Early Pregnancy: Hunger

Written 3/8/2016

I'm up to four meals a day.

I knew I'd be eating more. It's that old joke: eating for two. But everything I read said you're not actually eating that much more. Only about 300 additional calories in the first trimester, which is practically nothing. I certainly didn't expect to be adding an additional meal. But it turns out that I've become completely unable to go six hours between meals, like I did pre-pregnancy. I'm hard pressed to go four hours, which leads to an extra meal.

Instead of breakfast (7 AM), lunch (12:30 PM), dinner (6:30 PM), my schedule now includes a meal at 10:30 or 11 and a second one around 3 in the afternoon. And even then I'm starving by the time dinner rolls around. Although my meals have been smaller. The simple fact is that I just can't eat as much in a single sitting. I get full much more quickly. So I probably am only eating 300 extra calories. I guess the uterus starts pushing on the stomach (and the bladder and everything else), which makes it smaller.

This actually started a couple of weeks ago. On the train home from work I was suddenly hit by such a strong sense of hunger that I was almost worried I'd faint during the walk home. Instead of the meal I'd planned to cook that night, I barely had the patience to heat up leftovers. And so I learned that I needed to start planning around my new appetite better.

The problem with this is that I'm not a snacker. I eat three meals a day, and that's all I eat (unless I'm continuously grazing at a party or something). But I've had to start buying snack foods, like granola bars and yogurt. I've had to remember that I have those snacks, so that when I get hungry I'm not just flopping around in misery. Even harder is remembering to take those snacks to work. And I'm honestly a little surprised that none of my coworkers have commented on the fact that my eating schedule has shifted so dramatically.

I'm also figuring out smaller meals. Peanut butter and apple sandwiches are fast becoming a staple. As are quesadillas, stuffed with onions or spinach or whatever veggies happen to be in the fridge. I'm trying to get into yogurt, but it just doesn't sit in my stomach right. Smoothies, however, seem to be working. Maybe because they have less dairy?

This has been the biggest and most deliberate change in my life since I found out I was pregnant. I'm hoping it calms down somewhat in the coming months, though I'm not terribly optimistic about that happening. It's more likely that I'll be eating 6 meals a day by the time this is all over with. I'm mostly worried about how this will affect me during travel. We're going to NYC in April and Las Vegas in June, and it's harder to find healthy snack food on the road. I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed for some decent sandwich places.