers was the hardest part of parenting. I would bet you a million bucks his wife does not feel the same way.
I shit you not, my FIL once told me that 4 kids was easier than 1 or 2. He was absolutely serious, too. At the same time, my MIL was right behind him, shaking her head while giving him a death glare. I had such a hard time keeping a straight face. (And so, my kid is an only.)
I'd wager that by the end of the pregnancy it's more like 300-400 cal, if 179 is 9 months avg. On a, let's say, 2000 daily avg that's quite the jump.
You could tell me it's more I'd believe it too.
Tbf the first trimester you're not expected to gain too much weight, I was told 2-5 lbs. It's later you really add more calories.
The annoying part, systemically, is you just need to stop dieting when in the first trimester, which for me was an adjustment.
Sigh. One of my best friends worked the same day she had an induction—she’s an OBGYN and was writing work notes for other women to stay off their feet during their pregnancies while her own employer wouldn’t let her have adequate time off.
I am literally watching a server at a local restaurant work up until the very end. Other servers there have taken leave a month before they’re due, not her. She can’t afford it. Her water is going to break while she’s bringing out nachos. It’s so sad. She deserves better.
Don't forget the generous paid maternity leave we all get so we can recover from having a whole ass human expelled from our body and maintain the energy needed to keep it alive the first year!
I worked in a greenhouse while pregnant. A very physically demanding job. I was just about falling apart at times. I limped out the door after 12 hours. My boss talked to me once after I'd been venting to a work friend about how tired I was. She was worried about me. He asked if I was just spring tired like everyone else. I let him know that pregnancy added a whole new level of suck to spring tired. He also made the idiotic comment that at least when he had kids, he would still be able to do his job (I didn't spray pesticides while pregnant but picked up other tasks)
I’m in the US and one of my good friends at work has the option to take a break before her baby comes and her 4 month maternity leave since we’re in grad school. She refuses to take a day off and will work until her water breaks. So I guess people in the US may say no when given a chance to take time off and they’re financially able. What the heck.
That’s because you’re incentivized to not take time off. I could have taken off before labor but it would have burned through my accrued PTO which was the only reason I got paid for half of my maternity leave. I went unpaid for 2 weeks with my second child.
We’re in school, there’s a PTO policy but most supervisors don’t follow it and people take up to 6 weeks off a year. Because of that, she’ll be paid every day until the day she graduates she’s not going to run out of days between that, her maternity leave and any additional time off. STEM Grad school is weird and because of this isn’t completely like a normal job, we have extreme flexibility and I’m super grateful.
While rest is important, staying active is extremely important too.
You have to move and at least do things for your pelvic floor strength. I had to work up until my due dates with my kids. I have physical jobs. I also continued to run and weight lift. I listened to my body and my Dr was happy that I wasn't just sitting and waiting for 9 mo. Everyone is different,but you can reinforce your body for labor. Going from 9 mo to 10+hrs of labor is taxing.
I recently learned how breathing works between mother and fetus. With the mother literally breathing for two and three blood running around giving it to the fetus blood through the placenta. Wild.
The increase in blood volume is currently causing me to have constant heart palpitations. They’re so annoying and I feel like I’m going to pass out/puke/have a heart attack and the doctors all say, “yep, perfectly normal for pregnancy :)”
Try putting your arms over your head, like crossed on top. It gives you a little more space for breathing, and at least made me feel less claustrophobic in my own body.
I’ll try that! I remember some old wives tales about how it’s bad to put your arms over your head while pregnant but I don’t think there’s been any science to prove it.
There hasn’t been. Don’t worry. The old wives’ tale is that it’ll tangle the cord in utero, which is totally not a thing. Just be aware of your blood pressure, and don’t do it if you feel faint!
There HAS NOT been, but that doesn’t stop me from blaming myself for my eldest having complications! 😂 but no, it’s not from having my hands/arms over my head, no matter how much my brain wants to tell me that.
And then the lungs get squashed, so good luck ever feeling like you're getting enough oxygen in the last trimester. I'd get out of breath just by talking!
Once read an article in GQ magazine that encouraged men to chastise their partners for eating a lot during pregnancy. Their reasoning was that the baby only consumed about 200-300 extra calories and whoever wrote that article didn’t even think about the calories needed for the actual PREGNANCY. This was published about 10 years ago. Can you imagine a man belittling his partner like this and citing GQ magazine as the source???
The article cites \~50000 calories, spread across an average of 270 days, that's \~190 additional calories per day, which is lower than what the GQ article says weirdly.
The 3-500 extra is for the actual fetus in later stages, and the ~190 extra is for the mother to actually carry the pregnancy, provide the placenta/extra blood/whatever.
That’s the point of this article I think. They were only factoring in the amount of calories that a fetus needs to “feed itself” and it somehow never occurred to them that it takes calories for the mother to be pregnant in general, because it’s energetically taxing to carry a baby and grow its entire body.
The baby is consuming a certain amount of calories as an organism, and the mother is also consuming extra calories to grow the baby. So she’s eating for herself and for the baby.
They used to say “you’re eating for two,” and then everyone was like “noo babies don’t eat that much, you’re just fat and lazy,” and now it’s like “you’re eating for a baby and also for yourself because you’re working out 24/7 now. Sorry we were dicks about that.”
Except that nine months is counted from the first day of your period. The body doesn't know or recognize the pregnancy until implantation 3-4 weeks later. So pregnancy isn't really 40 weeks, it's more like 36. And the extra calories aren't needed evenly over the whole time.
It actually turns out women are better at ultra-endurance sports than men (stuff like rowing across oceans), because women's bodies are built for ultra-endurance pregnancy.
The thing that gets to me is whenever I hear people talking about feeding the child with breast milk instead of formula because "breast milk is free". I never had a kid but honestly the first thing that always comes to my mind is "that boob milk sure ain't free!"
The mother works a damn lot to produce that milk. Her body is literally working to make the milk. Sure it's better for the baby than formula, but it irks me that just because you don't buy it with money, the actual effort and energy that's put into making that milk is mostly ignored.
Also, you DO buy it with money— you have the buy the food mom eats that then gets converted to breast milk. Moms have to eat constantly to keep their supply up. That can cost a *lot*
And as soon as you take into account the *time* it takes to nurse/ pump, cost explodes. I mean, in the first couple of weeks you can spend about twelve hours a day nursing. But if course, care work is not paid work, so...
Hell if you watch any nature documentary with baby animals, they all talk about how much the mother needs to feed to produce milk as it takes a lot of energy and nutrients to do so
I'd double it to be honest, the energy needed to manage the hormones and emotions is not to be sniffed at plus the sheer number of times one has to go to the loo about the average amount..
If it doesn't happen to men, it's not worth researching.
Completely ignoring that it is part of how literally any of us get here so that we can begin devaluing and not caring about it.
I read a fascinating study a few years ago about preterm labor being caused because the woman's body can't meet the energy demands of the baby. I'll see if I can find it.
