Copyright (c) 2007 Jess Harley

So the rabbit died as they said in the old days. You got two pink lines on your home pregnancy test and your doctor confirmed it. You are going to be a mommy! Congratulations, you have an incredible journey ahead of you. You are going to need plenty of energy to grow a life inside of you and a good workout routine will help you.

A lot of women are under the misconception that exercise during pregnancy is bad. Unless you have complications such as a threatened miscarriage or you are a high risk pregnancy, most doctors will recommend you exercise throughout your pregnancy. Exercising during pregnancy can help you balance your hormones, help loosen your bowel movements, relieve stress, and help avoid or control gestational diabetes. It also can help you with your weight gain and make labor and delivery a little easier on you. There are some modifications though you will have to make to your exercise routine and some guidelines to follow especially if you have not really exercised before you were pregnant.

First get your doctors ok to exercise through out your pregnancy. As I said earlier, unless you have a complication your doctor will more than likely give you the ok. Once you have the ok, think about what exercises you did in the past. If you have not done much, start off slowly. Walk for about five minutes a day and add an additional five each week until you are up to thirty minutes. Even if you have worked out before you got pregnant, you do need to tone it down a little because you are going to be carrying extra weight.

You want to make sure you do low impact activities that will get your blood pumping but not get you out of breath. If you have exercised before you should keep your target heart rate at 140-150. It is going to be less if you never really exercised before. This does not mean you have to run out and get a heart rate monitor; you can do the talk test. If you are doing your exercise and you find that you can not talk without feeling winded, you are working out too hard. You want to find it a little challenging to talk but not be huffing and puffing.

So what kind of exercises should you do? Almost every doctor will tell you to walk. Walking just thirty minutes a day, three times a week will have a positive impact on your pregnancy. Yoga and Pilates is becoming the hip thing to do and help with your mental health while pregnant. Make sure you do a pregnancy geared class or video since they are designed specifically for your new body. Aerobics are good also, along with walking you have swimming, or even light jogging will work.

So what should you avoid, most doctors will recommend that you cut out any sit-ups and some weight lifting after your first trimester. This is because once you hit four months, your uterus will probably be slitting on at least one of your major veins and can slow your blood returning to your heart. So take it easy on those crunches. NO matter how many you do while your pregnant you are still going to get a baby belly!

How long should you exercise? Well, that is really up to you. Some women report being able to exercise all the way up to their delivery date while others have to stop by the time they hit their third trimester. When you are pregnant you really need to listen to your body and if you find you can not walk as much as you could a month ago, then you need to stop. Do not push yourself. It is not the time for the “no pain no gain” motto. Rest when your body tells you too.

Gone are the days when being pregnant meant you should do nothing. You can still exercise. Keep in mind though you are exercising to maintain a healthy pregnancy, not to lose weight during your pregnancy.

The whole question of dieting or not dieting is inseparable from us, women, because of our ambivalent relationship with our body—we love it and we hate it. In essence, mind has been exiled from body. I have known heavy women who face their unhealthy weight problem by eating more; I have seen women who are by all standards slender and beautiful agonize over the slightest thickening of midriff and thighs. For most women, our waists are never small enough, our bellies never flat enough and dieting seems to be the golden route to a kind of cultural icon of perfection.

We worry excessively about every ounce we gain or we give in uncontrollably to eating binges. This hunger or denial of hunger is the reason for the dramatic increase in obesity in North America and also the reason for yet another weight loss book on the market. As Jennifer Workman states so emphatically in “Stop Your Cravings”, “Why are we the most diet-crazed country in the world and yet also the most overweight, and apparently the most frustrated by our failure (xiv)?”

It is obvious that diets recommending food deprivation do not work. Weight issues involve more than food issues. Weight issue is a body acceptance issue and our obsession with weight is a symptom of our inability to honor the body, to give the body its due as a living, individual being. The authors of three books on the market explore this issue of body acceptance and provide suggestions on how women can re-think their relationships with their bodies.

In their book, “It’s Not About Food,” authors Carol Emery Normandi and Laurelee Roark, founders of Beyond Hunger Inc, state that women in our culture ” have an enormous pressure on them to be perfect”(6) and it is this pressure that is creating eating disorders, addictive behavior, depression and even death in women. Our hunger is not for food, but for internal guidance—”having the right to choose what we feel is right for ourselves and learning to hear the voice within that knows what we need”(16). Listening to this internal guidance means being comfortable with who are, even if it means accepting a body that is ten pounds more than what we think it should be.

This re-focusing on the internal and spiritual basis of hunger and food addiction certainly sheds new light on the meaning of “dieting.” A diet traditionally carries the meaning of food deprivation for the purpose of shedding excess weight. Unfortunately as well, the word also carries the connotation of starvation and hunger. In this sense, a diet is only a temporary, band-aid solution to the problem of obesity. To arrive at long term success, we have to look at the diet not as a temporary measure, but as a lifelong revision in attitude and lifestyle, which is only possible when we can get to the root of our ambivalence about our bodies.

Such is the case in “Love Hunger” authored by a group of expert physicians. In one case delineated in the book, a patient recognizes that her relationship with food comes from an unresolved conflict with her parents. When patient Barbara comes to realize that her issue with food is about her relationship with her parents—an authoritarian father and an overly-dependent mother, she begins the journey towards change and resolution. As a child, Barbara functioned like a “scapegoat spouse” (29) to both her parents. Her problem, rooted in family dysfunction which created a vacuum in her heart, is typical of many overeaters :”people with heart hunger will stuff their stomachs”(30).

The same suggestion that we look beyond the prescriptive diet to the person’s total body consciousness can be seen in “Addiction to Perfection,” in which Marion Woodman examines how the eating problems of the modern woman are rooted in an addiction that deprives her of being able to love herself for what she is. The problem that confronts a woman addicted to perfection is that she cannot accept herself for being human. The body in this instance is often sacrificed to the idealism of the mind. Only through bodywork and soulwork can she redeem her center—when her body is not pitted against her mind but can coexist as one unit: “I am body and mind. I may be tossed about like a sailboat in a cyclone, but through thick and thin I am able to hold my standpoint here at the center because I now have eyes to see and ears to hear” and “life can happen; life can pour through me.”(75)

The solution suggested by these authors comes from re-defining the parameters of perfection. What is a perfect woman? A perfect body? Perfect—by whose standards and definition? We need to understand perfection not in terms of standards dictated by cultural media, but by our own internal guidance. This means that a woman is perfect when she is empowered enough to choose the avenue by which she defines herself. That’s when dieting or not dieting becomes an irrelevant issue because she has worked out the dynamics of healthy body and purposeful living for herself.