How did it get this difficult to eat?

Steve has made me realise something this week. I'd never noticed it, but it seems it's been there for a long time.

I don't eat enough.

Now I thought I ate quite a lot, in fact I've always been kind of proud of my appetite. I used to joke that the "full" switch in my stomach had been ignored so often it didn't work any more. Well, it turns out that my appetite is not as big as I thought - and the "full" switch may well need re-training, as it seems to kick in way too early now.

It's got to the point now that because I don't eat enough, I barely have enough energy to get me through the most bland of days, and when we go out - for example to church (do you realise how much energy singing praise to God uses up?!) or even just a walk to the shops for necessities - it knocks me for six and this week, for one reason or another, it's taken me 5 days to feel right again. But because I don't have enough energy, this makes me feel sick and feeling sick means I drink less (that's another thing, I've never drunk enough water in a day) and if I drink less I feel more sick and then don't eat... thus creating a vicious cycle of not eating and feeling sick.

So what do I do? How do I break out of this cycle? I have no idea. I try, I honestly try to eat more, but every meal there comes a point where my stomach says, "enough: feed me any more and you won't enjoy the outcome." It's hard enough eating in the first place. Pretty often I'll sit down to eat the evening meal with Steve, and have to call time after 5 minutes to go and lie down to get my stomach used to the idea of taking in food. And by the time I've stopped feeling sick my food's gone cold. Sucks really.

The thing is, I really don't know what I can do to get out of this. There's no issue with body image, although I admitted to Steve's mum last night that as I've always been skinny, I am terrified of getting fat - and for some reason at the moment I just seem to associate getting the baby bump as being fat. But I don't think that's an underlying reason. I've been worked on for so long about putting on weight by doctors and dieticians and various other medics that I'm actually really happy about reaching what has been my target weight of 9 stone. I've never been that heavy before, and for ages I was stuck at 8.5 stone - and was terrified of hitting the 9 stone mark. But I've done it, and it's not that bad.

I tell you what though, I wish clothes stores would all size their clothes the same. It was horrible going into Dorothy Perkins on Sunday in search of maternity clothes - I'm usually a 10-12, happily so, as I refuse to think of myself as super skinny. In DP even the size 8 stuff was actually falling off me. All I could think was the nurse and dietician and consultant aren't going to be pleased if I've gone and dropped 2 dress sizes. Came as a sort of relief to discover that DP size everything wrong.

Anyway, back to the eating, when I talked it over with Steve, we discovered there is a kind of pattern to my general eating habits. Even before I was pregnant I didn't eat much at breakfast or lunch, and would eat a bigger amount at dinner. I was quite capable of eating a huge amount in one go, but it would only be once a day normally. When I started going to the gym I started eating more throughout the day, Steve recalls, but now I suppose I associate eating with being sick, just because that's been my experience with the morning sickness for nearly 2 months.

I'm going to talk it over with the team at the hospital on Friday, because I can't go on like this. I need more energy, but I am just finding it so difficult as it is to balance the food/insulin/sugar levels that I hardly dare upset that delicate equilibrium. And then what do I do if I want to start doing some gentle exercise? Blimey that's going to upset the balance even more.

Ah well, enough for now. Got that off my chest, and hopefully I'll get some help on Friday...