to be completely shocked and disgusted at the leaflet I've just been given by my mw???

[mummylovesnancy]

This leaflet, titled 'Raised BMI in Pregnancy' was passed on to me by my midwife at my booking in appointment yesterday. Along with the words 'You can't have a home birth, you probably won't deliver naturally and you'll be given consultant led care.'
I'm 28, I have 2 PERFECTLY healthy children who both have perfect height to weight ratios, eat well, are active and are generally normal children. I weigh 13st and I'm 5'2 which puts me in the 'obese' catagory according to the good ol' BMI index of wonder. I have been roughly this weight and exactly this height for all of my adult life. I am overweight, I accept that, but what I don't accept is being told to read this sodding leaflet which tells me, among various other little pearlers, that:
*I will have raised blood pressure. (Not 'I may', 'I WILL')
*I will be prone to urinary tract infections. (never had one in my life!)
*'Bigger Ladies' (exact wordage) get more blood clots. (Dumb Fuck)
*Examinations will be difficult. (Why? Because you have to part all my layers of fat to get to my vag?! How fucking degrading)
*I will have restricted mobilisation. (Will I? Because I don't now, will it automatically come with being fat and preggers?)
*Putting in a drip will be difficult. (yeah because my hands are so freaking chubby.)
*Breastfeeding will be challenging (I've managed it with two babies, now because you've changed your guidelines I think I might struggle.)
And my favourite one yet:
*The risk of stillbirth or your baby dying in the first 28 days is increased in 'larger ladies' (Thanks for that one, nhs, I just had a misscarriage 8 weeks ago. Was it because I'm fat?)

It also mentions on about 7 occasions that I may want an epidural. Is that to keep me quiet?! It also offers to refer me to a dietician and a counsellor.

I have been overweight (or a larger or bigger lady, as the nhs prefers) and given birth naturally twice with absolutely no complications and one of them was a home birth. I can't believe I have to read all this shit. The idiot who wrote this doesn't even know how to place an apostrophe or comma ffs!

Does anyone agree with me that this is a disgusting, degrading, scare mongering piece of shit or am I being an unreasonable pregnant wreck??

"Once upon a time, food was just something you had to survive. Now its about pleasure."

I don't know about you quietly, but I eat food because I'd die if I didn't. Survival is pretty much the reason to eat. Even in the 21st century.

Food now is supposed to taste nice. We don't eat something that tastes horrible in 21st century British. We demand it is pleasant. That's why we add stuff to everything to make it taste better. Thats a modern thing. It is a pleasure thing.

Eating for pleasure even in victorian era was the preserve of the privileged (and part of the reason why culturally being fat was seen as attractive during the time as it was associated with status).

If you really ate to survive, you wouldn't be here arguing against everyone who says we should be careful how much we eat.

Quietly-I think you talk a lot of sense. I know I shouldn't eat everything on my plate-especially if it's a massive helping. If it tastes good, I find it hard to "deny" myself, unless I am very uncomfortably full, as opposed to seeing having a cut off point however hard, as an "investment" in my body from a health and aesthetic point of view. What you describe is having a modicum of discipline....self awareness, being able to diffrentiate from genuine hunger and eating for eating sake. I want to do that.

Thunder-I did not deny myself food. That is the point. I ate plentifully and well. My cravings for crusty bread, cakes etc diminished after day 5. That's not to say I didn't fleetingly think of bread when I had my soup or a "dippy" egg. I have a self destructive streak. When the weight stalled, instead of thinking of the 10lbs I had already lost, and going onwards and upwards I thought of what I was giving up. I believe I am psychologically and physically addicted to carbohydrate rich food-esp bread-all kinds-I don't eat white, plastic bread though, and the only way I will take control of my weight (and keep it off) long term is to reduce them significantly. For life. I know people that have cracked it, and I want to be one of them.

I don't think you can use the hideous social inequalities of Victorian England as an example of what food means to human beings. First we've had the Paleolithic diet being used to justify the idea that apparently if we don't exercise an iron will our appetities will run away with us. Now Victorians prove that supposedly the idea of food being a pleasure is only a century old.

The reason we have tastebuds is because food tastes good to us. You think stone age people didn't enjoy a bit of roast meat cooked on their fire, or the nuts they found in the forest. I bet they did.

From an evolutionary point of view, the reason we have tastebuds is to prevent ourselves from being poisoned.

It's got bugger all to do with food tasting good

Thats a modern thing. It is a pleasure thing.

Nah. My female ancestors were astonishingly good (working class) cooks who made food taste magnificent - so I don't know where the idea that tasty food was only for the rich comes from.

The main difference between now and days of yore is our sedentary lifestyle. We don't even get up to change the bloody TV channels anymore.
We also have idiotic amounts of food choice.
I remember my first trip to the USA as a kid in the 70s and being dazzled by the fact they had a whole supermarket aisle devoted to just breakfast cereals - something we consider perfectly normal now.
Supermarkets have to shoulder a lot of the blame for impulse purchases, ultra cheap food (8p for a packet of bisuits) and the fetishisation of food (M&S very good at that).

