In order to fully share with you the process my body is undergoing now and, soon, the postpartum rebuilding and reconditioning I’ll be working toward, I need first to start out with the facts and figures about my starting point.

When I found out I was pregnant, or rather, when I confirmed the strong feeling that I MUST be pregnant, I weighed 137 pounds, and was a muscular 5’8. I’ve been teaching Pilates and Gyrotonic to prenatal and postnatal clients for years, so I have experience on that level, but I’m finding it’s a very different matter to go through the process oneself. So far, at 35 and half weeks, I’ve gained approximately 30 pounds.

This is considered a healthy and normal weight gain, but of course feels like, well, gaining 30 pounds. I keep thinking of a woman who was in a course I taught who said each time she was pregnant or nursing her bum would get really big. At first she was upset by this, but eventually came to realize this extra fat is what she needed to support and feed her baby, and her body found her rear the best place to store these resources. She then began to refer to it as her “milk truck” and was able to come to peace with it, and maybe even see it with some affection. I’ve cultivated a bit of a “milk truck” and alternate between a sense of affection and a sense of “oh my God, is that really my bum?”

My fitness routine before becoming pregnant consisted of 45 minutes to an hour and a half a day of Gyrotonic on the Pulley Tower and specialized equipment, or an hour to two hours of Gyrokinesis, which is done with no equipment, just a stool and a mat, five or six days a week. In addition to this I’d enjoy my 25 minute walk into the studio and then home again, and then additional walking for fun. I loathe “the gym”. Exercise for me is a time to enjoy using my body and breath, creating mental space and finding calm. I love to feel my heart working, but would only ever be seen running when very late.

I’ve not eaten meat, only some very occasional fish, since I was 15, and I generally eat organic, mostly vegetables and whole grains, beans, eggs, and some limited dairy. I’ve long avoided wheat, soy, and sugar, but am not overly strict about it - if my mom makes spinach pie with some wheat, I’m eating some spinach pie. So I’ve kept a pretty moderate, non- processed diet, but not overly rigid diet.

I’m 35 years old, which I was amused to discover via Google is considered an “older mother” when it comes to first pregnancies. My husband and I were delighted to find that pregnancy came so easily, as I’d had some serious issues with ovarian fibroids and endometriosis, and had been told by several health professionals that it could be very challenging to conceive. But everything kicked in the first month we tried. I think partly this was because I was so relaxed about the matter. I thought that if the universe decided I’d have a baby, I’d have a baby. If not we could adopt, or get more cats. I was really pretty mellow about the issue.

My husband, on the other hand, was not so mellow. He has wanted to be a father so badly for so long. And since wherever we go small children and animals flock to him, I have confidence he’ll be a natural.

When I became pregnant I had already scheduled a Gyrokinesis teacher training course, which is a fairly physically intense course to conduct, for what would turn out to be weeks 8 through 10 of my pregnancy. I knew that during the first trimester a woman can expect some fatigue and some nausea and, as a chronic over achiever, business owner, and perfectionist, I’ve experienced some fatigue before and thought how bad can it be? I’ve worked through fatigue before. And nausea, well I’ve always had a strong stomach. No worries…

What I didn’t realize is that the English language seems to lack a word for the extremely intense sensation of every cell of one’s body screaming “CURL UP IN A BALL AND GO TO SLEEP FOR A VERY LONG TIME” and so, lacking this more accurate word, we describe this phenomenon during pregnancy as “fatigue”. And then there’s the misnomer “morning sickness”, which turned out to be a quaint sounding term for being sick all day, every day for three months, not necessarily throwing up, but really sort of wishing maybe I just would.

So my teacher training course during my first (and least favorite) trimester was, to understate the experience dramatically, “challenging” I found it much easier to teach the course again at 6 and a half months pregnant, big belly and all, than in those first months. Aside from the walk into work and the movement I had to do with my students and clients, I did very little other than sleep and eat. After teaching I would walk to my mother’s house, just five minutes downhill from my studio, and look so tired and pathetic that she’d drive me home.

The only time I wasn’t sick during these first months was when I was either eating or sleeping, so I occupied myself with these activities as often as possible. And when I ate, I didn’t eat anything like I would normally eat. Some other force was commanding the nature of my meals, and it was partial to fried and salted potato based foods. I ate potato chips, fries, hash browns (a double order one day). It also wanted dairy fats- Amy’s organic rice mac and cheese EVERYDAY for two weeks, “salads” from the Big Boy (?!) salad bar that consisted of primarily hard boiled egg, cheese, and lots of ranch dressing. Brains are at least 60 percent fat, so my guess is that I was contributing to the building of my child’s brain. I also ate an insane quantity of tomatoes.

The fact that I didn’t gain very much weight at all during this time defies my understanding of science. From all I’d read and been taught I knew that I only needed an additional 300 calories a day through pregnancy. I’m sure I was taking in twice this, at least. My belly was expanding rapidly and I began to show enough that I was wearing looser clothing to hide my belly at 9 or 10 weeks. I wasn’t ready to tell people yet, but it was becoming somewhat obvious! But still my weight crept up only slowly. My belly grew so fast early on that there was a suspicion of twins that sent us into a panic for a several weeks until our ultrasound at 20 weeks showed just one, somewhat large, boy. And then, somewhere in my second trimester, my belly growth slowed and my weight gain kicked in, leaving me meditating regularly on the beauty and glory of the “milk truck”.

Look for my next entry on Sunday morning. I’ll write about my exercising throughout my pregnancy and what my plans are for my postpartum program.

Aimee McDonald-Anderson is an Ann Arbor native and owner of GYROTONIC® Ann Arbor & The Movement Center in downtown Ann Arbor. She has been teaching Pilates since 1997 and GYROTONIC® since 2000. She holds a bachelor of fine arts degree iin dance from The University of Michigan.