MAJ D’Aurelio does a handstand while thirty-seven weeks pregnant at the summit of Flattop Mountain, Alaska. (Credit: Tyler Struss)
What’s It Like?
Staying Army Strong while Growing a Warrior
By Major Jeri L. D’Aurelio
I am neither a doctor nor a person with specialized medical training that informs the opinions I share in the following paragraphs. Therefore, if the views in this article contradict the medical advice of licensed medical providers, listen to your medical provider!
As a postpartum Army judge advocate (JA) who recently gave birth, I have a pregnancy-informed viewpoint of the Army’s new Holistic Health and Fitness (H2F) program. Simply put, the H2F program seeks to improve all-around Soldier readiness while decreasing injuries by focusing on training in five domains: physical readiness, nutritional readiness, mental readiness, sleep readiness, and spiritual readiness.1 This article provides my perspective on the physical and nutritional readiness domains and emphasizes my approach to them while pregnant. I must note that I have been blessed with “easy” pregnancies, free from complications, so the opinions below are from that perspective and are not intended to judge or in any way pressure women who face different challenges that limit what they can do during pregnancy.
Physical Readiness
Despite the emergence of the JA’s critical role in combat operations during the Global War on Terrorism, it is possible for JAs to hear, from Soldiers and civilians alike, that “being physically fit doesn’t make you a better attorney” or “if we find ourselves relying on the JA to engage an enemy, things have gone terribly wrong.” While being fit may not be critical to a JA’s immediate mission, it plays an essential role in the second half of a JA’s dual profession as Soldiers and officers. As physical readiness is a crucial aspect of being a Soldier, respecting it reflects your respect for what it means to wear the uniform and be a part of the greater Army team. Similarly, while no one desires to be in a situation where all members of the staff are needed to engage an enemy, you do not want to be viewed as a liability to your fellow Soldiers. Thus, it is critical to be proficient in Soldier tasks, in the operation of your assigned weapon system, and be physically fit.
For female Soldiers, this responsibility can be significantly challenging throughout the various stages of pregnancy. Despite the challenge that is pregnancy, maintaining a focus on physical fitness throughout pregnancy will not only make it easier to meet the Army standards in body composition and physical fitness upon return to duty, it also better prepares individuals both mentally and physically for birth and postpartum.2 While there are policies in place to relieve pregnant women from meeting fitness standards during the pregnancy and the year following the birth, they must meet all standards as soon as that time concludes. The H2F program has a specific Pregnancy and Postpartum Physical Training (P3T) methodology intended to keep Soldiers physically fit during pregnancy.3 A key principle of the P3T methodology encourages Soldiers to participate in “the highest level of physical fitness they are comfortable with,” 4 which has been the center of gravity for my prenatal and postpartum fitness approach during both my pregnancies.
Fundamentally, perspective is critical to any fitness journey. I view pregnancy as an opportunity to challenge oneself in new and different ways. To be clear, I am not advocating for increasing or wildly changing one’s fitness routine while pregnant. Instead, I consider pregnancy a new way to challenge myself by seeing what physical feats I can safely achieve throughout the pregnancy. For example, during my first pregnancy, my husband and I went for a hike every weekend, and I took handstand pictures to gradually record our child’s growth over time (comically, my final handstand picture was in the operating room minutes before I gave birth to our oldest child). During my second pregnancy, I recorded a pull-up once a week to document our child’s growth over time. This time, my final pull-up video was right before we headed to the hospital to have our second son. Little things like this were not detrimental to my nor my babies’ health, and they kept me motivated to get in the gym every day. Throughout my recent pregnancy, my goal was to complete at least thirty minutes on the stationary bike and thirty minutes of functional fitness Monday through Friday—nothing extremely hard, just consistent.
As mentioned briefly above, JAs are more effective at advising and impacting their commanders’ decision-making process when they prioritize being both Soldiers and lawyers. Continuing to “get after it” in the gym during pregnancy—though in a far less arduous manner than in my pre-pregnancy routine—enabled me to maintain my physical fitness, thereby making it much easier to resume physical training after the birth of my child.