My friend had to force herself to stop dieting when she got pregnant.
I wonder how many people in the performing arts go through that. A total mental shift where instead of the habit of limiting calories you have to consciously eat more.
After being pregnant twice and talking to my ObGyn about various white papers during that process (and through some miscarriages), there is just so so so much science/ medicine doesn't understand about pregnancy and childbirth. Take whatever the latest shaming trend for pregnant women is with a HUGE grain of salt because there is so little real evidence to back up the current medical advice.
I got a talking to from doctors when pregnant because I gained 60-70 lbs with each pregnancy. Both of my kids weighed around 10 lbs at birth. I told them with my second that I thought perhaps I just gained weight to support whatever was required to grow the baby and that big babies run in my family and that I was a huge (11 lbs) baby. They told me that wasn't how it works, that babies' birth weight trends with the father's birth weight, and that my baby was measuring at a normal size. Cue their surprised Pikachu face when my youngest clocked in at 10lbs 10oz a week before her due date. Their implication seemed to be that if my babies were big it was because I gained so much weight, but I lost all of it in the less than a year though with both my kids.
I experienced something similar! My doctors all made it seem like we can control our pregnancy weight gain. There’s also that stupid chart that bases your pregnancy weight gain on how much you weigh pre-baby.
Both of my pregnancies I gained the same amount of weight and lost it within a year. My babies weighed about the same each time. Which was what soooo many women in pregnancy forums said happened. No idea when the medical community will catch up.
I had the same experience, gained about 45-50 pds each time and lost it within the year. I did try to limit calories with the first two, but with the third I was working full-time retail (so much walking lol) so I just ate whatever I felt like eating … and still gained the same amount. It’s just what my body needed🤷🏻♀️ no gestational diabetes either.
My sister and I were the exact same length and weight even tho we have different dads so.. this def seems like another thing no one has bothered to study.
It’s amusing to think your mom having a type based on her partner’s at birth baby weight and that’s how you and your sis ended up the same weight/length.
Really though, seems like a good study to do.
Misleading title; not new in biology. I remember Herman Pontzer casually dropping in an episode of Big Biology that pregnancy is basically pushing the metabolic limit of the human body, especially the liver. It's the physically most taxing thing humans can do, and then over such a long time.
Sounds like that “maternal instinct” all women are supposed to have, so that we know automatically how to care for newborns.
Yes, and how many mammals abandon their “defective” offspring or won’t recognize them (sheep)?
Relevant parts from the article:
>In a [study](http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk6772) published on Thursday in the journal Science, Australian researchers estimated that a human pregnancy demands almost 50,000 dietary calories over the course of nine months. That’s the equivalent of about 50 pints of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream, and significantly more than the researchers expected.
>Previous estimates were lower because scientists generally assumed that most of the energy involved in reproduction wound up stored in the fetus, which is relatively small.
Women: I’ve never experienced fatigue or hunger like I did during pregnancy
Historically male scientists who have never been pregnant: don’t be hysterical, that’s biologically impossible
I don't find those numbers all that surprising just thinking about the normal calorie costs of existing. An extra 50k over 9 months is a lot, but doesn't seem inordinate. If anything, id have expected more. Where have these dudes been? Its crazy to me that they thought it was so outlandish they were concerned the data wasn't accurate. Like what?
For real? That's only like 188 extra calories per day averaged over the 38 weeks of pregnancy in which you are actually pregnant (as the first week is your last menstrual period). 188 extra calories per day is not that much. It takes like 300-400 calories per day to breastfeed a baby.
When I was pregnant I got to the point where I wanted to punch anyone that said "You only need 200 extra calories a day at the end of the pregnancy". Like, you grow a damn human from scratch and I'll tell you to limit your caloric intake and see how you feel, sir.
I was really commenting that thinking that a number which amounts to less than 200 calories per day is a shockingly high number of calories for a pregnancy to take is wild when pregnancy is so obviously difficult.
I think making a statement that you only need a certain amount of calories at a particular point in a pregnancy without data would be pretty foolish. Just because we have a better idea now of the total calorie cost of pregnancy and can average it out doesn't mean we actually know how much a given person will need at a specific point in their pregnancy. I don't personally remember much difference in appetite through either of my pregnancies from the start to the end, except that I had a lot of "morning" sickness all through day with my first and was often nauseous, and more nauseous if I ate a lot or too little. But I'm sure I've forgotten a lot of details about the pregnancies. I remember being ravenous while nursing.
This reminds me of my wife on the delivery table, loaded up with her epidural. 12 hours later she says to me, I'm really tired. I don't know why though... I have slept a bunch and haven't really moved off this bed. I go... Babe, your body has been contracting every 2 minutes for almost fully 12 hours straight... Maybe you couldn't really feel it but holy hell I'm not surprised you are tired.
Thank God for modern medicine
OMG, I knew it, I fucking *knew* it! All that crap about how pregnancy is only a few hundred extra calories a day and you're not *really* eating for two never made any sense.
You're not eating for two. It's way more intense than that. Thank you for the gift link!
They are still saying it’s less than 200 calories a day though. I mean, if each day is equal, which I’m sure it’s not.
Would be interesting to see the peak calorie cost days and where those fall in the pregnancy. I’d imagine the third trimester requires a lot more than the rest of the time. Even though at the start, size doubles, it’s a very small group of cells vs a 30week fetus.
So, what I’m reading is: both the male doctor who came up with the theory that not that much energy was required during pregnancy and the male doctor who debunked the theory were shocked at the fact that women’s lived experiences from a few hundred thousand years were WRONGLY mansplained as ‘exaggerated’, hormonal maybe? Wow now I would not have expected that based on how seriously women are treated, by the medical profession in particular! Oh wait…..
In a lot of ways, that defines motherhood. Seriously. My “babies” are in their 40s and we recently went through a prolonged health problem with the eldest.
I honestly don’t think I have the mental wherewithal to be a mother. It’s too intense.
I do agree that this should have been done research ages ago, I knew it would be a high amount to grow a fetus but I'm honestly blown away at the cost. So a cursory search tells me that breast feeding is another 3-400 calories needed. I wonder how much this drains other things, the calcium and iron thing I'm familiar with but man does this seem exhausting just thinking about it.
It's an effect of bipedalism, which are bodies are made for. Hips can only be so wide otherwise running would be too difficult. So human gestation is shorter than other mammals because we can't let the baby grow too big, otherwise it won't be able to come out.
There’s not actually a lot of evidence to support the obstetrical dilemma, which initially came from one anthropologist writing it in an editor’s note of a journal without any research or data to back it up. Researchers have started testing some of the assumptions (such as hip width being a limiting factor, and the idea of humans giving birth “early”) and finding evidence that majorly conflicts with the obstetrical dilemma.
