Pregnancy Weight Gain, Post-Eating Disorder

Pregnancy weight gain.  From what I hear, it's not particularly comfortable for a lot of people, eating disorder history or no.  But I think we'd be kidding ourselves if we said that ED history doesn't potentially level up the challenge.

During my first trimester, initially I lost weight (once the 10 lbs. of free fluid from OHSS finally cleared out of my abdomen) and ended up almost even, a little over baseline.  Now about four weeks into my second trimester, I seem to have hit a weight gain stride.

So that's been interesting.

It spurs an intimately familiar thought pattern:  "I gained X.  That means I'm going to gain X+infinity."  Except that's not how it works.  That's never how it works.  But it's reminiscent of ED thought patterns.  "They want me to gain X.  I know I'm not going to stop at X.  I'm just going to keep gaining and gaining and it'll be totally out of my control. You'll see.  I can't trust my body.  It has no idea what it's doing. I have to keep it under control."

The concrete difference here is that I have no desire to control in a disordered way.  During my eating disordered years, even when I wasn't engaging in disordered behavior, the trap of wanting to was always ready to spring.   But now it's not so much as lurking underfoot.  I mean, thank goodness, don't get me wrong.  But color me surprised.

Anyway.  For now, I'm just rolling along doing what I'm doing.  I passed the early glucose challenge test (with PCOS you take one around 14-16 weeks, in addition to the normal one later on).  We had a normal anatomy scan a week ago (for some reason my practice does two, the next one at the standard 20-22 weeks).  Everything's clearly going okay so far.  (Except the heartburn.  It can fuck right off.)

So really I'm back, in this new strange way, to a very familiar spot:  Trust your body.  It can do this.  You can do this.  Other people have done this! And they did just fine!  The more things change...