The Yummy Mummy’s Survival Guide

Bumps Maternity Wear: Pretty lingerie and also baby clothes.

Maternity Exchange: For fabulous second-hand designer labels (which, don’t forget, won’t have been worn for more than a couple of months).

Homme Mummy: The Essential Maternity Wardrobe is a fabulous capsule wardrobe of stylish maternity basics—looks great, saves time!

Budget Blowers: Shops

9London: Extremely exclusive. Breaks the bank, but the Yummiest Mummies shop in there so may be worth the overdraft. And it smells lovely.

Diane Von Furstenberg Maternity: Well, the queen of the wrap has now launched an equally marvellous maternity range, so you don’t have to stretch your normal dresses and tops any more!

Bumpsville: This is really special stuff, and a couple of basics from here will be worth the minor splurge.

Blossom Mother and Child: Already visited by Kate Winslet, Thandie Newton and other A-listers, Blossom stocks regular designer labels which you’ll still fit, as well as their own gorgeous maternity one.

Budget Blowers: Online

Séraphine: Prettiest, most feminine maternity clothing I’ve ever seen. Well what did I expect? It’s French.

Arabella B: Excellent denim collection.

Push: The most un-glamorous name imaginable, but the collection is as sexy as it gets, and Push has a huge celebrity following so you’ll be logging on soon.

Serendipity: Stock super-stylish and glam stuff, from designers such as Earl Jean, Liz Lange and Urban Baby.

Gym Babies

To start with, a small disclaimer, so that you don’t try and take me to the High Court if things go wrong: what follows worked for me, through three healthy pregnancies, and I know many other women for whom it worked too. I’m not saying it’s for you, and you know what your body can take better than I do. Get the all-clear from your midwife or doctor before you start, and ask them if you are unsure about anything. Thank you.

How Much Exercise Should I Take When I’m Pregnant?

Ahhh, a subject of such debate, confusion, conflicting advice and worry. When you are pregnant you will feel quite protective over your bump, and the idea of putting your growing baby at any risk at all seems unthinkable. To counter this, you will also feel fat and large and huge and wobbly, and you will probably want to do some exercise to try and keep things in some kind of toned order, which is absolutely fine.

It all just depends on how much and what kind of exercise your body is used to, and whether it still feels OK to do it when you have a baby taking part as well. ‘If it feels bad, don’t do it’ seems like sensible advice to me. Something to bear in mind is that your body will be producing a hormone called relaxin, which is not a natural laxative as its name suggests, but just loosens all your joints in preparation for the you-know-what. This means you should be more careful about how much high-impact exercise you do, even if you are used to that sort of thing.

For me, it was running. I’ve been running competitively since I was a little girl (why? am I mad?), and my poor body is quite used to being put through its paces, on the road, in the gym, along a beach or wherever. In fact, if I don’t go running for a few days I get as grouchy as a pre-menstrual banshee wearing newly washed, slightly-too-tight jeans. It’s just who I am and what I’m used to.

Given this starting point, I decided I would try to carry on running, lifting weights, cycling and doing everything else I usually do, until it felt wrong or I just couldn’t manage any more because my bump got in the way, and it worked very well.

NB: Doctors advise against doing any exercise lying on your back after the first trimester, because the baby puts pressure on your vena cava, (the big vein carrying blood from your legs to your heart) which reduces the blood flow to the uterus, and to your brain, both of which are bad.

Here are some types of exercise you can do when you are pregnant:

Running: The most vigorous and probably ill-advised type of exercise during pregnancy, but it worked for me. I ran until I was 20 weeks pregnant, at which point it started to ache a little, so I stopped. Also, I got funny looks from people as I jogged along with my paunch, and I felt embarrassed.

Cross-Training: A perfect way to burn unnecessary calories you felt you ought to eat at the time: it’s non-impact, aerobic, and you can read about beautiful, non-pregnant people while you’re doing it to remind yourself why you’re bothering.

Weights: Very important, because moving your heavy body around in the later months will become hard work, and there will be lots of lifting and carrying to do after your baby is born. The stronger your muscles are the easier both will be. Your legs and arms aren’t pregnant, so you can have fantastically toned limbs to make up for the fantastically un-toned tummy. Apparently doing weights is very good for reducing your risk of getting osteoporosis too, so start now and carry on forever…

Sit-ups: I’m nervous about this bit, because I did them until I was about five months pregnant, but I would hate anyone to feel they ought to do this and do themselves or their baby an injury. If you’ve done your pre-pregnancy work and have strong abs before you start, then you shouldn’t have too much trouble getting back into shape. Do them if you want to, but never do anything which feels bad, and ask your doctor before you start.

