“Eating for 2” is a BS excuse to eat for Australia!

Staff Writer

Sarah Levett is a successful standup comedian, writer, MC, co-host of the New FM Breakfast Show … and soon to be a Mum for the first time.

Here, Sarah writes a series about the experiences of being pregnant while working on the radio.

Read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Below is part 3 – “Eating for 2” is a BS excuse to eat for Australia!

We all have things in our wardrobe we should have thrown out years ago when we stopped fitting into them even with lubricant, assistance, a crane, and a crowbar. And they make great radio content….

For women, it's “I swear, this summer, I will finally get back into the jeans I wore when I was eight.” Not size eight. Age eight. And for men it’s “Honey, you haven’t accidentally-on-purpose thrown out my 1987 Bon Jovi Slippery When Wet tour t-shirt (a faded, shrunken, moth-eaten, reminder of the hot chick you still believe you were dating back then, even though holding her drink that one time while she pashed someone else doesn’t count) … have you?!

The same wardrobe-shrinking thing happened to me, only much faster.

Being anally organised I have a carefully researched 9 month weight plan – involving a complex but foolproof diet and exercise regime for every month of my pregnancy. By month 3 I nailed it! Winner! The whole 9 month weight goal – in just 12 weeks! And this is what I learned: “Eating for 2” is just a bullshit excuse for women to eat for Australia.

Boy, did saying that on-air fire the phones up! One listener stacked on 30 kilos and is still trying to lose it. And her kids have grown up and left home. Another caller said men actually put on sympathy weight and her husband has swapped the Bon Jovi t-shirt for one that reads “My wife is pregnant. I'm just a really sympathetic husband”

And some of the stuff women crave when they’re “eating for two” is just weird. Especially as the other person eating it gets no say. One listener called in and said she couldn't stop eating dirt. I’m pretty sure there are no calories in dirt, yet even taking into account the kid’s future career in mining I just didn’t take to it.

Besides which, you have to consider “you are what you eat”. No surprises, by week 6 my muffin top looked like a 3 tiered cake. Things started to stretch. My skinny jeans were working overtime and making noises like they were part of the ropes and rigging for the Black Pearl. Against professional advice from a structural engineer, I hung onto my clothes far beyond their recommended safe working capacity. I was wearing safety goggles and doing up my jeans using a torque wrench and an occy strap.

Yep, according to listeners I was suffering from a bad case of M.W.D – Maternity Wear Denial.

But ballooning is just the obvious, external change to your body. It’s the less visibly obvious ones that are far more scary. Everyone else notices “the bump” – what you notice is what it’s done to your eyesight. One day – BAM! – you’re suddenly struck by the horrifying and certain knowledge that never, ever again, for the entire duration of the rest of your natural life, will you ever be able to look at some cute guy's bum the same way.

Unless that cute guy's bum looks like a pram.

Up until now prams have been about as mesmerizing as watching someone crochet. On my “things I’m mesmerized by” league ladder, until now prams and crocheting have been tied for equal last place. Not that I ever really thought about either. But suddenly prams are the visual equivalent of Magic Mike and his 10 pack.

So I now find the following list far more stimulating than my favourite passages in 50 Shades of Grey: Bugaboo cameleon, steelcraft-agile, phoniex, profile, terrain, eclipse, Valco matrix-Ion and Zee, Mountain buggy swift. I saw one pram that, if it were wearing a cape and holding a God-of-thunder hammer it could have starred in Thor. Phwaor.

Clearly I need help, so to the phones we went. One caller told a pram story about a two storey pram – which toppled over because it was stacked to the bottle shop ceiling with cask wine. And (slightly off topic, but worth mentioning) one genteel lady caller chimed in with “Well, I done my part for the government by having four”.

She meant babies. Not prams*.

* I hope.

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