We never really figured Nicole Richie to be the type of girl who gets massively, gigantically pregnant. In fact, she always struck us more as the “skinny legs, bowling-ball stomach” type, except by “bowling ball” we actually meant “small grapefruit” (or perhaps an “above average-sized apple” or something moderately large in the citrus family.)
Either way, we always assumed Nicole’s unborn fetus was very, very hungry. But it turns out he/she is just adorably svelte!
“Only 300 additional calories a day are needed to sustain a healthy pregnancy,” writes the New York Times. And if you combine that with the 200 or so calories Richie was already consuming on a daily basis, you’ve got yourself a recipe for one healthy zygote.
Excessive weight gain in pregnancy not only makes it harder to shed the extra pounds after childbirth. It also increases the risk to the mother of gestational diabetes, dangerous rises in blood pressure (pre-eclampsia), the need for a Caesarean delivery and postpartum infection. For the baby, a mother???s excessive weight gain raises the risk of neural tube defects, birth trauma and fetal death near term.
Studies of tens of thousands of pregnancies showed that how much a pregnant woman should gain for the best chance of a healthy outcome for both mother and baby depends on how much she weighed before becoming pregnant.
Hear that? Newly preggers Nicole Richie isn’t starving herself because she’s got deep-rooted body image problems and a horrific fear of gaining weight. She’s doing it because doesn’t want to put herself at risk for gestational diabetes!
Anyhow, we’ve never had a problem admitting we were wrong, so we’d like to hereby apologize for completely misreading the situation. We applaud your self-control, Nicole. And so does that (whole wheat) bun in your oven.
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