Cycling: There is a point beyond which this becomes impossible because your knees bash into your huge bump. This isn’t usually until the very last month or so, and until then I found cycling a fantastic way of keeping fit and having toned legs. If you can cycle outside then so much the better: fresh air is great for growing babies. Just be aware of your changing balance as you get bigger—it can get quite wobbly on there towards the end.

Swimming: Probably the best exercise you can do, according to all the experts who know about this sort of thing. It’s cardiovascular, all your muscle groups get a workout, and it relieves the weight on your tummy and back, which is wonderful. I swam dozens of lengths every day as soon as I stopped being able to run, and until two weeks after my due date. It was so boring that it nearly killed me, and now I can’t go anywhere near swimming pools, but watching the attendants panic as a very overdue lady entered the pool again was well worth it.

Dancing: Not only good exercise but also very relaxing and good fun. I’m a hopeless dancer, and was even more ungainly and hopeless when I was pregnant, but I found it very calming and relaxing. Not sure about tangos and vigorous dancing, but ballet is perfect. If Darcey Bussell can do it, then so can you. Some gyms offer balletcise (what a word!) classes, which sound very soothing, and aim to tone you up gracefully. Ha ha.

Walking: Everywhere. If you really can’t find the opportunity to do any of the above, then walking is a highly overlooked form of exercise, and when you’re lugging a heavy baby around at the same time it becomes quite effortsome. Be warned, though: walking can become painful later on, as the baby puts pressure on your back and you start to get pains and twinges in your legs. In the final weeks walking is a great way to get things moving south, which you’ll be very keen to do.

Pilates: Apart from being the most fashionable form of exercise, Pilates targets the tummy and pelvic-floor muscles, which weaken during pregnancy. Many Pilates exercises are performed on your hands and knees, which is an ideal, if rather inelegant, position: it helps to take a lot of stress off your back and pelvis, and towards the end of your pregnancy can help to position your baby well when it’s time for lift-off.

Aquaerobics: I never did this, as the idea of a pool full of pregnant people was too grim for me, but those Mums I know who tried it said it was better than dry aerobics because the water made the bump less heavy.

Activities You Should Avoid

Some of the activities I was advised to avoid during pregnancy made me laugh until my stomach hurt. So there’s one for starters. As well as stomach-hurting laughter, I have read that pregnant women should also avoid waterskiing, horse-riding, sky-diving (!), downhill skiing, fencing, and ice-skating. Other no-nos include doing strenuous exercise if you are suffering from vaginal bleeding, premature labour or heart disease. You don’t say!

NB: In my experience, no matter how much you exercise, and how careful you are about what you eat, you will get a bit fatter during pregnancy. It’s nature’s way of preparing your body for the exhaustion which follows, and of cheering you up when the bulk starts to fall off at the far end. Don’t try to be a weight your body doesn’t want to be by doing too much exercise, and try to enjoy your new shape. Most men love the curves, and you will honestly look wonderful in your new, womanly silhouette.

TOP TIP: You will need new sports gear: a better, more supportive bra, a longer vest or T-shirt (to avoid exposing several inches of highly stretched midriff to the hunk of muscle on the machine next to you), and a very high quality pair of gorgeous trainers to protect your legs, joints and back. This is one item of kit which you can wear after the baby comes too, so spending a little more won’t feel as extravagant.

Antenatal Classes

If you want to spend a lot of time looking at huge, panting women, then I suggest you rent a (bad) porn movie instead. Ante-natal classes teach you little more about the birth than you can find out for yourself, they are usually in the evening when you’d rather be watching telly, they take ages, and there is always the possibility of them whipping out a ‘birth video’, from which you will never recover. What can be useful about these evenings among the dungarees and bored men, is that you get to know where the maternity ward is, you might meet women who will be your friends for many years, you can try out some labour positions which you will never use, and you will discover how hard a plastic baby is.

If you are going to go then find out about classes near you from your midwife, and book early—there are usually six sessions to go to, and they can book up quickly.

You’re Eating For How Many?

