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Why Am I Always Hungry? Pregnancy Tales

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I am in my last trimester and my cousin, who I haven’t seen in a couple of months has just sent me a text message saying “You need to stop eating!”

Now, this my cousin is very worried about my huge appetite. Thing is, ever since the beginning of my pregnancy, I have been eating ALL the time. It’s as though I have this bottomless pit in my stomach, such that regardless of how much I put in, it just goes nowhere! I had normal eating habits before the pregnancy, but the extreme hunger pangs I have been experiencing throughout my pregnancy have oftentimes made me think I am losing my mind. I mean, I am permanently STARVING. Regardless of what and how much I eat, I still remain famished. The amount of food I would normally pack in a whole day during my pre-pregnancy days, nowadays I have already packed by noon.

So what I have been doing for the better part of my pregnancy is spending lots of time in the fridge and the microwave. My hunger cycle is every 1.5 hours, and should I fail to munch on something I feel dizzy and quite sick. At the beginning, I would bite on snacks like cereals, nuts and fruits, but I soon realized that these were not doing me any good, as the hunger would be back again in another 30 minutes or so. My body (or is it my baby) needs serious food, not snacks. So what I’ve been doing is carrying lots of food to the office. Rich African foods, not snacks or fast food. And that’s what keeps me going every 1.5 hours or so.

My workmates have taken to taking jibes at me because of my constant feeding. What though surprised me the other day is when a fellow colleague, just five weeks behind me in her pregnancy told me that she doesn’t feed as much. That she can have breakfast at 10am, and the next meal she can eat would be at 3pm. I almost collapsed! I absolutely could not relate to what she was saying. Me, I would have long expired by now, if I did the same that is. But I guess we are all different. Me, I’m a HUGE feeder. Her, she’s a small feeder. God bless us both.

By the way, did I tell you that my hunger pangs wake me up at night? This used to happen on a daily basis throughout my first trimester. I mean, I don’t know what was worse, my heavy sleep appetite, or my heavy food appetite. Despite being in a deep slumber, the hunger pangs would wake me up and hard as I tried to ignore them, I would find myself tripping over the bed in a mad dash to the kitchen. I however don’t recall escapades to the fridge at night during my second trimester, thank God. But guess what? The interrupted sleep is back, now in my third trimester! In between my frequent trips to the loo, I have been making regular stopovers in the fridge department as well.

And this is what prompted my cousin to tell me to stop eating. Well I would have dismissed had she not had a pregnancy experience, but her son is a year old so let’s just say she’s been where I am. But on the ‘stop eating’ advise, I will have to dismiss her. Because I will surely expire if I do not eat. I can sort out the weight issues later :).

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Maryanne W. Waweru is a Kenyan mum raising her two sons in Nairobi. A journalist, Maryanne is passionate about telling stories and hopes that through her writing, her readers learn something new, feel encouraged, inspired, and appreciative of what they have in their lives. Maryanne's writing focuses on motherhood, women and lifestyle. "Telling stories is the only thing I know how to do," she says.

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