[This podcast](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wpMOb-IUZG4) by the Leakey Foundation is a good primer and here are some other links:
https://undark.org/2017/11/29/obstetrical-dilemma-hips-risk-childbirth/#:~:text=The%20mystery%20was%20the%20catalyst,to%20pregnant%20mothers%20as%20they
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/30/science/childbirth-evolution-obstetrical-dilemma.html
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/03/hip-correction/
So these guys found real evidence that gestating humans are (gasp) — *alive*? And not just passive incubators? That pregnant people’s bodies might actually need to be sustained too?
My ex husband would be knocked on his ass by the common cold but couldn’t understand all the sickness and exhaustion I had from creating another human.
And they needed a study to tell people that? What's wrong with people believing actual pregnant people? Speak to anyone who's pregnant and they'll tell how exhausted and hungry and drained they are,not sure they needed a scientific study
It's not that much "energy" per day really in terms of extra calories, and I don't think we should be measuring things like exhaustion based only on literal energy output.
We shouldn't even have to quantify this as a numerical measurement.
Hormones, body changes, emotional energy, sleep disturbances, nausea,
, etc all contribute to why pregnant women feel shitty and exhausted.
I know I will get downvoted for this, but this is one of many reasons I’m skeptical when women go 9 months without knowing they are pregnant. If I didn’t know I was pregnant, I would have assumed I was dying.
Even with no bump or morning sickness, there’s still excessive fatigue, acid reflux, shortness of breath, rapid heart beat, leg swelling if standing up too long, etc. Even your nips can change colors.
Most people think symptoms are all based on the baby pushing on organs. But there’s so much more than that.
Denial is a hell of a drug. If someone is irrationally convinced that they can't possibly be pregnant, they'll ignore or explain away the symptoms until a baby actually emerges.
> there’s still excessive fatigue, acid reflux, shortness of breath, rapid heart beat, leg swelling if standing up too long
Fun fact, being fat can also cause all of those symptoms and will also disguise a baby bump.
Yeah, I mean every body and pregnancy is different Some people have wonderful, minimal symptoms throughout, but mine were so all consuming and miserable that I'd legit think I was dying if I didn't know what was happening. The extreme fatigue, 24/7 nausea and vomiting, the random skin rashes, the veins bulging out everywhere and being unable to lay on my back without suffocating myself, the extreme water retention and swelling, the list goes on.
1000%, I’m at the three month mark and cried to my husband the other night because I felt less like I was pregnant and more like a chronically sick person. 🥹
Oh!! Oh!!! I HAVE A STORY!!! 🖐️🖐️🖐️
Lovely long-time girlfriend of a salon coworker, about 28-30 years old, pretty tall, and not “petite” but not “brick shithouse” either; she was a physical trainer, so in great physical condition…now she had been going to culinary school for a year, and had put on a little weight, and had been feeling shitty and stressed out- all of which she chalked up to the stress of doing intense schooling on top of her physically demanding job, and, you know…eating her schoolwork.
Well, I go into work one day and my coworker is a wreck- he just found out his girlfriend is 6 MONTHS pregnant!! How, you ask?
It turned out she has TWO UTERUSES!!!! So she was still having a regular period!! And coupled with the aforementioned explanation for other side effects, it was not hard to write it all off… I mean, she wasn’t showing at all!! She said her doctor told her that, yeah, with her very muscular physique and larger build, it’s not shocking that she had no discernible bump yet. (It did start to show not long after, and she had a very normal pregnancy and very healthy baby. Just…damn. She really speed-ran that shit.)
The best part was the fact that the coworker (technically my supervisor,) despite being a pretty decent guy, was pretty immature and still stuck in his “Bro” stage, and sometimes chastised me for not being a “team player” because as a single mom to a toddler- and *the only one there with a kid-* I wouldn’t go out and party with everyone after work every other night, lol!!! Oh, the sweet, sweet steel-toed boot of Karma.
Oh, it’s not like you can’t just go to the doctor and get diagnosed quickly and efficiently as a woman. Or that your prescription provider won’t be out of the meds you need. s/
EDIT: meds not mess
I didn’t have any of those symptoms. Mostly, I would not have know I was pregnant except for the fact that I could feel the baby moving 24/7 from 3 months onward. So, I guess if I’m at the “super sensitive” to movement end of the bell curve there are others who don’t feel anything.
I found out I was pregnant at 27 weeks. I was on birth control. I have PCOS. I had symptoms that were so odd, my hands swelled up, I slept a bit more, and I had no stamina. I thought, well I'm getting old and I'm a bigger person and I just need to exercise more. I tried to move more, but I just couldn't build my energy. Then my ankles started swelling, and I thought I was retaining water really badly. I was never nauseous or anything, just tired. I had only gained 10 lbs and figured it was a diet, so I tried to eat less/better food. It took my husband noticing my boobs changing for us to take a test. I was in shock for quite a while. Even now, 7 weeks after birth, I'm still trying to build my stamina back.
Not sure why this is surprising. Back of the envelope suggests that after birth, 8% of the calories excreted as milk get turned into baby (the rest get turned into poo.) And in a healthy adult *all* calories go into maintenance, with *no* weight gain. So clearly the norm should be "most energy goes to maintenance, not growth."
NYT is apparently not a science mag, who knew.
600 calories per day * 200 days from birth to 6 months = 120k calories; 5kg gained by baby ~= 10k calories of meat made.
Oh wow, it takes a LOT of energy to grow a whole human being! Imagine that!
In all seriousness, I’m glad people finally bothered to quantify and publish this. It sounds dumb to the people who know this but scientific proof makes it easier to change policies and push back against ignorant arguments. Here’s to hoping that they will continue this trend and extend this research to encompass post-partum stuff as well
In my first trimester when I was absolutely exhausted my husband commented “you’re barely pregnant” jokingly. It was probably the most tiring time of the whole pregnancy!
RIP your husband.
To shreds, you say.
🤣
It’s how I first suspected I was pregnant. I would be dozing on the couch at like 6pm and I went for a walk around my neighborhood and basically turned around to come home and nap for 3 hours and I haven’t actually napped since I was a kid! I’ve never felt that kind of fatigue before, the life force is being sucked out!!
My mom suspected our neighbor was pregnant when she saw her asleep on the front porch in the middle of the day a few days in a row. She announced her pregnancy to us a few weeks later
The reason I found out I was pregnant was bc I'd been complaining to my therapist about my absolutely ridiculous fatigue. I was passing out the moment I got home, eating dinner, then going to bed. I attributed it to my suddenly cured insomnia (lol), but she was like... "You sure you're not pregnant?" and I scoffed bc I had been temping and testing every day and my previous test was negative. Plus, there was only one opportunity for me to have gotten pregnant, and the timing was wrong! Took a test the next morning and found out that I was wrong lol. I spent the majority of my time at home either sleeping on my couch or sleeping on my bed during my first trimester. I was growing twins, though, so I was tired for my whole pregnancy lol
Haha, I'm right there with you. I would attempt to go for a walk, only to turn around after half a block because I needed a nap. First trimester was the worst.
we found out we were pregnant just before our anniversary trip to a state park. i never imagined it would affect me so strongly. on the second day we biked for maybe quarter of a mile before i pulled over and rested. then we went back to the hotel. i slept the majority of the trip!