2 February. 8 p.m. Five months pregnant with number three.

All of a sudden I’m SO fed up with feeling big. I feel that I should be eating more because the baby must be beginning to need more now, but I just seem to be expanding in all the wrong places suddenly, and I really hate it. My legs are huge and I’ve got that horrible big-pregnant-face thing back again. I’m trying to stick to fruit for breakfast, a light salad-y lunch with some chicken or something, and lots of veggies for dinner with some carbs, but maybe that’s not enough. Yes, it is enough. It was fine last time, and the bump is definitely getting bigger so it must be OK. God, it’s so hard to know if I’m getting it right. If there’s anything wrong with this baby I will always blame myself, but if it all turns out fine and I’ve turned into an elephant I will wish I hadn’t pigged out so much. Either way I’ll be wrong, so I’ll just try to eat sensibly. Fat chance, ha ha.

So, so, so, so many of my friends dread becoming fat during pregnancy. In fact, they’re so convinced that pregnancy will turn them into a big blob of lard, that it’s one of their main reasons for putting the whole thing off a little while longer. This completely baffles, and also rather annoys me, for two reasons:

Firstly, what’s wrong with getting a little bigger? Maybe pregnancy is a good time to lose the boyish hips and develop a womanly curve or two. Secondly, being pregnant doesn’t mean being fat. Not all pregnant women swell to the size of a salad-dodging Sumo wrestler. It all depends on how you decide to play it, and how much willpower you have. If you have no willpower at all, then now is a good time to start cultivating some.

The great news is that you can have a baby and still get into your normal jeans on the way back from the hospital—you just can’t button them up for a few weeks. Toned thighs and abs are still a definite possibility, and unless there are medical reasons which cause excessive weight gain, it’s very possible that you will go back to being roughly the shape you normally are. Like all desirable things, you just have to work at it, and in this case that means really, really, really hard.

When you are pregnant, you will get bigger. It’s mainly just your stomach and breast regions which will go a little crazy, and to be honest that’s hardly very surprising: there’s a person growing inside you, and it’s got to go somewhere. Unless you have some really weird internal arrangements, like no vital organs at all, then the only way is outwards, hence the big tummy.

And the breasts thing is fantastic! Even the flattest of flatties develop heaving bosoms worthy of a Merchant Ivory production. Any man (or woman) who has cause to be fumbling around the region will be delighted with your new arrivals. Embrace these new curves: flaunt them, feel them and enjoy every inch, because when the breast-feeding is over, so are the breasts. Gone!

Anyway, so far, ‘bigger’ is OK. It’s a good kind of bigger. The trouble starts when you feel you have to eat enough to feed your growing baby as though it’s running a marathon in there or something. It’s not. It’s just hanging around, swallowing, stretching, sucking its thumb occasionally, and growing a teeny bit. Hardly enough to merit a full extra meal, if you’re honest.

‘But it needs to grow—I must eat more!’, you will cry, washing down another granola bar with a full-fat latte before polishing off your husband’s pain au chocolat and wondering if just one more doughnut before lunch might be in order. This is absolutely fine, if you don’t mind turning into a bus. It’s not fine if you want to recognise yourself in a few months’ time.

WARNING!!: This strong sense of having to eat tons more than usual is reinforced by absolutely everyone you know telling you to, and tirelessly offering you calorie-laden nourishment, which you would never normally have (honest). Resist! Resist! This goes doubly for your parents, and about ten-fold for any in-laws you may have acquired. Only visit these well-meaning people if you are armed with either a will of iron strong enough to decline their barrage of offerings, or a paper bag to pop any unwanted but forced-upon-you food into for future disposal. It sounds awful, but these desperate times can call for desperate measures. The alternative is just saying ‘No, thank you’ the whole time, which becomes very boring, and makes your mother-in-law think you hate her. Bad plan.

But I’m eating for two

No, you are not, or at least not in the way that it implies. ‘Eating for two’ makes it sound like you should be packing in two times the amount of food you would normally eat, or at least something approaching it. If you do that, as everyone from your second-best friend (your best friend will know better) to your favourite barista will do their damnedest to encourage, you will, as you so fear, become enormous!

‘Eating for two’ became my most hated phrase when I was pregnant (apart from ‘Oh, I had twins, too.’ I’ve never had twins, just huge bumps, apparently).

OK, so how much am I supposed to eat when I’m pregnant?

This is an impossible question to answer, but I can tell you what worked for me, and you can decide if you want to give it a go. Everyone is different, everyone wants different things, and I am NOT saying that this is medically or universally the best way to approach things, so please leave the lawyers out of it.

