It's no secret to most sufferers that eating disorders don't magically go away when a person turns 25. Or 30. Or gets pregnant.

It is certainly possible to get pregnant while deeply engaged in an eating disorder (although situations like this are very unusual). So what does a future mother do? Many people are under the impression that women who are unable to stop ED behaviors during pregnancy are sacrificing the health of their unborn child so that they can "look good," which is frankly BS.

But women with an eating disorder--or even a history of one--are at very high risk during pregnancy. An interesting article titled "Dying to Be a Good Mom" from Brain Blogger examines this phenomenon, looking at risks during pregnancy and after the birth of the new baby. What makes this article stand out is not only its good look at medical risks, but also the conflicting feelings and ambivalence many new mothers with EDs face.

One thing struck me as a little ludicrous, however. "Researchers are now finding that mothers with eating disorders may place their children at increased risk for developing an eating disorder, also." Obviously, environment is important. But what puts the child most at risk is the genes predisposing the child to an eating disorder that were passed down from the mother.

Otherwise, I have to recommend it quite highly.

Now, I'm in a bit of a pissy mood already today, what with being hormonal and all. So it probably gave me a lower threshold to dealing with crazy news about obesity. But this, my friends, has kind of sent me over the edge:

Pregnancy Weight Gain May Impact Child

In a nutshell, the study said that gaining the "recommended" weight during pregnancy increased your risk for having an "overweight" toddler. One researcher did warn, however that not gaining enough weight increases your chances for having a low birthweight child.

Now, not having formally reviewed the statistics, I'm not entirely positive that I should say this, but what the hell. The risks of health damage to a low birthweight child far far FAR outweigh (hah!) the risks of a so-called overweight toddler.

A very nice review of the whole issue is found here.

There might be other things going on here, too. Maybe women who gain more weight during pregnancy just happen to have larger children. That doesn't mean that it's the weight gain that caused it. With any topic even remotely related to obesity, association immediately implies causation. For a while, it was thought that coffee increased your risk for cancer. But oh, wait a minute. People who drank coffee (back in the 1960s or 1970s, when the study was done) were also much more likely to smoke cigarettes. It was the cigarettes doing the damage, not the coffee. In epidemiology, this is known as a confounder. There are all sorts of statistical magic that you can work to take this into account. Something tells me this wasn't the researchers' priority. Because, dude, obesity is the root cause of all evil in our society.

Women have been going through pregnancy and childbirth for hundreds of thousands of years. Don't you think that our bodies instinctively know what to do? Or that women, eager finally to be able to eat what they want, let themselves gain too much weight because they've finally been granted permission to eat like a human? And what's four times more likely? Four times more likely than one overweight toddler is four overweight toddlers. In the grand scheme of things, is it really that big of a deal?

Get real, people.