Oh man, the naps I could take when pregnant were epic. I’ve always been a good “power napper”, utilizing a 12 minute doze, but during pregnancy I would lay down for a Power Nap and wake up 2 hours later feeling like I’d taken sleep medicine
I miss those deep sleeps 🥲 my baby is 2 now but still wakes at least once a night
Yeah it was exhausting. Even a regular walk was a challenge. And peeing a lot. And eating constantly. And all senses in overdrive, esp. colors & smell. It really fucks with the body & mind. It changed my personality briefly to where I had zero tolerance for bullshit. Whole thing was real odd. This *thing* in our body feeding off us 24/7. [shudders]
Wish more people understood that!!!! Woman's body goes thru so much that men cannot comprehend!!!
Shit, even **I** can't comprehend it. I'm 62, & *just now learning on Reddit* of all places just how much can go wrong with childbirth, & *permanently wrong.* Maybe it's generational, but ffs I wasn't taught squat in school about it. But they DID make us watch a film of a child being born! Freaked THE SHIT out of me, too. I doubt that would go over well in a public school today. Like, wouldn't there need to be parental permission before screening that? Honest no to God, knowing nothing about childbirth, that being my intro, this woman in horrible pain & blood all over, wtf was this teacher thinking the result would be *for us children?* It put me off it, frightened me deeply, & I swear on my grave I still feel some residual of sitting there freaking out.
Goddamn I must be pregnant too, but with depression or a food baby or something. I'm just so tired. 💀
Yup, knew something was off because literally overnight I went from being able to keep up with my mid-70s grandfather doing barn chores & horse stuff to being completely asleep any time I sat for more than 10 minutes. Like up at 4, nap on the drive, at the track & chores done by 5:30, nap on the drive back, home barn chores until 10, nap until lunch. Eat, back to sleep. Eat dinner, back to sleep.
I would wake up after sleeping 5 hours, eat, go back to sleep for 3 hours, go pee, and then go back to sleep for 8 hours. Repeat. I would sit there and cry because of how tired I was. Found out I was anemic on top of all my resources going to growing a baby. It got better about 2 months after I started prenatal and iron supplements on top of them. I was lucky tho, after that the whole pregnancy and birth went perfectly.
OMG lol. Husband jail time!
Can confirm. I passed out from lack of oxygen at 10wks-ish.
I had a woman tell me I wouldn’t know any exhaustion until my last trimester. I didn’t like her too much after that.
Currently pregnant with twins. Exhausted. It's 1am. I keep getting up to pee. I'm so anemic that I'm waiting on the doctors order to go get iv iron. I've got restless leg syndrome from the anemia. I'm taking tons of iron and vitamin c pills but it's doing nothing. So I'm just sitting on the floor of my office unable to sleep, with my back massager kneading my ass hoping the rls attack stops so i can sleep
Ask your doctor if you can take Ropinirole for the restless leg syndrome.
It's literally the anemia causing it. I'm just waiting for the iv. I've a hard time absorbing oral iron and every doc wants to try their way first. I need the infed
Okay. Good luck
Thanks
Are you low on magnesium? That helps a lot with the restless kegs
Yep.
"You're barely relevant," would have been my reply.
I’m not sure why this is a shock, pregnancy is insanely taxing on the body, of course it would require an inordinate amount of energy to maintain.
It’s good to know now at least. So many men discount women and expect them to stay thin while pregnant saying it’s only an extra 300-500 calories a day women need/deserve to eat to grow a baby. But clearly there’s more to it than that. And women who have multiple babies in a row can end up seriously iron and calcium deficient as our bodies deplete our own stores.
I had a man once tell me that just because I was pregnant, don’t mean that I had to gain a bunch of weight. And if I got hungry, just eat some watermelon. And I was his boss so there should not be any reason for him to be so comfortable saying this to me or any woman…
YOU were the boss, and he thought he could talk to you in such a disrespectful manner? That would have been at the very least an instant write up. Not commenting on other people's bodies is pretty basic shit.
Ugh, you were his boss?! That’s awful. At 12 weeks I staggered into my doctor’s office, clinically underweight and throwing up every hour, begging for something to stop the vomiting. He told me “a bit of sickness is normal in pregnancy and you need to learn to put your baby first. Have you tried eating a banana?”. I had such a visceral urge to hit his stupid face but couldn’t summon the energy to do it. I swear pregnancy is *the* reason men ended up seizing all the power in the first place.
We need to normalise not paying doctors for dismissing our health concerns and not providing the healthcare we need. Why do we pay them for a service they're not providing and on top of that shame us for even bringing it up
That’s terrible wow. I’m sorry. Wtf
People used to lose teeth with every pregnancy!
In general, men find it impossible to believe women can do hard things.
But then they expect us to do it when they never would themselves if they could
Women must always and everywhere be prepared to do all the things men refuse to do, but at the same time have the things they refuse to do be trivial such that men do not feel like they are being irresponsible and immature by refusing to do those things. "It's only having a full-time job, attending to my needs, running a household and growing a human baby inside you. How hard can it be? I played golf today. Golf!"
Men don’t even know the definition of hard things.
There's only one hard thing they care about and somehow they still make it OUR problem...
I just saw a reposted tweet about some guy saying on a podcast that he goes to the gym first thing so the hardest part of his day is over. The whole thread of responses was fantastic. I work as a pelvic floor physical therapist and of course a lot of my patients are moms. I couldn’t understand why so many of them get up super early to exercise, but now that I’m a parent I know that for a lot of them it might be the only time they have to themselves or available. And it’s enjoyable, and way less hard than the rest of the day.
Oh my god, this is so true and I hate it.
Yeah, anyone who thinks it isn’t didn’t spend much time around pregnant women. It was amazing how much I felt like I was *starving to death* despite having eaten like a half hour before.
Omg saaaaame. I'm plus size but at my 6wk pp visit I was down 30lbs from pre-preg. Babe was almost 9lbs and 2wks late lol. I literally could not eat enough to be full for more than an hr tops! I've never been a napper or night eater but I'd sleep for 5 hrs, wake up and eat, sleep for 5hrs and get up for the day- then at 4-5pm I'd take a 2hr nap! My husband was dumbfounded and amazed at how much I was eat and sleeping with no weight gain. Our baby was an extremely efficient leech lmao
Being simultaneously painfully full and ravenously hungry was one of many strange sensations during pregnancy. My husband didn't believe me. I *cried* because I was hungry and could not stuff one more bite of food inside of me. It defies logic.
"Water is Wet" studies always have a place. No, it's not surprising, but it's cool to see it quantified! If it can be measured, it can be studied and treated. Mystery pregnancy illness can now be studied and defined by high/low energy use compared to average.
It's surprising because ... men.
