Pregnancy is sold to us as a season of glowing skin, growing bumps and quietly excited preparation.
That is not always what it looks like.
For some of us, pregnancy looks like vomiting several times a day and watching the number on the scale fall rather than rise. It looks like calculating whether you can make it through a car journey. It looks like lying in bed, not from exhaustion, but because someone told you to stay there, and you are terrified of what happens if you don’t.
That was my pregnancy.
I’m sharing it here because it is part of why Nutura exists. And because if you are currently in the middle of a pregnancy that looks nothing like the one you imagined, I want you to know that yours is not the only story that goes off-script.
I Lost 10 Kilograms in My First Three Months
I had expected some nausea. What I got was something else entirely.
During my first trimester, I lost around 10 kilograms. Not a little. Not the kind of weight fluctuation you read about in the “your body is changing” sections of pregnancy books. 10kg gone, while my baby was growing.
What I was experiencing had a name: hyperemesis gravidarum. Most people know it as severe pregnancy sickness. But calling it morning sickness — as it so often gets called — doesn’t come close to capturing what it actually is. Hyperemesis gravidarum is severe, persistent nausea and vomiting during pregnancy that interferes with eating, drinking and basic daily functioning. It can cause significant weight loss, dehydration, and electrolyte imbalance. Some women need hospital treatment.
I was one of those women, though I fought hard against it.
I had a clear picture of what I wanted my pregnancy to be. Natural. Minimal intervention. No medication unless absolutely necessary. I held onto that idea for longer than was probably wise, which meant I needed close monitoring while my body did what it was doing.
Eventually, I reached a point where holding on wasn’t the right choice anymore. I needed an injection. I didn’t want one. I had one anyway.
That moment, accepting an intervention I had resisted, taught me something I now consider fundamental to the Nutura approach.
Accepting medical treatment is not the opposite of a natural pregnancy. It is part of listening to what your body is actually telling you.
You can value nutrition, minimal intervention and natural approaches. You can also accept an injection when your body genuinely needs help. These are not contradictory positions. The idea that accepting medicine means failing at a natural approach is one of the most unhelpful narratives in maternal wellness — and I say that as someone who believed it, until I didn’t have the luxury of believing it anymore.
What Is Hyperemesis Gravidarum — And How Is It Different From Morning Sickness?
This distinction matters more than most people realise, because confusing the two leads to women not getting the help they need.
Nausea and vomiting during pregnancy is common. Up to 75% of pregnant women experience some degree of nausea and vomiting during pregnancy. For most women, this peaks between weeks 8 and 12 and eases by the second trimester. It is uncomfortable. It is not hyperemesis gravidarum.
Hyperemesis gravidarum is a severe and debilitating disorder of pregnancy, defined by nausea and vomiting, at least one of which is severe, starting in early pregnancy before 16 weeks, causing an inability to eat and drink normally and strongly limiting daily living activities. It is not a worse version of morning sickness. It is a different condition entirely.
HG typically begins between 4 and 6 weeks of gestation, affects approximately 0.3 to 3% of pregnancies, and is a leading cause of early pregnancy hospitalisation. That means it is rare enough that many healthcare providers underestimate its severity, and common enough that every pregnant woman should know its signs.
The clearest clinical marker is weight. Hyperemesis gravidarum is characterised by more than 5% weight loss from pre-pregnancy weight, alongside ketonuria, the presence of ketones in the urine, indicating that the body has begun breaking down fat for energy because it cannot access enough from food. I lost 10 kilograms. That is not a rounding error.
The condition can render women so physically and mentally unwell that they are at increased risk of terminating a wanted pregnancy. That sentence stopped me when I first read it, because I understood it. Not because I reached that point, but because I understood how someone could.
The symptoms to know
Symptoms predominantly include any combination of nausea, gagging, retching, dry heaving, vomiting, and food or odour aversion. But what distinguishes HG from typical pregnancy nausea is the severity, persistence, and impact on daily life. Less recognised symptoms include excessive salivation, fatigue, weakness, dizziness, heightened sensitivity to smell, altered taste perception, sleep disturbances, and significant mood changes including depression, anxiety and irritability.
The signs that warrant urgent medical assessment, not a wait-and-see approach, not another week of crackers and ginger tea:
Persistent vomiting that does not ease with rest or dietary changes. Inability to keep any food or fluid down. Significant weight loss. Urine that is very dark or heavily concentrated, or urinating much less than usual. Dizziness, weakness or feeling faint. A complete inability to function in daily life, not tiredness, but incapacity.
Secondary medical care should be considered when there is clinical dehydration or weight loss greater than 5% of body weight despite first-line measures, or when electrolyte imbalances are present.
Do not wait until you have ticked every box on a list. If you are vomiting repeatedly, losing weight and struggling to keep fluids down, that is reason enough to call your maternity team today.
Why women are dismissed and why that has to change
Concerns regarding prescribing in pregnancy and inaccurate assumptions that the condition is self-limiting result in women being dismissed and having difficulty accessing appropriate care. I experienced this directly. The assumption that what I was going through was normal pregnancy nausea, that I should manage it at home, try harder with food, wait it out, cost me time and weight I could not afford to lose.
HG is not self-limiting for every woman. It can persist well beyond the first trimester, occasionally lasting throughout the entire gestation or even into the postpartum period.
If you are being dismissed, go back. Bring someone with you. Ask to be assessed rather than reassured. Ask for your weight to be documented. Ask what the threshold is for further investigation. You are not being difficult. You are asking for appropriate care.
What Nobody Tells You About Not Being Able to Eat
When eating is this difficult, the instinct from everyone around you is to talk about food.
Eat small amounts. Try ginger. Have you tried crackers? Bland foods. Cold foods. No smells.