You did deny yourself food delicious, you denied yourself a whole food group which you then binged on. Seriously pay attention to your body. It will tell you what you need. It did then.

Carbohydrates are not the enemy, that's just another disfunctional food attitude created by people who have issues around food. Whole nations' diets are based on carbohydrates - Chinese, Italians, Indians, French for example - weirdly enough they've managed those diets for centuries without any issues around weight.

Did you look at the page I linked to, or are you just not interested. Because lots of people who have eaten that way have lost serious amounts of weight if that's what you're interested in and not only that have mended their relationship to food at the same time.

What you're proposing is spending a life time of discipline and will and self denial which will lead you to think about food constantly. If that's what you want go for it, but I wouldn't recommend it. And I'm saying it here because there are obviously weight loss diet evangelists on this thread and I think they need to be countered. Dieting for weight loss through deprivation (calorie control or removing a food group) is not a good thing.

surely the poisoning-prevention works through the mechanism of pleasure? The sweet foods are generally good and the bitter ones are bad.

That book you link too is about calorie control.
If you follow the rules, you eat less calories overall.

No sweets, no snacks, no seconds; if that's no calorie control, I don't know what is.

Oh yeah Soupy, that's why we can taste salt and sweetness and umami. Because they are all poison detectors.

There are food haters on this thread. Not just fat haters.

Nature loves us, she wants our food to taste good to us and always has done.

You avoid the bitter foods because they taste bad.
Most poisons (plant based ones, rather than modern day synthetic ones) are bitter tasting because of the very nature of the chemicals that poison you.

It's not about pleasure from sweet foods, it's about avoiding death from bitter foods although you could also enjoy sweet foods too.

If poisons were naturally bitter, many more hunter gatherer would have died from them because they would have been less detectable.

No it isn't.

He says you eat three meals a day, with snacks, sugary things and sweets reserved for the weekend and special days.

He doesn't say how large the portion sizes are or the content of the meals.

It would be quite possible to eat a huge amount of calories if that's what you chose to do.

What it actually does is set up reasonable habits with food and avoid the feeling of deprivation that weight loss calorie controlled dieting gives.

French cuisine is based on carbohydrates, is it, thunder?

So you think the pleasure response to sweetness only developed in the last century Soupy?

Even bitter can taste good. Bitter leaves in salad are delicious.

Have you been on many diets Soupy.

Yes it is.

No snacks, no sweets and no seconds. 5 days a week.

THAT IS CALORIE CONTROL. You may not see it as that, but that's exactly what it is.

Dear god!

What about your view that you should eat what you want and need? What if you want a sweet snack?

There are food haters on this thread. Not just fat haters.
Nature loves us

Hilarious. Absoutely hilarious.
How can anyone write shit like that without any whiff of irony?!

No thunder no diets.

I tall, size 12 and quite athletic.

I'm also lactose intolerant so can't do dairy (much to my dismay) but other than that, anything goes.

Yes bitter salad leaves are delicious.

But most plant based poisons are bitter, so if you didn't have definitive evidence of it being safe either way, 5000 years ago, you'd have avoided the bitter leaves.

Someone tell Cote about the French Revolution when they cut off their King's head for the want of bread. It was the staple of the peasant diet. I bet it tasted good too.

Soupy it isn't calorie control. If you can't fit a large amounts of calories into three meals a day and all the snacks sweets and whatever you want at the weekend you're just not trying hard enough.

Are you a scientist BTW.

The reason we have tastebuds is because food tastes good to us. You think stone age people didn't enjoy a bit of roast meat cooked on their fire, or the nuts they found in the forest. I bet they did.

I bet they did. But they also didn't deliberately use science to exaggerate that effect. They didn't use flavour combinations in quite the same we do now. The japanese have made it into a real artform - by combining the 5 areas of your taste buds. And we have invented stuff like MSG.

deliciousdevilwoman, I want to be very careful with what I say here, as I don't have full understanding of the place you are at, and I think to suggest I do, is wrong. The only thing I can say, is I think viewing it as 'denying yourself' or restricting anything is the wrong mental place. I think it has to be a shift to asking yourself, 'do i really need this?' and viewing it as an achievement to leave something - even if its one mouthful or two and go from there. If you see something left on your plate I think it does kind of start changing the way you see things. Slow process. I hate the idea of wasting food but I've got it into my head thats not my fault now. I never used to do it when I ate out, and I enjoy eating out more now. I don't calorie count, but I am calorie aware. I've no magic solution and I know I'm incredibly lucky. I wish I had more to offer to actually help.

FWIW thunder your heart and your mind seem to be in the right place, I just find it so odd that you never concede on any points and there have been many relevant and facxtually correct rebuttals to you on this which you absolutely refuse to take on board.

You got cross about the implication that you were greedy, yet you found it ok to say that someone who eats reasonable portions and gets their five a days and stops when they're full, soulless (or something very similar to that effect)!

Do you really not see the irony there?

It's ok to eat the way you want, as long as it's thunders way. That's how it seems to me.

Of course it is calorie control. It's telling you not to eat snacks (extra calories), not to eat sweets; which are usually not part of meals, so again to avoid the extra calories. No seconds, extra calories.

Yes am a scientist