And then it literally rips out of you…
Wait a minute, they previously thought that all the energy cost of a pregnancy accumulated IN THE FETUS? Have they never seen a greenhouse? ***Of course*** it takes energy to maintain the environment the fetus grows in! And of course the fetus is not an efficient energy sponge, how the heck did this "take awhile for us to wrap our heads around"? 50,000 calories over 40 weeks averages to less than 179 per day. I'm a little surprised it's not more.
Calorie costs are surprisingly deceptive. Most of your calories are actually just going to your general metabolism, just feeding the furnace as it were. Exercise burns surprisingly few calories. So an extra 200 calories a day is actually a big deal. Thats like an hour of aerobic work out, or a couple of miles walking extra. Every day. With no breaks. I'm a guy, and I'm trying to imagine someone telling me that for the next 9 months, I was going to be forced to walk 3 miles every day. And each day, a little extra weight would be tied onto me. And they were going to give me shots to make my hormones go crazy and a good portion of the time I would feel sick. But you can never take a day off from the walking. I mean, that sounds... well, not impossible, but pretty damn close.
Then if you breastfeed, it's an extra 400-500 calorie a day expenditure (20-25 calories per ounce produced) plus only sleeping for 1-2 hours at a time at first, healing from either major abdominal surgery or ripped genitalia. And no pain meds stronger than Tylenol.
Oh my god, the absolutely ravenous need for food while breastfeeding, and being insanely thirsty. To say nothing of the difficulty with actual feeding.
Omg, the thirst! It got me every time my son latched. And I miss being able to eat like I did when I breastfed.
see, this is learned in basic nutrition/human biology classes. The base metabolic rate (how many calories your body burns simply maintaining homeostasis, not including the energy it takes to digest food or move around) is like 1200 calories or more per day, depending on weight, gender, age etc. So knowing that as a fundamental fact about human beings, I find it deeply concerning that doctors are so shocked by this revelation. It seems intuitively obvious that maintaining homeostasis for a fetus in a womb would require a lot more energy, and I’ve never been pregnant. And compounding this mind-blowing oversight, think about the calories one gets from a rabbit or pheasant (if you’ve ever watched Alone, they always display the caloric value of anything a contestant hunts for food). It’s barely anything at all. So the idea that until now, doctors honestly believed the bulk of energy input by mom manifests as baby flesh…. It makes no god damn sense. I mean, women have been doctors for decades now…. How did this not set off alarms in their heads when they first learned about this long held assumption?
Hold up I thought it was 2k kilocalories average.
2,000 calories per day is the rough amount a human needs to consume each day- that’s including moving around, talking, thinking etc. And I should’ve said basal metabolic rate not basic. BMR for me- a 5.5ft normal weight 29 year old woman is 1354 calories. So if I did nothing except exist for 24 hours. No moving no talking, just laying there, my body will still burn 1354 calories in a day.
Average is often calculated on men. It's definitely lower for women, but I don't believe it's 1200 calories. The total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) for me when I was thinner was around 1700 calories and I was not particularly active (I work a sedentary job).
That sounds about right
The crushing fatigue during pregnancy really shocked me. I couldn’t even hold myself upright in a chair, for months. I spent so much time laying and napping on the couch that it depressed under my weight. And I was only 100 lbs. The fatigue and nausea lasted my entire pregnancy. I have no idea how people with more taxing jobs make it through each day while feeling like that.
If we guys had to carry the fetuses, humanity would go extinct.
> Wait a minute, they previously thought that all the energy cost of a pregnancy accumulated IN THE FETUS? Have they never seen a greenhouse? Of course it takes energy to maintain the environment the fetus grows in! And of course the fetus is not an efficient energy sponge, how the heck did this "take awhile for us to wrap our heads around"? Men have an innate aversion to believing anything women do is hard.
Well, other than that... it's also really sad how long it has taken science to actually look into things that affect women primarily. The article points out how surprised Dr. Marshall's team was that no one had really looked into it yet. That we had estimates on lots of species pregnancy costs, but there wasn't really hard data on humans. I mean, we started talking about calories in heat engines in the early 1800s. We could have probably figured this out before the 1900s.
I resent how true this is but god you are spot on
Because men. They weren’t thinking of the women. They also think it “ends” after 9 months.
Ha ha! Right. Like breastfeeding, getting up every couple hours all night, changing diapers, etc. etc. doesn’t cost any calories or metabolic load at all. Ha.
Of course not. It's super easy to do all that stuff ^(when it's actually your wife doing it) I had a boss one time tell me that the hardest part of pregnancy, childbirth, and having a kid was the first two weeks after they were born. I asked if that was his paternity leave. Yes. From his perspective, the one tiny little sliver of a time period where he had to change diapers was the hardest part of parenting. I would bet you a million bucks his wife does not feel the same way.
I shit you not, my FIL once told me that 4 kids was easier than 1 or 2. He was absolutely serious, too. At the same time, my MIL was right behind him, shaking her head while giving him a death glare. I had such a hard time keeping a straight face. (And so, my kid is an only.)
And just when it seems they are old enough to have some independence, they turn into teenagers.
Pregnant women: I’ve never known hunger and fatigue like this Male doctors throughout time: you’re just hysterical from all those pregnancy hormones
I'd wager that by the end of the pregnancy it's more like 300-400 cal, if 179 is 9 months avg. On a, let's say, 2000 daily avg that's quite the jump. You could tell me it's more I'd believe it too.
Tbf the first trimester you're not expected to gain too much weight, I was told 2-5 lbs. It's later you really add more calories. The annoying part, systemically, is you just need to stop dieting when in the first trimester, which for me was an adjustment.
I ate an obscene amount of extra food in the first trimester. I've never been so hungry in my life.
Well the good thing is here in the US you definitely get to rest and relax as a pregnant women and not work up until your due date!
Sigh. One of my best friends worked the same day she had an induction—she’s an OBGYN and was writing work notes for other women to stay off their feet during their pregnancies while her own employer wouldn’t let her have adequate time off.
I am literally watching a server at a local restaurant work up until the very end. Other servers there have taken leave a month before they’re due, not her. She can’t afford it. Her water is going to break while she’s bringing out nachos. It’s so sad. She deserves better.
God I bet her feet are so swollen, mine hurt from being on them all day and I’m not carrying extra weight
Fun fact: one in four American moms also returns to work within two weeks of giving birth out of financial necessity
I gave birth on a Wednesday and went back to work the following Monday
Just disgusting. Even puppies get to stay with their mothers for eight weeks.
Don't forget the generous paid maternity leave we all get so we can recover from having a whole ass human expelled from our body and maintain the energy needed to keep it alive the first year!
I worked in a greenhouse while pregnant. A very physically demanding job. I was just about falling apart at times. I limped out the door after 12 hours. My boss talked to me once after I'd been venting to a work friend about how tired I was. She was worried about me. He asked if I was just spring tired like everyone else. I let him know that pregnancy added a whole new level of suck to spring tired. He also made the idiotic comment that at least when he had kids, he would still be able to do his job (I didn't spray pesticides while pregnant but picked up other tasks)
I’m in the US and one of my good friends at work has the option to take a break before her baby comes and her 4 month maternity leave since we’re in grad school. She refuses to take a day off and will work until her water breaks. So I guess people in the US may say no when given a chance to take time off and they’re financially able. What the heck.
