Why eating suddenly becomes a punishment when you are pregnant

Being pregnant also means that you doubt a lot. Am I doing this right? Is this normal? Am I not too stressed? I worry whether I have too much stress, and that's not good either.

Here we go again.

You start to worry, precisely because you want to do everything right. You don't want to make silly mistakes. You want to get everything sorted as a soon-to-be mother. The best for your offspring. And food makes it difficult for me during this pregnancy. The first three months I couldn't get a bite down my throat due to severe nausea, I woke up at night from hunger and had to have my husband make a sandwich with cheese, the only thing I could eat.

Then physically it got better and I could finally eat everything I felt like. But yes, then it's also paying attention again, every day. What can you have, what can't you? Is this fresh cheese or not and does this contain raw egg or not and can you do cheese fondue, because the wine evaporates anyway? Can you have tiramisu if there's no alcohol in it? Oh come on, I find that so delicious. Questions I never thought I would ask myself. But with every bite, I can get grumpy again, because, well, am I now ten thousand percent sure that mozzarella is allowed and pâté too and chicken breast and tuna salad? What a hassle. And the annoying part is mainly in the googling.

Let that be a wise lesson for everyone who is pregnant or will be: don't google anything. Because if you start googling what is good and what is not for you, then everything is off-limits. Then you dare not do anything anymore. Suddenly, you find water scary. Really. The more I search on the internet, the more worries I get. I can take a bath but not too hot and not too long. But what is too hot and too long? A bath is supposed to be good for relaxation, right? Can I still exercise in the coming months or not? And bike to work? And sleep on my back? I get stressed from googling and as soon as you google ‘stress in pregnancy’, well, then it's virtually complete panic. Because you really shouldn't do that, as a mother-to-be. Shame on you.

But you can't help it. It's a cycle. You want to do it right and therefore look up everything about what is allowed and what is not. And by searching and googling and sniffing around the web, you get worries. Because ultimately, every site has something to say about something. So: I take it easy. I listen to myself. I know for sure that I can't order steak tartare and I don't do that either. But let's not exaggerate. In the past, we didn't know everything either, right? And we, that previous generation, also turned out just fine.