50: Nausea is affecting your eating. You may not be making the best choices about your food, so it’s important to listen to your body. At the same time, there may be simple changes you can make to your diet that will make you feel a bit better and will give your baby the nutrients needed for development. See chapter 3 to help you plan your diet. And don’t forget your vitamins.
51 to 70: you’re experiencing moderate nausea, which is affecting the way you eat. In addition, you may be having some cravings. It might be time to make a few midcourse corrections and to work on your diet to give your baby the nutrients needed for healthy brain and body development. Chapter 3 will give you some great suggestions to get started. And don’t forget your vitamins.
71 to 100: Nausea is having a huge effect on what you eat. Pregnancy can be hard on your body and on your frame of mind. It’s hard to think happy thoughts with your head in the toilet bowl. If you’re in your first trimester, remember that that’s when the nausea is usually worst. If you can get through it, you can face anything. You’ll need to make the best choices you can about foods. See chapter 3 to help plan your diet. And don’t forget your vitamins.
YOUR Quality of Life: Body Image
Answer the following questions about your feelings in the last four weeks (using the scale indicated)
Body Image Score
Interpreting Your Score
8 to 16: You don’t seem to be at all worried about your body. In many ways, that is good. Make sure, though, that you are still keeping in shape. Eat balanced meals and nutritious foods. Exercise is good for you and for your baby. See page 310 for our exercise plan.
17 to 32: You have a small amount of concern about your body image, but it is not excessive. Pregnancy is a time of changes in your body. At the same time, you do need to make sure to take care of your body. A healthy body is good for you and your baby, and it will make it easier for you to have a body you like after you give birth. Make sure that you eat balanced meals and nutritious foods. Remember that exercise is good for you and for your baby.
33 to 48: You have quite a bit of concern about your body. It’s really crucial that you exercise during pregnancy and that you eat balanced, nutritious meals. You are eating for you and for your baby. It is possible that you have gained too much weight and that your doctor may recommend ways to help solve any problems that have come up. However, it is also possible that your weight gain is quite normal. (See page 68 for guidelines for gaining weight.)
YOUR Quality of Life: Overall Score
To get a sense of how you’re doing overall right now, we’re going to create a total score for Quality of Life. Enter the scores from the four tests that make up the Quality of Life survey in the boxes as shown below.
On many tests, you aim to get the highest score possible. This test is a little different. When your Quality of Life score is low (close to 30), your life is in balance.
Trying to maintain your quality-of-life balance during pregnancy is a bit like trying to walk on a four-inch-wide gymnastics balance beam with your pregnant body. It’s not as easy as it looks, and it doesn’t look easy. It is also possible you have not gained enough weight and are overly concerned about your own shape without attending to what your baby may need. If that describes you, see your OB as soon as possible, and perhaps a nutritionist, to make sure you are not underfeeding the baby unintentionally.
So most people are probably not perfectly in balance. Remember that for every gymnast who nails a perfect routine on the balance beam at the Olympics, there are hundreds who slip a little or even fall flat. The trick is just to keep getting up there and trying to balance again.
Interpreting Your Overall Score
30 to 70: Congratulations! You have achieved some real balance in your pregnant life. There’s still a lot ahead of you, but you’re quite centered so far.
71 to 150: Like most pregnant women, there are days when you have it together and days when things seem beyond your grasp. Keep on reading. We have a lot of tips to help keep you centered.
151 to 238: Between your nausea, your inability to think straight, and your negative feelings about your body, you’re probably looking at pregnancy as more like a never-ending traffic jam than an Olympic gymnastics event. All the same, you’re in the middle of one of life’s peak experiences. We have a lot of tips here to make your worst days more bearable. Hang in there, and read on.
* That book is two shelves over.
† In this day and age, of course, traditional intercourse isn’t the only way to make a baby.
* Apologies to anyone named Horatio Horace Humphrey.
1 Nice Genes A New Twist on Genetics Teaches Us How a Baby Really Develops
Back in tenth-grade biology class, you were probably taught—as were we—that the unique combination of genes you received from your mom and dad (your genotype) was responsible for everything that followed: the color of your eyes, the size of your feet, your love of lasagna, your hatred for all eight-legged and no-legged creatures. To a certain extent, that’s true, but over the past few years, studies have suggested that classical genetics may be only part of the picture. It’s not just your genes that determine who you are, but which of those genes are turned on, or expressed, and to what degree they are expressed—a cutting-edge field called epigenetics. While you can’t control which genes you pass on to your child, you do have some influence over which genes are expressed, affecting what features are seen in your baby (his phenotype). In this chapter, after giving you a brief refresher on the basic biology of what happens after your life-changing evening of romantic rasslin’, we’re going to introduce you to a new subject:YOU-ology—how what you eat, breathe, and even feel can affect the long-term health of your child.
Two to One: The Biology of Conception
We trust that you know the ins and outs of the process that involves his part A and her part B, so we’ll skip what happens deep under the satin sheets and focus on the miracle deep below the flesh and deep inside the body—that is, how the egg and sperm come together.*
The Eggs
Factoid: Though it happens rarely, women who lose their corpus luteum (through a ruptured cyst, for example) might need a progesterone supplement during the first trimester to help maintain the uterine