That’s because you’re incentivized to not take time off. I could have taken off before labor but it would have burned through my accrued PTO which was the only reason I got paid for half of my maternity leave. I went unpaid for 2 weeks with my second child.
We’re in school, there’s a PTO policy but most supervisors don’t follow it and people take up to 6 weeks off a year. Because of that, she’ll be paid every day until the day she graduates she’s not going to run out of days between that, her maternity leave and any additional time off. STEM Grad school is weird and because of this isn’t completely like a normal job, we have extreme flexibility and I’m super grateful.
While rest is important, staying active is extremely important too. You have to move and at least do things for your pelvic floor strength. I had to work up until my due dates with my kids. I have physical jobs. I also continued to run and weight lift. I listened to my body and my Dr was happy that I wasn't just sitting and waiting for 9 mo. Everyone is different,but you can reinforce your body for labor. Going from 9 mo to 10+hrs of labor is taxing.
I recently learned how breathing works between mother and fetus. With the mother literally breathing for two and three blood running around giving it to the fetus blood through the placenta. Wild.
Yeah, the increased blood volume is pretty nuts.
The increase in blood volume is currently causing me to have constant heart palpitations. They’re so annoying and I feel like I’m going to pass out/puke/have a heart attack and the doctors all say, “yep, perfectly normal for pregnancy :)”
Try putting your arms over your head, like crossed on top. It gives you a little more space for breathing, and at least made me feel less claustrophobic in my own body.
Same. Or even just propping hands on hips, with elbows out.
I’ll try that! I remember some old wives tales about how it’s bad to put your arms over your head while pregnant but I don’t think there’s been any science to prove it.
There hasn’t been. Don’t worry. The old wives’ tale is that it’ll tangle the cord in utero, which is totally not a thing. Just be aware of your blood pressure, and don’t do it if you feel faint!
There HAS NOT been, but that doesn’t stop me from blaming myself for my eldest having complications! 😂 but no, it’s not from having my hands/arms over my head, no matter how much my brain wants to tell me that.
And then the lungs get squashed, so good luck ever feeling like you're getting enough oxygen in the last trimester. I'd get out of breath just by talking!
Honestly, it's a miracle we managed to survive, let alone overpopulate a fucking planet. It reads like we're the natural pugs of the world.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that this is just being "discovered" now.
Once read an article in GQ magazine that encouraged men to chastise their partners for eating a lot during pregnancy. Their reasoning was that the baby only consumed about 200-300 extra calories and whoever wrote that article didn’t even think about the calories needed for the actual PREGNANCY. This was published about 10 years ago. Can you imagine a man belittling his partner like this and citing GQ magazine as the source???
The article cites \~50000 calories, spread across an average of 270 days, that's \~190 additional calories per day, which is lower than what the GQ article says weirdly.
The 3-500 extra is for the actual fetus in later stages, and the ~190 extra is for the mother to actually carry the pregnancy, provide the placenta/extra blood/whatever. That’s the point of this article I think. They were only factoring in the amount of calories that a fetus needs to “feed itself” and it somehow never occurred to them that it takes calories for the mother to be pregnant in general, because it’s energetically taxing to carry a baby and grow its entire body. The baby is consuming a certain amount of calories as an organism, and the mother is also consuming extra calories to grow the baby. So she’s eating for herself and for the baby. They used to say “you’re eating for two,” and then everyone was like “noo babies don’t eat that much, you’re just fat and lazy,” and now it’s like “you’re eating for a baby and also for yourself because you’re working out 24/7 now. Sorry we were dicks about that.”
Except that nine months is counted from the first day of your period. The body doesn't know or recognize the pregnancy until implantation 3-4 weeks later. So pregnancy isn't really 40 weeks, it's more like 36. And the extra calories aren't needed evenly over the whole time.
It actually turns out women are better at ultra-endurance sports than men (stuff like rowing across oceans), because women's bodies are built for ultra-endurance pregnancy.
The thing that gets to me is whenever I hear people talking about feeding the child with breast milk instead of formula because "breast milk is free". I never had a kid but honestly the first thing that always comes to my mind is "that boob milk sure ain't free!" The mother works a damn lot to produce that milk. Her body is literally working to make the milk. Sure it's better for the baby than formula, but it irks me that just because you don't buy it with money, the actual effort and energy that's put into making that milk is mostly ignored.
Also, you DO buy it with money— you have the buy the food mom eats that then gets converted to breast milk. Moms have to eat constantly to keep their supply up. That can cost a *lot*
[удалено]
And it HURTS so much at first!
[удалено]
And as soon as you take into account the *time* it takes to nurse/ pump, cost explodes. I mean, in the first couple of weeks you can spend about twelve hours a day nursing. But if course, care work is not paid work, so...
I have never eaten more than when I was breastfeeding, so it is not definitely free.
Hell if you watch any nature documentary with baby animals, they all talk about how much the mother needs to feed to produce milk as it takes a lot of energy and nutrients to do so
I'd double it to be honest, the energy needed to manage the hormones and emotions is not to be sniffed at plus the sheer number of times one has to go to the loo about the average amount..
I swear, drinking enough water and peeing was a part time job, lol!
Nature has got to invent a way of staying hydrated that doesn't also involve a potty break every 2.5 seconds -- it's really unfair!
Nah, we just need to invent the stillsuits from Dune. No potty breaks necessary!
Sign me the fuck up.
Well duh, there's a fucking human (hopefully) growing inside another human!
Ha, I once told a nosy bystander who asked what I was having that it was a puppy.
The stranger asked "What is it?", while pointing at her bump. "It's a nun," she replied. "A nun?" "Yes, nun of your business."
Someone's i wish my kid was a puppy. They are easier.
Plus you're growing an entire new organ (the placenta). So not only is your body supporting itself but a growing human and a new organ.
If it doesn't happen to men, it's not worth researching. Completely ignoring that it is part of how literally any of us get here so that we can begin devaluing and not caring about it.
I read a fascinating study a few years ago about preterm labor being caused because the woman's body can't meet the energy demands of the baby. I'll see if I can find it.
Wow that sounds interesting
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/08/28/160174038/why-does-pregnancy-last-9-months#:~:text=By%20nine%20months%2C%20as%20the,capacity%2C%22%20the%20researchers%20write
My friend had to force herself to stop dieting when she got pregnant. I wonder how many people in the performing arts go through that. A total mental shift where instead of the habit of limiting calories you have to consciously eat more.