Some of that is useful. But when you are losing 10 kilograms in three months, the priority is not building a perfectly balanced pregnancy plate. The priority is: what can I keep down today?
That is not failure. That is triage.
During my worst periods, hydration mattered more than food. Large amounts of water at once triggered more nausea, so smaller, more frequent sips became the goal. On better days I could eat something. On worse days, eating something, anything, was the bar I was aiming for, not eating the right thing.
As symptoms slowly improved, variety came back. But during the hardest weeks, survival eating is not a compromise. It is the appropriate response to what is happening.
If you cannot keep fluids down at all, if you are dizzy, if your urine is very dark or you are urinating much less than usual, if you feel faint, that is the point where you need medical assessment urgently. Not your next routine appointment. Now.
Then the Pregnancy Changed Again
Just when I thought I understood what my pregnancy was going to be, something else happened.
I had a uterine fibroid. I already knew about it before pregnancy, it had been 2 centimetres in diameter. By the time I was pregnant, it had grown to 13 centimetres.
For context: a uterine fibroid is a non-cancerous growth in or on the uterus. Many women have fibroids and never know. Many women with fibroids have completely uncomplicated pregnancies. But the size, number and location of fibroids, and critically, their relationship to the placenta, can matter.
In my case, part of my placenta was located over the fibroid. I then experienced what was described to me as a partial placental detachment.
Suddenly I was not just managing nausea and rebuilding weight. I was managing a different kind of fear entirely.
Rest became part of my pregnancy. Not the peaceful kind. The kind where you lie still and try not to think too hard about every sensation in your body. The kind where you have an enormous amount of time to worry, to search online, to catastrophise, and to feel completely out of control of something happening inside your own body.
Bed Rest Is Not Restful
I want to be careful here, because this is where my experience and current medical evidence need to be separated.
Routine bed rest is not a standard recommendation for preventing preterm birth or managing most pregnancy complications. The evidence does not support it as a general intervention, and prolonged inactivity carries its own risks, including blood clots and physical deconditioning.
I am not telling you to put yourself on bed rest.
What I am telling you is that my activity was restricted as part of my individual pregnancy management, and that if your healthcare provider recommends limiting activity, you should ask exactly what that means for your specific situation. Not “take it easy.” Specifics.
Can I walk around the house? Use stairs? Cook? Drive? Work? Lift my older child? How long does this apply? What symptoms mean I need to go to hospital immediately?
Do not leave an appointment with only a vague instruction to rest when you do not understand what rest actually means for your daily life.
The Emotional Weight
Here is what I was not prepared for.
Being sick every day is exhausting in a way that goes beyond tired. Food stops being enjoyable. Cooking smells become unbearable. Normal routines disappear. You plan your day around whether you will feel sick, whether you need to be near a bathroom, whether you have the energy for a conversation.
People meant well. They offered tips. They reminded me it would pass. They said things like “at least the baby is okay.”
And they were right, the baby was okay. I knew that. I was grateful for it.
But two things can be true. You can be deeply grateful for your pregnancy and still find it extraordinarily hard. You can love your baby and still struggle with the experience of being pregnant. You do not have to perform gratitude while you are vomiting.
What actually helped was not more tips. It was practical help. Someone going to the supermarket with my list. Someone bringing dinner. Someone taking care of something I could not manage that day. A person saying, not “let me know if you need anything,” because a person in survival mode will rarely ask but “I will do this specific thing for you.”
If someone you love is having a difficult pregnancy, that is the kind of support that reaches them.
What This Changed About How I Think About Maternal Wellness
Experiences like these are part of why Nutura cannot simply be another platform telling you which fruit your baby resembles this week.
The fruit comparisons are charming. The checklists are genuinely useful. The recipes matter and you will find plenty of them here.
But pregnancy can also involve hyperemesis, fibroids, bleeding, hospital visits, activity restrictions, difficult decisions and genuine fear. And women going through those experiences deserve information that reflects their reality, not just the glossy version.
The Nutura approach comes from this: natural where appropriate. Evidence-based always. Medical support when necessary.
These are not competing ideas. Natural maternal wellness does not mean being afraid of medicine. Evidence-based care does not mean ignoring nutrition, emotional wellbeing or a mother’s instincts and preferences. There is room for all of it and knowing which one you need at any given moment is what good maternal care actually looks like.
If Your Pregnancy Doesn’t Feel Magical Right Now
You don’t have to love pregnancy to love your baby.
You don’t have to feel glowing while you’re vomiting.
You don’t have to enjoy lying in bed afraid of what might happen if you move.
You don’t have to pretend you’re fine because other people keep reminding you how lucky you are.
Some pregnancies are simply hard.
Mine was. I lost 10 kilograms in my first trimester. My fibroid grew from 2 centimetres to 13 centimetres. Part of my placenta sat over it. I experienced a partial detachment. I resisted medication until I couldn’t. I rested when I wanted to be doing anything else.
None of that was what I had imagined.
But it is what taught me to listen. To know the difference between what my body wanted and what my body needed. To understand that sometimes a healthy approach to pregnancy means setting aside the philosophy and accepting the help.
If you are currently in a difficult pregnancy, whatever that looks like for you, you deserve to be properly assessed, genuinely listened to, supported with accurate information, and included in decisions about your care.
And sometimes, getting through today is the only goal that matters.
Coming Next on Nutura
Fibroids and Pregnancy: What I Learned When My Placenta Was Located Over a Fibroid
What uterine fibroids are, why size and location matter during pregnancy, what a partial placental detachment means and involves, and what every mother diagnosed with fibroids should be discussing with her maternity care team.
Nutura is a maternal and infant wellness platform specialising in nutrition, breastfeeding and baby sleep — founded in Mauritius by a mother who learned the hard way that evidence-based care and natural approaches belong together. Browse our resources at nutura.org.