Nutritional Readiness
In addition to physical exercise, nutrition is crucial to your all-around health and longevity. You can exercise routinely and still end up with diabetes, heart disease, or a slew of other ailments if you maintain a poor diet long-term. The Army’s H2F program provides evidence-based guidance on the types of food Soldiers should consume as well as some healthy eating patterns.5
While there are some cardinal truths about what makes a
healthy/unhealthy diet, everyone is different and a healthy diet for me
may not be a healthy diet for you. Once I became a competitive athlete,
I began experimenting with diet to find what worked best for me. I
started by trying an elimination diet—I removed many foods from my diet,
waited thirty days, and then began reintroducing them to see how my body
reacted.6 One unintended benefit that resulted was that I became a far better cook, as it takes more skill to make food taste good when you cannot have gluten, dairy, or sugar. As I added foods back into my diet, I settled on a routine that includes a heavier amount of meat, vegetables, and fruit and a lighter amount of grains and pasta. My husband, on the other hand, has found that his body is closer to peak performance with a diet resembling the carnivore diet. One general rule that can be applied to achieve a more nutritional diet, regardless of the food-group ratios, is to make as much of your food at home as possible. If you buy all the base ingredients and make the meals, you know what is in the food you are eating, and you can avoid the detrimental ingredients contained in ultra-processed foods.
Regarding nutrition during pregnancy, a misconception is that a pregnant person should eat twice as much as they did previously because they are “eating for two.”7 In fact, eating twice as much is just a sure way to pack on extra weight that will be difficult to lose after the pregnancy (and could even lead to complications during the pregnancy).8
According to the American Pregnancy Association, the pregnant body burns
roughly 300 more calories a day during the second and third
trimesters.9 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends 340 additional calories during the second trimester and 450 additional calories during the third.10 These increased calories are in addition to the recommended caloric intake based on height and weight. Therefore, if you already normally consume more calories than the recommended amount, you may not need to increase caloric intake at all during pregnancy. For reference, a measuring cup of diced chicken is 230 calories (with no seasoning or dip).
It is important to make a nutritional diet and physical exercise regimen habitual. Once that is the case, it will feel less and less like you are faced with hard decisions, such as whether to go to the gym, because it will just be part of the routine. Then, if you become pregnant, you can more easily continue those healthy lifestyle routines with slight modifications based on your specific situation. This routine approach will not only lead to a healthier you year-round, but it will also keep you in a healthier state through pregnancy and make it easier to meet the Army standards after giving birth. TAL
MAJ D’Aurelio is a Battalion Judge Advocate for 1st Special Forces Group at Joint-Base Lewis-McChord, Washington.
Notes
1. See U.S. Dep’t of Army, Field Manual 7-22, Holistic Health and Fitness, at xiv (26 Oct. 2012) (C1, 8 Oct. 2020) [hereinafter FM 7-22].
2. See Exercise During Pregnancy, ACOG: Am. Coll. of Obstetricians & Gynecologists, https://www.acog.org/womens-health/faqs/exercise-during-pregnancy
(last visited Apr. 8, 2024);
Ctrs. for Disease Control & Prevention,
Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans 44-45 (2d ed. 2018).
3. FM 7-22, supra note 1, at 12-10.
4. Id.
5. Id. ch. 8 (Nutritional Readiness).
6. While not an endorsement, the elimination diet I tried was Whole30.
7. See Pregnant Nutrition, Am. Pregnancy Ass’n, https://americanpregnancy.org/healthy-pregnancy/pregnancy-health-wellness/pregnancy-nutrition (last visited Apr. 8, 2024).
8. See Weight Gain During Pregnancy: Why Is It Important to Gain the
Recommended Amount of Weight During Pregnancy?,
Ctrs. for Disease Control & Prevention,
https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternalinfanthealth/pregnancy-weight-gain.htm
(last visited Apr. 8, 2024).
9. Pregnant Nutrition, supra note 7.
10. Weight Gain During Pregnancy, supra note 8.