Ok this wont be really important to me for at least another month but dh and I are going to start trying to get pregnant again in january. I know your not supposed to technically diet when your pregnant but I've gotten so used to watching everything I eat that I think it's gonna be hard for me not to plus I don't want to gain 60 pounds like I did with each of my first to. I've done so well, losing 20 pounds and I'm still a long way away from my goal. I don't want to use pregnancy as a license to go back to a food free for all, so I plan on continuing to monitor my intake and I'm just wondering what is the range I should be shooting for calorie and fat wise during pregnancy. I do plan on asking my doctor about this when we start meds again in 3 weeks but I thought I'd ask you ladies first to get a rough idea. Right now I'm eating in the 1200-1700 range but more often than not I'm right around 1500.

Thanks and congrats to everyone here I hope to be officially joining you by the end of january.

Hmm, hard to say. I keep hearing you should add 300 calories, but it's very hard for me to believe that pregnancy--which is, after all, creating an entire new person--requires fewer calories than does breastfeeding, which is an additional 500. So I would personally go with the higher number. Well, actually, personally I would resist the urge to count calories and instead concentrate on eating healthy, "real" foods (i.e. fruits, veggies, meat, whole grains as opposed to stuff like Velveeta or Lucky Charms).

I agree with Sabra. I think paying attention to what you eat, rather than how much, would be better for the pregnancy. The hard part is not giving into the cravings for chocolate and ice cream

Don't you worry about watching what your eating and not eating enough? That's also part of my though process. I'm afraid that if I don't monitor but just watch what I'm eating that I might not realize that I'm not eating enough. Of course I have no intention on eating like I do now. I know when pregnant I'll need to eat more and that if I'm hungry I'm gonna eat with the occasional splurge thrown in. But like I said I don't want to eat too little either.

I agree with Sabra-eat healthy food. I agree with her that you should eat at leat 500 more cal a day. I think If you stick between 2000 and 2500 you should be ok. Remeber to ask your doc and if it ok with him/her you can do light exercise during the pregnancy too. (If you have already been exercising-not good to start when you are preg)

I did worry about not eating enough, honestly. It's always hard for me, between bad morning sickness & this last time especially with my uterus getting huge early on (3 pregnancies will do that to ya ) I didn't have much of an appetite after that, usually.

This is what I have tried to go by as best I could these last two pregnancies: Brewer Diet for a Healthy Pregnancy. The pages are a bit alarmist, but I appreciated the guidance not only on what to eat, but how much. This diet is supposed to help prevent preeclampsia. There's no clinical evidence that it does, but the anecdotal evidence is pretty good, and I can say personally that I had no reoccurrence of the problem while following this as best I could in my 2nd & 3rd pregnancies. Definitely something to talk about with your doctor though.

Thanks everyone! I can't wait till I can get in and talk to him about this. Well ok it's more that I can't wait to have a reason to talk to him about this. I'm so excited that we get to start trying again next month. Hopefully we'll get lucky this weekend and have a christmas conception but I am still betting that we'll be back for more fertility treatments next month.

Can anyone tell me, does it really increase your chances of getting pregnant the less you weigh? I heard this somewhere but don't remember where.

There's really no evidence to totally convince me one way or another, but there are enough women who have gotten pregnant right before hitting their goal weight that I think there just might be something to it.

I think a lot of times being overweight can either help screw up your hormones or else be a sign something is wrong with them. I have PCOS, and that can cause you to gain weight. Getting it under control (through nutrition in my case; I don't think it is very severe with me) helped me lose weight and get pregnant. BUT I was at my highest weight-->250--when I got pregnant the first time. So I really don't know.

But in case you ever feel bad about being maybe too fat to get pregnant, keep in mind it's equally possible to be too skinny to get pregnant. Extremes on either end of the scale (pun unintended) are probably damaging to fertility.

Hyperemesis gravida. It's how I lost 33 pounds in the first trimester of my first pregnancy. That baby was 6 pounds at birth, but she may well have been a bit premature.

You're right, though, that the baby will take what s/he needs and mama will get whatever's left over. Which is not to say that you should limit yourself on purpose.

Thanks again ladies. I'll be talking with him one way or another in 2 weeks so I'll make sure to discuss with him then.

Hi
I am uncertain about the liver in the brewers diet. It is dangerous to eat high amounts of vitamin a in pregnancy as it causes deformities and liver is full of it.
I gained a very small amount of weight in my first and second trimesters but (from 232 to 245) but in the last eight weeks without altering my diet much I went upto 264. i did not diet but was sick in the first trimester.
I am now 17 weeks prego with number 2 and am 252. I have just read that overweight women can focus on maintaining their weight not gaining, then after the birth you can be 10kgs less. I dont know about that.
Good luck with conceiving I am sure it wont be too long.

Hmm, sometimes it amazes me how much different countries differ in what's considered healthy. I remember an acquaintance in New Zealand saying something about large amounts of soy being discouraged where she's from, and here it tends to be an attitude of "the more the better."

The thing with liver being recommended for pregnant women here is that it is rich in iron, and iron-deficiency anemia is fairly common. I do note that the diet doesn't list it as a necessity (it says once a week "if you like it"). I only had it once this last pregnancy because my hubby doesn't like it. So if you've got any concerns you can easily ignore it. I never managed to follow it completely--I was never able to eat so much--but it was good for those times when I was wondering if I managed to get enough.

I do know from experience that the entire subject of overweight women gaining weight during pregnancy is a controversial one and really always has been. Back when my MIL was pregnant with my husband, she was deemed overweight by her doctors (and at 5'7" & 150, she wasn't overweight by any sane measure) and put on a 1,000-calorie-a-day diet. Keep in mind that nowadays nonpregnant women are counselled to not go under 1,200 a day. I've heard the "gain no weight" thing, and I've heard "gain 15 pounds" and I've even heard that normal weight women should aim for 35 pounds and overweight women 25. It's enough to make your head explode.

I agree Big Monster Momma, in the last trimester it would be nearly impossible to maintain.

Did you have preeclampsia? I had that with my first, and I think that was the only reason I gained any weight that pregnancy. I say this because I was 242 the day I delivered (started out at 252, then went down to 219 because of the HE), and a week later I was way down to 219 again! It had to have been just about totally water weight, or there's no way on Earth it would have just disappeared like that. Pre-E can make things really freaking weird at the end of pregnancy.

That sucks. You can have pre-E without having sky-high blood pressure. I remember one monitoring session in labor & delivery where the only time I had a really high reading was for the one they took when the corpsman was coming at me with a needle to draw blood. I was told with my second pregnancy that they no longer look at swelling as a sign of pre-E (it's one of the things I was told to monitor the first time, & my rings didn't get tight til I started developing it), but rapid weight gain is a hard sign of it, and really it's not too hard to check for protein in urine. I was right on the border of full-blown eclampsia too, because I was getting these headaches so bad they were throwing my vision off, not to mention the dizziness & all...

But yeah, I understand bitterness. It's why I made plans this last time around for midwife care/home birth (even though I wound up going to the hospital, it was my choice in the end, which meant a lot). I just wasn't brave enough to schedule another hospital birth after the first two!