Bulking Up

I had my 6 month doctor's appointment yesterday.  Everything looks good with the little one, but the nurse practitioner said she was concerned about my weight gain.  As someone who is ALWAYS concerned about my weight gain, I wasn't surprised to hear this, but I WAS surprised to hear that she was concerned that I hadn't gained enough!  This has never been an issue for me in my past 3 pregnancies.  I think it's due to the fact that I found out so late that I was pregnant (10 weeks) and that their baseline weight for me is actually about 12 lbs heavier than I usually am.  I am not concerned about my weight gain.  I am 5 lbs lighter, at 6 1/2 mos than I was when I delivered my second.  As I told the nurse, if this "lack of weight gain" causes me to have a little smaller baby, I'm all for that!  After 8lbs 6oz, 9lbs, and 8lbs 14oz, I feel I'm owed a 7 pounder!  But her comment did raise some questions for me.  If I did want to gain weight, how would I do it?  Now I know we all know how I could gain weight, but I don't want to gain weight like Tom Hanks did for A League of Their Own (sadly, I've been mentally composing this post since yesterday and I couldn't come up with a more recent example...so sad, I know!).  I want to gain healthy weight.  My husband suggested I hit the gym again like I did after my daughter was born.  It's kind of an inside joke.  We joined the YMCA and I took a class to learn how to use all the machines.  I HAD to use them for about 6 weeks and record how often and what I did.  I did some weight lifting, and because my arms are about the size of my toddler's thighs, the muscle I built was easy to see.  They said I had Madonna arms.  But other than putting on muscle weight, I was kind of stumped as to how, on a whole food, vegetarian diet, to gain weight.  That's kind of the beauty of that kind of diet, it's healthy for you and you don't need to worry so much about counting calories and fat and all that other junk that goes with diets.  So I've decided just to keep going as usual.  She said the kid's still growing on schedule and that's all I really care about!