Before: 266
After: 176
About a year after giving birth to my daughter, I tried to get pregnant with baby number two. However, I learned that I suffered from secondary infertility.
Over the next two years, I underwent countless fertility medications, tried intrauterine implantation, and ultimately went through eight in-vitro fertilization cycles in an attempt to harvest viable eggs for later implantation. Still, no baby. As if that weren’t hard enough, I also gained 120 pounds.
(Weight gain caused by fertility treatments is common, says Julie M. Levitt, M.D., a board-certified ob-gyn with the Women’s Group of Northwestern in Chicago. Hormonal changes can stimulate appetite. And since some medications can increase the size of the ovaries, some women are sidelined from activity to prevent a twisted or ruptured ovary.)