For me it was a simple question of maths. I am 1.7 metres tall and I normally weigh about 50 kgs. At twelve-weeks gestation a foetus is, depending on which book you decide to believe, about 6cm long and weighs roughly 18g. Grabbing a pocket calculator for a second, I calculate that this made my three-month-old unborn baby about 3.5% of my height, and only 0.36% of my weight.

So at this stage, going by our relative weights, it was more a case of eating for 1.0036 than for 2. Looking at a typical day’s food, that’s probably not much more than a few extra grains of rice, and maybe a couple of grapes.

Not two Danish pastries, a mozzarella panini and a steak tartare, then? Errrr, no.

Even at full term, when it is ready to be born, a baby is generally about 35 cms long and weighs on average 3.5kgs. That’s still only 7% of my normal body weight. In food terms, I make that one extra potato and a chicken wing, at the most.

Can a baby really grow big enough that way?

Babies do whatever Mother Nature has in mind for them. Most just seem to grow as big as their genetic make-up tells them to, and there seems to be little correlation between the amount Mummy eats and the size of her baby. I’ve known big ladies produce tiny babies, and skinny ladies give birth to whoppers. Que serra, serra.

Using my very own geeky, logical approach, I managed to produce two 9 lb babies (which to you and me just means ‘ridiculously big’), and one 8 lb baby. I didn’t put on more than a kilo or two besides baby weight with any of my kids, and most of this was to be found in my maternity bra. I breast-fed all of them without any trouble at all, and so far they seem to be very strong and healthy children.

Now, before you padlock the larder…

Other Factors to Take Into Account (which mean you should up the food-intake)

Your increased blood volume, higher metabolism and just general extra effort required to haul yourself around all mean you should probably increase what you eat by slightly more than I’ve shown above. But the general point remains the same: becoming pregnant doesn’t mean you have to eat tons more. Just a little extra healthy food will do wonders.

Obviously, if you have any concerns, then go and talk to your doctor or midwife about them. At the end of the day, or rather nine months, it’s your baby, and your body. If you do what feels right for both of you, you will always know that you did your best. If you don’t mind putting on a bit of weight, then go for it! Being pregnant was the first time I enjoyed feeling rounder and more curvy, and it was (eventually) a very sexy feeling. But if you’d rather keep the weight gain to a minimum, then try not to eat much more than normal. As long as it’s a balanced diet with all the food groups in it, you and your baby will probably both be just fine.

Body Image and Eating Problems

Here’s an indisputable fact: lots of women have eating problems. Millions of us. I can hardly think of a single friend between the ages of twenty and sixty who hasn’t had, or doesn’t still have, some kind of hang-up about food and eating, and that’s not because I hang around neurotic, anorexic, food-obsessed people. Almost everyone has food issues these days, and pregnant women are no exception.

We may like to think, or hope, that becoming a mother somehow changes our attitudes to life, our priorities and our self-image, but in fact it often does nothing of the sort. Just because you have a baby to think about does not automatically mean you suddenly stop caring about the size of your bum, the wobbliness of your thighs or how much carbohydrate you consume. Nor should you expect it to, or worry if it doesn’t.

If you are one of the lucky, confident types who loves her body in whatever form, then I take my hat off to you. If, like me and most of my friends, you have a fairly changeable body image and have been through periods of being underweight, overweight or just-not-the-weight-you-want weight, then you will probably continue this way throughout your pregnancy. Some women get a little worse, and some women get a little better as they learn to relax about their bodies.

One thing I have discovered is that pregnancy can be the start of food problems for many women because it changes your body shape out of all recognition very quickly, you suddenly become aware of lots of parts of your body you had never paid much attention to before, and it requires you to think about what you do and don’t eat the whole time. Once you’ve had the baby you might start to lose some of the weight gained, but this pursuit can become addictive, which is why you may have seen pictures of previously gorgeous, curvy girls suddenly looking like skeletons within a year of their baby being born. It’s very sad, but it’s not uncommon.

So if you are wondering why there is quite so much reference to food and body size in this book from now on, that is why. Spend 20 minutes in a playground or a toddler group and just listen to the conversations: 80% of them are about biscuits, picking at food, losing weight, trying to get fit or just feeling fat. I had a conversation with a stunningly attractive mother of four last week who told me she only started to accept and like her ‘new’ body when her first child was 12. It’s not just me. It’s motherhood.