No, sorry. I know, it's kind of boring, but I really haven't. No pickles and ice cream. I'm trying to be patient with the clique though because no one except me seems to tire of the pickle joke.
At first I just figured that cravings were more like a loosening of inhibition. Like, I'd walk by a hot dog stand and smell that glorious smell, and think, "I want a hot dog." Whereas before I knew that I'd be gaining 30 pounds regardless, I'd have thought, "Yeah that smells good but I don't just go around eating hot dogs." Still though, I didn't have to have a hot dog then and there. I just thought, "I could go for that." But then I'd move on.
I do think I've had some food fixations though. For a few months, it was this white cheddar cheese from Whole Foods. I swear I ate a block of it a week. Again, that could be attributed to lessening of food inhibition because who wouldn't want to eat a block of cheese a week? I've realized just recently though that I've stopped eating so much cheese, and now I make whole wheat pancakes or toast up Kashi waffles a few times a week. But I wouldn't call these "cravings." I don't go all day thinking about syrup and waffles. They've just become my go-to, I'm-hungry-and-this-will-fill-me-up-and-make-me-happy habit. Both of these fixations have ease of preparation in common, which is always tempting for me, and while they're both treats that I normally would never indulge in with such abandon, as long as I'm still working out and hungry for about 2/3 of the entire day, I don't give the calorie intake a second thought. Anyway, the cheese has calcium and the pancakes/waffles have fiber.
Funny thing about the cheese though...
I just realized a few days ago that it is NOT pasteurized. It's a hard cheese, it's cheddar, but pasteurized it is not. One of the first rules of pregnancy eating is to avoid "soft cheeses" (I swear it's always soft cheeses that are referenced, like Brie and goat cheese) that aren't pasteurized because there's a miniscule chance that they could have a bacteria called listeria in them. I'm supposed to avoid deli meat that isn't heated to steaming (yeah, ew) for the same reason. And hot dogs too, so for the record, it's a good thing that their smell doesn't ignite a full-on craving (though honestly I think this mostly applies to the kind of hot dogs that sit an a warming rack at 7-11 all day, and no one should be eating those).
I was picking up this favorite cheese of ours at Whole Foods just last week and the word "raw" on the label caught my eye. I did a double take: huh? Raw? Anil and I have bought this cheese a million times before and never noticed that word, and I'm not even exaggerating when I say that for like two months I was going through a block a week of this stuff. Neither of us ever thought to look at the ingredients to check for "pasteurized milk," because it's cheddar for crying out loud--it's from Vermont, not the south of France.
Ironically, at brunch that morning I'd spent literally 10 minutes deliberating over whether I could get the breakfast sandwich, because I wasn't going to ask them to heat the ham in it separately and I thought it reasonable that the sandwich would heat it enough (and really, it's just ham). Turned out the ham wasn't deli style so it didn't matter anyway. But there I was deliberating with Anil over a single piece of ham after I'd apparently been incessantly wolfing down unpasteurized cheese.
For the record, I'm not worried about it; the risk of listeriosis, as I understand it, is incredibly minimal. It's just that somewhere along the way doctors realized that this was a bad bacteria to expose a fetus to and that it could be avoided by simply reading ingredient lists (not that difficult, you'd think!), so it became a rule. Obviously, it's not like the moment you eat a piece of unpasteurized cheese, lighting strikes. Certainly I would have avoided it if I'd realized my mistake, but at this point, it's spilt milk. Raw, unpasteurized milk, but it's been cleaned up nonetheless.
Five and a half months in, it makes me think about all that we try to control, in pregnancy, in child-rearing, heck in our own bodies in this time that, for many women, is the first time we've ever felt like our body suddenly has a mind and agenda all its own, and of how somewhere, someone is watching all of that and just laughing. Like so many things in life, you do your best, but at the end of the day you just hope you keep getting lucky. If that sounds like a pregnant woman who's recently realized that she's almost in her last trimester and life is about to get as out of control as she's ever seen it, I hope I'm making that attitude of "so be it" sound believable. I'm working on it.
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