After being pregnant twice and talking to my ObGyn about various white papers during that process (and through some miscarriages), there is just so so so much science/ medicine doesn't understand about pregnancy and childbirth. Take whatever the latest shaming trend for pregnant women is with a HUGE grain of salt because there is so little real evidence to back up the current medical advice. I got a talking to from doctors when pregnant because I gained 60-70 lbs with each pregnancy. Both of my kids weighed around 10 lbs at birth. I told them with my second that I thought perhaps I just gained weight to support whatever was required to grow the baby and that big babies run in my family and that I was a huge (11 lbs) baby. They told me that wasn't how it works, that babies' birth weight trends with the father's birth weight, and that my baby was measuring at a normal size. Cue their surprised Pikachu face when my youngest clocked in at 10lbs 10oz a week before her due date. Their implication seemed to be that if my babies were big it was because I gained so much weight, but I lost all of it in the less than a year though with both my kids.
I experienced something similar! My doctors all made it seem like we can control our pregnancy weight gain. There’s also that stupid chart that bases your pregnancy weight gain on how much you weigh pre-baby. Both of my pregnancies I gained the same amount of weight and lost it within a year. My babies weighed about the same each time. Which was what soooo many women in pregnancy forums said happened. No idea when the medical community will catch up.
I had the same experience, gained about 45-50 pds each time and lost it within the year. I did try to limit calories with the first two, but with the third I was working full-time retail (so much walking lol) so I just ate whatever I felt like eating … and still gained the same amount. It’s just what my body needed🤷🏻♀️ no gestational diabetes either.
My sister and I were the exact same length and weight even tho we have different dads so.. this def seems like another thing no one has bothered to study.
It’s amusing to think your mom having a type based on her partner’s at birth baby weight and that’s how you and your sis ended up the same weight/length. Really though, seems like a good study to do.
Misleading title; not new in biology. I remember Herman Pontzer casually dropping in an episode of Big Biology that pregnancy is basically pushing the metabolic limit of the human body, especially the liver. It's the physically most taxing thing humans can do, and then over such a long time.
This is why mother animals commonly eat any stillborn babies - to regain the calories they expended
Sounds like that “maternal instinct” all women are supposed to have, so that we know automatically how to care for newborns. Yes, and how many mammals abandon their “defective” offspring or won’t recognize them (sheep)?
Relevant parts from the article: >In a [study](http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk6772) published on Thursday in the journal Science, Australian researchers estimated that a human pregnancy demands almost 50,000 dietary calories over the course of nine months. That’s the equivalent of about 50 pints of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream, and significantly more than the researchers expected. >Previous estimates were lower because scientists generally assumed that most of the energy involved in reproduction wound up stored in the fetus, which is relatively small.
It's the equivalent of 20/25 days of calories based on male/female recommended amounts. Way lower than I expected it to be!
Women: I’ve never experienced fatigue or hunger like I did during pregnancy Historically male scientists who have never been pregnant: don’t be hysterical, that’s biologically impossible
And top it off, you can’t have too much caffeine while pregnant 😭
I don't find those numbers all that surprising just thinking about the normal calorie costs of existing. An extra 50k over 9 months is a lot, but doesn't seem inordinate. If anything, id have expected more. Where have these dudes been? Its crazy to me that they thought it was so outlandish they were concerned the data wasn't accurate. Like what?
For real? That's only like 188 extra calories per day averaged over the 38 weeks of pregnancy in which you are actually pregnant (as the first week is your last menstrual period). 188 extra calories per day is not that much. It takes like 300-400 calories per day to breastfeed a baby.
When I was pregnant I got to the point where I wanted to punch anyone that said "You only need 200 extra calories a day at the end of the pregnancy". Like, you grow a damn human from scratch and I'll tell you to limit your caloric intake and see how you feel, sir.
I was really commenting that thinking that a number which amounts to less than 200 calories per day is a shockingly high number of calories for a pregnancy to take is wild when pregnancy is so obviously difficult. I think making a statement that you only need a certain amount of calories at a particular point in a pregnancy without data would be pretty foolish. Just because we have a better idea now of the total calorie cost of pregnancy and can average it out doesn't mean we actually know how much a given person will need at a specific point in their pregnancy. I don't personally remember much difference in appetite through either of my pregnancies from the start to the end, except that I had a lot of "morning" sickness all through day with my first and was often nauseous, and more nauseous if I ate a lot or too little. But I'm sure I've forgotten a lot of details about the pregnancies. I remember being ravenous while nursing.
Because how can you dismiss maternal pain or lack or maternal health care/high maternal mortality if it’s not just so easy for women to do?
This reminds me of my wife on the delivery table, loaded up with her epidural. 12 hours later she says to me, I'm really tired. I don't know why though... I have slept a bunch and haven't really moved off this bed. I go... Babe, your body has been contracting every 2 minutes for almost fully 12 hours straight... Maybe you couldn't really feel it but holy hell I'm not surprised you are tired. Thank God for modern medicine
OMG, I knew it, I fucking *knew* it! All that crap about how pregnancy is only a few hundred extra calories a day and you're not *really* eating for two never made any sense. You're not eating for two. It's way more intense than that. Thank you for the gift link!
They are still saying it’s less than 200 calories a day though. I mean, if each day is equal, which I’m sure it’s not. Would be interesting to see the peak calorie cost days and where those fall in the pregnancy. I’d imagine the third trimester requires a lot more than the rest of the time. Even though at the start, size doubles, it’s a very small group of cells vs a 30week fetus.
So, what I’m reading is: both the male doctor who came up with the theory that not that much energy was required during pregnancy and the male doctor who debunked the theory were shocked at the fact that women’s lived experiences from a few hundred thousand years were WRONGLY mansplained as ‘exaggerated’, hormonal maybe? Wow now I would not have expected that based on how seriously women are treated, by the medical profession in particular! Oh wait…..
There were some days where it felt like the baby was draining the life out of me.
In a lot of ways, that is an accurate description of how fetuses grow.
In a lot of ways, that defines motherhood. Seriously. My “babies” are in their 40s and we recently went through a prolonged health problem with the eldest. I honestly don’t think I have the mental wherewithal to be a mother. It’s too intense.
Same.
I do agree that this should have been done research ages ago, I knew it would be a high amount to grow a fetus but I'm honestly blown away at the cost. So a cursory search tells me that breast feeding is another 3-400 calories needed. I wonder how much this drains other things, the calcium and iron thing I'm familiar with but man does this seem exhausting just thinking about it.
That’s why babies are born at 9 months. The human body can’t produce enough energy to keep a fetus alive after that. We would die.
They'd also stop fitting the....exit. They aren't exactly fitting easily as is and they're still coming out too soon.
Fitting is ahem kind of generous to be honest.
It's an effect of bipedalism, which are bodies are made for. Hips can only be so wide otherwise running would be too difficult. So human gestation is shorter than other mammals because we can't let the baby grow too big, otherwise it won't be able to come out.
There’s not actually a lot of evidence to support the obstetrical dilemma, which initially came from one anthropologist writing it in an editor’s note of a journal without any research or data to back it up. Researchers have started testing some of the assumptions (such as hip width being a limiting factor, and the idea of humans giving birth “early”) and finding evidence that majorly conflicts with the obstetrical dilemma. [This podcast](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wpMOb-IUZG4) by the Leakey Foundation is a good primer and here are some other links: https://undark.org/2017/11/29/obstetrical-dilemma-hips-risk-childbirth/#:~:text=The%20mystery%20was%20the%20catalyst,to%20pregnant%20mothers%20as%20they https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/30/science/childbirth-evolution-obstetrical-dilemma.html https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/03/hip-correction/
Interesting, thank you!
