dietary guidelines from Britain-- interesting - Page 2

[fertilemyrtle]

Erigeron,

I agree with a lot of your sentiment :)   As a pregnant woman who hasn't had an eating disorder, but has definitely had some "disordered thinking" around eating, it's tough to be balanced.   I just think the balance should go both ways - some of my yoga students get chastised for not gaining enough, but have perfectly healthy babies.   i'm just not a fan of such a limited interval of weight 25-35 pounds.   And I'm not a fan of calculations like "eat 300 extra calories a day."   I don't think that works for most people, for a variety of reasons (do you know how much you were eating before?  What if that doesn't feel like enough?  what if it feels like too much? What if your exercising has changed? what if those calories are all sugar?).  

FWIW, a lot of people I know who have gained 40+ pounds worked with great providers who didn't care about the numbers - they were only concerned about the quality of the food.  

That's what I'm concerned about too.  Yep, you've got to live!   have some cake!  Have some chips!   But for me, not too much.   I think we do just eat too much of it.   I'm focusing myself and my family on those things being exceptions to our diet, which is tough because it's more readily available than an orange when you're on the go and looking for some food.  

[erigeron]

Agreed, chastising someone for gaining too little weight is also silly. What's she supposed to do, go home and binge on Twinkies? I think it's about meeting the needs of your own personal body and baby, not matching a number on a scale.

A friend of mine was overweight when she got pregnant with her son, and said that after he was born, she weighed a little less than before she'd gotten pregnant.

[Smokering]

I don't think I buy that a lot of people eat WAY more calories than they need. I calculated it and for a person to gain 5 lbs/year they would have to eat around an extra 50 calories a day, which is, oh, a tangerine or a small piece of cheese. Someone would have to be gaining at the rate of 30 lbs/year or more to have enough "extra" calories in their diet to support a growing baby without altering their diet.

There are a lot of people who gain considerably more than 5 pounds a year...

I don't know, this whole conversation sort of gets my back up a little just because the right to eat what you want and what your body asks for and not feel guilty is very much under fire for comparatively affluent women in contemporary "Western" society. In many places in the world today people are dying of starvation, but middle-class Westerners are guilting each other (and being guilted by the patriarchal-industrial complex) about eating a few extra potato chips, vilifying "carbs", and in general advancing this ethic that seems to treat food as this necessary evil. The natural endpoint of this seems to be the idea that calories and fat aren't really necessary and that if you eat them you're weak. And that way anorexia lies. I realize that nobody in this thread is advocating we go that far, but I do hear a bit of "why do we need those pesky calorie things, anyway?" sort of rhetoric and I think that has been stuffed into our brains from day one. Calories aren't the enemy. We need a certain number... and they taste good. And that's not bad. My sister is a very intelligent and logical person, but when she was in high school she drew the conclusion that if it's better to eat 50 grams of fat a day than 100, it's better to eat 0 than 50, and adjusted her diet accordingly. It really, really bothers me that we live in a society with such messages that somebody can even draw such a ludicrous conclusion.

I haven't picked up that vibe from this thread at all. More of an annoyance that doctors offer a one-size-fits-all recommended weight gain to pregnant women, when that just doesn't make sense. Some women don't need to gain any weight while pregnant, because maintaining or even losing their PP weight will still allow for enough nourishment for mother and baby. Other women might need to gain a fair bit more than recommended, if they started off with depleted nutrient stores, are expecting to lose weight dramatically during the first few weeks of breastfeeding, are expecting twins, etc.

I'm vaguely Traditional Foods-minded, so I'm not at all anti-fat or anti-food; but this thread is about dietary guidelines, and if we're discussing them, some foods are more "evil" than others. I don't avoid MSG while pregnant because of the "patriarchal-industrial complex", I avoid it because it's bad for my baby. It seems silly that the British dietary guidelines ignore stuff like that, while giving a blanket statement on weight gain for pregnant women.

[frugalmum]

The average American consumes nearly 4000 calories a day, and the consumption has risen 17% since the 1970s while the average activity level has gone down.  4000 a day is close to twice what your average, moderately active woman needs to sustain body function and activity (excluding extremely active/ athletic women).  I am 5'8" and require 1800 cal a day to maintain my body weight. 

When a population that is already overeating is advised to eat 300-500 extra calories a day to sustain a pregnancy, this is asking for trouble.  Particularly when most have no idea how many calories they need in the first place for maintenance, and most people have no idea how many calories they're already consuming.  They just hear "eat more" and go with it.  I also think it's a bad idea to insinuate that anyone who cares to speak up on this issue is somehow promoting anorexia.  There shouldn't be any shame in wanting to stay fit and a healthy weight.  There are so many health benefits to be had from it, particularly during pregnancy where obesity is the main cause of complications, at least in the US. 

If there are 3500 cal in a pound of body weight, and the baby is 7 pounds, that's 24,500 calories to produce the weight of the baby.  That averages about 600 a week over 40 weeks, less than 100 extra calories a day.  And most women in the developed world have some extra pounds that could be metabolized in the event the caloric "extra" is not met.  Morbidly obese women can not gain any weight, or even lose weight, while pregnant, and produce a healthy baby.  So I don't think the idea of extra food = a healthy baby is so clear cut. 

[erigeron]

Is that the average American who eats 4000 calories a day, or the average American man? What about the average American woman? Especially given that women in our society are pretty widely encouraged to be on a more or less perma-diet? If that's an average, there are people above and below it, so what percent of women are not overeating?

I'm pretty sure that the guidelines to eat 300 extra calories a day are not meant to be applied to people who are overeating at baseline. It's 300 calories a day over the normal recommended intake.

Also, being pregnant isn't just about creating baby's body (and more amniotic fluid, and more blood, and more breast tissue), but also sustaining it metabolically, and that requires extra calories. 

All that aside, I have a hard time believing that not eating when ravenous can ever be healthy for a person, and if she's pregnant, that it can be healthy for her fetus either. All this abstract discussion of what we should and shouldn't be eating externalizes the question and encourages us to listen to any other source for advice rather than to our own bodies, and that is a big way that disordered and unhealthy eating of various varieties gets started. If I've eaten my 300 extra calories for the day and had plenty of fluids and I'm still ravenous (not peckish, not moderately hungry, but so hungry I can barely function and am scared I'll pass out if I stand up too long), am I still supposed to pay attention to the dietary recommendations by some experts who have never been inside my personal body gestating my personal baby? On MDC, we tend to give a lot of credence to the idea of knowing what our own bodies need and what's going on with them--why doesn't that extend to knowing when they need us to feed them?