I found out in April of this year that I was pregnant with my second child. It wasn’t a planned pregnancy. In fact, in the previous months I had been focused on my health and fitness and in the process had lost 40 pounds. While I love my kids dearly, pregnancy is not an experience that suits me well. During my first pregnancy, I was very ill with morning sickness, UTI’s, a kidney infection, and to top it off, gestational diabetes. This pregnancy, unfortunately, was no different. Fourteen weeks of morning sickness that definitely did not end when the morning was over, UTI’s all over again, and this time I was diagnosed with pregnancy anemia.

Prior to becoming pregnant, I was in the gym working out almost every day. I was training to take part in my very first 5K and I was determined to not only run the race but to run it at a goal pace. Needless to say, that did not happen. In fact, when I started to get really sick, the gym was the last place that I wanted to be. As time went by, more and more reasons for me not to go to the gym came up, whether it was just how I was feeling on a certain day or life just seemed to get in the way. After all, who goes to the gym when they are pregnant, right? Isn’t it supposed to be a time when you can eat what you want because you are “eating for two?" Well, I’m here to tell you that this method of thinking couldn’t be further from the truth.

Even though I was sick and was not working out, a major aspect of pregnancy for me was my weight and monitoring my sugar intake. During my first pregnancy, I had gestational diabetes. Looking back on it, I really didn’t take the diagnosis very seriously. My doctor told me to work out — I didn’t. She told me to avoid desserts — I did, but not as often as I should have. The list could go on and on. The ultimate result was that my first son was born hypoglycemic. He had to be taken to the NICU within 12 hours of being born and I had to leave the hospital without my baby, having to come back a day later to take him home. I was crushed. For me, this pregnancy, especially after losing 40 pounds, was going to be different and so far, it has been! I have been very careful with what I have eaten, I have avoided as much sugar as possible and running around after my two-year-old has kept me busy.

Then came to moment of truth, my dreaded glucose test. For those of you that have never gone through a glucose test before, your first test entails drinking 50 grams of a sugar drink and then having your blood drawn after an hour. If your blood sugar level is above a certain mark, you then have to go back and drink 100 grams of the sugary drink and have your blood drawn once an hour over three hours. Needless to say, neither test is particularly fun. Unfortunately, even though I had eaten almost everything right, monitored my weight (only gaining 6 pounds), and done everything “right," the blood sugar reading for my first test came back too high and I had to go for the three-hour test. Statistics show that once a mother has had gestational diabetes in her first pregnancy, she is almost 90% likely to develop it in any pregnancy after. Well, this mom fell somewhere in the middle. After one hour, my blood sugar was elevated however the two and three hour tests, my blood sugar came back fine. It was decided by both of us that in the remaining 9 weeks of my pregnancy I would monitor my blood sugar. However, part of maintaining blood sugar for me was getting my butt back to the gym as daily exercise is a primary deterrent of gestational diabetes.

So, I started my journey all over again and after I put my son down for a nap, getting my sweats and heartrate monitor on, I ventured out to a place I have loved but hadn’t entered in months. The first thing I noticed is that the double takes that you get when you walk into a gym at 7 ½ months pregnant are pretty funny. Regardless of what you are doing at the gym, your eye always tends to wander to see what people around you are doing. Well, the funny thing about me is that if you look at me from the front, I don’t look pregnant, the side is a different story. I had to smirk a bit when a guy looked at me in the mirror, looked down, then looked back up quickly and watched me walk over to the treadmill. Anyway, on the treadmill with the understanding that when I got home I would probably be tired, cranky and sore. Well my thoughts were nowhere near the truth. After about 40 minutes of walking on the treadmill at a pace of 2.5mph- 3mph and doing so arm and shoulder work outs, I walked out of that gym feeling fantastic! As the day went on, I realized that my joints weren’t sore and they didn’t hurt, specifically my ankles! I went to bed that night excited to go back to the gym the next day and I haven’t looked back since!

The moral of my story is that there is no person in this world that should ever forsake their health, no matter what type of position they are in. Everyone has their own reasons for wanting to get healthier whether they are personal or for health reasons, but the bottom line is that you have to get over the fear and stigma of taking that first step. If I can walk into a gym at 7 ½ months pregnant with my head held high, knowing that I am taking the right steps for my health then anyone can. I am looking forward to continuing to work out as much as I can over the next 9 weeks and then I am so excited to be able to go back to train this year for the 5k I was unable to do next year. Goals cannot be reached until we take the first step to do so!