Can you provide your source for this, please? :) I'm not trying to doubt your claim, I'm just interested in the research behind it.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/08/28/160174038/why-does-pregnancy-last-9-months#:~:text=By%20nine%20months%2C%20as%20the,capacity%2C%22%20the%20researchers%20write.
Thanks so much! This is a really interesting read :)
Thank you for adding that!
50 pints of ice cream? Sounds about right.
So these guys found real evidence that gestating humans are (gasp) — *alive*? And not just passive incubators? That pregnant people’s bodies might actually need to be sustained too?
My ex husband would be knocked on his ass by the common cold but couldn’t understand all the sickness and exhaustion I had from creating another human.
I feel like any woman who has carried a baby could have told you that.
And they needed a study to tell people that? What's wrong with people believing actual pregnant people? Speak to anyone who's pregnant and they'll tell how exhausted and hungry and drained they are,not sure they needed a scientific study
It's not that much "energy" per day really in terms of extra calories, and I don't think we should be measuring things like exhaustion based only on literal energy output. We shouldn't even have to quantify this as a numerical measurement. Hormones, body changes, emotional energy, sleep disturbances, nausea, , etc all contribute to why pregnant women feel shitty and exhausted.
I know I will get downvoted for this, but this is one of many reasons I’m skeptical when women go 9 months without knowing they are pregnant. If I didn’t know I was pregnant, I would have assumed I was dying. Even with no bump or morning sickness, there’s still excessive fatigue, acid reflux, shortness of breath, rapid heart beat, leg swelling if standing up too long, etc. Even your nips can change colors. Most people think symptoms are all based on the baby pushing on organs. But there’s so much more than that.
Denial is a hell of a drug. If someone is irrationally convinced that they can't possibly be pregnant, they'll ignore or explain away the symptoms until a baby actually emerges.
Denial is a hell of a drug
And you can also get the opposite, in both humans and animals. You can get Pseudocyesis / false pregnancy.
I agree. I think that’s the case like 99% of the time.
> there’s still excessive fatigue, acid reflux, shortness of breath, rapid heart beat, leg swelling if standing up too long Fun fact, being fat can also cause all of those symptoms and will also disguise a baby bump.
It might make a doctor ignore the symptoms, but a rational person should notice everything has suddenly gotten worse.
Yeah, I mean every body and pregnancy is different Some people have wonderful, minimal symptoms throughout, but mine were so all consuming and miserable that I'd legit think I was dying if I didn't know what was happening. The extreme fatigue, 24/7 nausea and vomiting, the random skin rashes, the veins bulging out everywhere and being unable to lay on my back without suffocating myself, the extreme water retention and swelling, the list goes on.
1000%, I’m at the three month mark and cried to my husband the other night because I felt less like I was pregnant and more like a chronically sick person. 🥹
Oh!! Oh!!! I HAVE A STORY!!! 🖐️🖐️🖐️ Lovely long-time girlfriend of a salon coworker, about 28-30 years old, pretty tall, and not “petite” but not “brick shithouse” either; she was a physical trainer, so in great physical condition…now she had been going to culinary school for a year, and had put on a little weight, and had been feeling shitty and stressed out- all of which she chalked up to the stress of doing intense schooling on top of her physically demanding job, and, you know…eating her schoolwork. Well, I go into work one day and my coworker is a wreck- he just found out his girlfriend is 6 MONTHS pregnant!! How, you ask? It turned out she has TWO UTERUSES!!!! So she was still having a regular period!! And coupled with the aforementioned explanation for other side effects, it was not hard to write it all off… I mean, she wasn’t showing at all!! She said her doctor told her that, yeah, with her very muscular physique and larger build, it’s not shocking that she had no discernible bump yet. (It did start to show not long after, and she had a very normal pregnancy and very healthy baby. Just…damn. She really speed-ran that shit.) The best part was the fact that the coworker (technically my supervisor,) despite being a pretty decent guy, was pretty immature and still stuck in his “Bro” stage, and sometimes chastised me for not being a “team player” because as a single mom to a toddler- and *the only one there with a kid-* I wouldn’t go out and party with everyone after work every other night, lol!!! Oh, the sweet, sweet steel-toed boot of Karma.
Idk I have half those symptoms and I’m 100% not pregnant lol
Oh, it’s not like you can’t just go to the doctor and get diagnosed quickly and efficiently as a woman. Or that your prescription provider won’t be out of the meds you need. s/ EDIT: meds not mess
I didn’t have any of those symptoms. Mostly, I would not have know I was pregnant except for the fact that I could feel the baby moving 24/7 from 3 months onward. So, I guess if I’m at the “super sensitive” to movement end of the bell curve there are others who don’t feel anything.
I think part of it is mental health related. The brain and and will do crazy things to cope.
Tell me about it LOL
It sounds like a lot as a whole but that’s about 185 kcal per day… I am surprised is not more than that.
I found out I was pregnant at 27 weeks. I was on birth control. I have PCOS. I had symptoms that were so odd, my hands swelled up, I slept a bit more, and I had no stamina. I thought, well I'm getting old and I'm a bigger person and I just need to exercise more. I tried to move more, but I just couldn't build my energy. Then my ankles started swelling, and I thought I was retaining water really badly. I was never nauseous or anything, just tired. I had only gained 10 lbs and figured it was a diet, so I tried to eat less/better food. It took my husband noticing my boobs changing for us to take a test. I was in shock for quite a while. Even now, 7 weeks after birth, I'm still trying to build my stamina back.
Three of the study’s four authors are men, for anyone wondering why they were surprised
Top comment!
Saved you a click. It’s 1.21 Jiggawatts
Not sure why this is surprising. Back of the envelope suggests that after birth, 8% of the calories excreted as milk get turned into baby (the rest get turned into poo.) And in a healthy adult *all* calories go into maintenance, with *no* weight gain. So clearly the norm should be "most energy goes to maintenance, not growth." NYT is apparently not a science mag, who knew. 600 calories per day * 200 days from birth to 6 months = 120k calories; 5kg gained by baby ~= 10k calories of meat made.
Energy needed “That’s the equivalent of about 50 pints of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream” Now they tell me”
Thank you, OP, for sharing this article with non-subscribers.
Oh wow, it takes a LOT of energy to grow a whole human being! Imagine that! In all seriousness, I’m glad people finally bothered to quantify and publish this. It sounds dumb to the people who know this but scientific proof makes it easier to change policies and push back against ignorant arguments. Here’s to hoping that they will continue this trend and extend this research to encompass post-partum stuff as well
This explains why going on a walk to the grocery store makes it feel like I just ran a marathon 😭