One interesting phenomenon I have run across several times in the popular pregnancy literature is “sympathy weight gain“– where the husband gains weight when the wife is pregnant. So far, this is definitely not the case here. In the time I have been pregnant, my husband has actually lost the little mini-potbelly he’d been busy growing since we got married. In fact, he looks pretty darn sexy these days– lean and healthy and manly in a way I’ve never seen him before, even when we were dating! The blurb I linked to may explain both the sympathetic gain phenomenon, and my own husband’s losses: usually the wife is in charge of feeding the family. When her dietary habits change, his dietary habits change, too. So I imagine that between first-trimester nausea (“I can’t stand the sight of food, maybe you should pick up some take-out”) and weird cravings (“hon, why exactly did you get a case of super-salty pretzels and five gallons of ice cream?”), it’d be easy for the whole family’s eating habits to suffer.
Our dietary habits have changed a lot, but sort of in the opposite direction. We now have no snacky foods around the house, because there’s no fridge to keep them in, and because the kind that don’t need a fridge are very expensive! It’s amazing what a lack of agricultural subsidies will do to the price of junk food. No matter how much I may (or may not) crave chips or cookies, we can’t afford that stuff! Before the move (and the pregnancy), we ate dinner separately, because I worked evenings. Now I cook dinner for both of us, every night. Nothing complicated, just your basic meat, veg, and rice or tubers. Also, we no longer have a car, so we walk everywhere. Probably, there will be weight gain for both of us, if/when we return home. But it won’t be sympathetic, it’ll just be returning-to-our-bad-habits weight gain.
One of the less exciting changes I’ve made to my diet is that I’ve started eating liver once a week. I have almost no previous experience cooking the stuff, and I really, really don’t like it. I certainly don’t try to subject my husband to this– I eat it for lunch, chopped very small and sauteed with ground beef and tons of paprika to hide the taste, and then he makes lunch with the remainder of the ground beef (minus the liver and paprika). The paprika does a pretty good job of making it palatable, and I’m slowly working up to eating a respectable serving. So far, I’ve gone from a thin slice the size of two postage stamps to a thin slice the size of maybe six postage stamps. It helps to squeeze a lot of lime juice into my glass of water. I’m glad they sell it by the slice here, though. I wouldn’t know what to do with it if I had to buy a pound or more, like I would back home. Ick. If you know any other good ways to cook the stuff, I’m all ears. It’s not a form of self-torture or anything, I’m just trying to find ways to get the most nutritional bang for my buck, and liver is an awesomely good deal. We’re talking 10-20 cents a serving, for something that probably has more vitamin content per gram than anything else in the supermarket. The more crowded my stomach gets, the more important it seems to make everything count more.
Gringa Embarazada 