Trimester Zero: Hot or not?

Hello everyone,

Happy Friday! All right y’all. Let’s talk about Trimester Zero.

For those of you not chronically online, Trimester Zero is a social media trend currently going viral, telling everyone that the 3-6 months before you start trying to conceive must be spent in maniacal preparation for pregnancy. Sidebar: to dispel the false impression that I am chronically online, permit me to share that I was made aware of this trend by an investor emailing me a New York Times article on the matter… I am about as online as your grandmother.

The term ‘Timester Zero’ originated in a 2017 book by sociologist Miranda Waggoner, examining how public health initiatives shape reproductive risk. The Trimester Zero we’re being hit with online is, shall we say… not that. It is candles (organic soy wax, please), CoQ10 in doses that would revive even my dusty eggs, autumnal walks in perfect woodland, hot husbands clad in Under Armour, kegels, and an impressive volume of affiliate links to the stuff you apparently cannot conceive of conceiving without.

Before I stride upon my soap box, let me give credit where it’s due. Prepping for pregnancy is genuinely important. There’s a study out of Harvard on the metabolic rates of elite endurance athletes that found pregnancy demands roughly the same level of energy expenditure as an ultramarathon. Like endurance sport, during pregnancy the body is operating at the very edge of its metabolic constraints. You’re growing a human, and that takes the kind of energy that ultra-athletes train their whole lives to muster. So the logic that you should do some prep before throwing yourself into it? Sound. And the actual evidence-backed advice is wonderfully plain. Eat well, try to eat a Mediterranean diet, take your folic acid, move your body when you can, get some sleep, don’t burn yourself out. It’s the sort of unsexy advice that is really hard precisely because it is really simple.

All right. Time for everything I loathe about this trend…

The influencers selling Trimester Zero have taken decent public health work and turned it into a commercial opportunity. Fine in principle, disastrous in practice. The marketing is fear-driven, playing on our very real anxieties about matrescence. One creator gently explained that morning sickness “might be common but it isn’t normal” and that with the right prep you’ll bound into the first trimester hiking mountains after a hearty breakfast you craved and kept down. The implicit message is that pregnancy doesn’t need to be hard; without their protocol you’ll suffer needlessly and it’ll be your fault. What a giant croc of shit.

Then there’s the part where influencers tell you to mistrust your OBGYN. There’s already plenty of well-earned mistrust in maternal care, and that’s a fair conversation to have. What’s not fair is influencers telling you your OBGYN “doesn’t know about this stuff” or “doesn’t have time to care.” Do OBGYNs have time to talk to you about this? Yes, it’s called preconception counseling. No, the information in there isn’t going to blow you away (see point above on unsexy simple advice), but anyone telling you to mistrust your doctor is themselves the person you should mistrust. When something goes wrong, and sometimes it does, it isn’t the wellness influencer who saves your life. It’s an OBGYN.

All right, now to the misinformation in this trend. It’s more rampant than a rabbit, and where the actual research is thin, the certainty gets thicc. I was sold organic cotton underwear as the gateway to grandchildren (ehm, code brown for 30% off). Tylenol, friend of the show, takes another beating despite significant data showing it’s fine. Mold is coming for you. Nail varnish is evil. Windex is poison. Non-stick pans? No, you ignoramus, only cast iron is safe.

Look, I absolutely agree that we should reduce exposure to endocrine disruptors where we reasonably can, but those chemicals are everywhere. If you want to eliminate them entirely you may as well move to a cave and forget pedicures forever. The problem is that buying the iron skillet feels easy when the basics are hard, and in the absence of solid research it’s so seductive to click ‘add to cart’.

My penultimate (I promise!) gripe: the continued erasure of men in this trend. Most of the content I consumed this week featured women heroically prepping themselves and then heroically prepping their (often visibly bewildered) husbands. Montages of homecooked fertility meals being served to men who appear to have been ambushed mid-Gameboy sesh. It perpetuates this awful idea that men have one 30-second job in the whole enterprise. Wrong. Paternal exposure to heat, environmental toxins and endocrine disruptors can significantly impact sperm quality, with knock-on effects on birth defects and developmental outcomes. Paternal obesity is a major risk factor for preterm birth and fertility issues in children, and stress before conception can alter epigenetic patterns that affect offspring mental health. Men play an enormously important role in conception – rather than cook for them, can we not just ask them to prep themselves? There are some Unproblematic Kings out there shifting this narrative (👏), but the Trimester Zero framing collapses the whole project into pregnancy prep, which makes it harder to keep men in the picture. Let’s reframe. This is about preparing to bring a human into the world, and that, for most of us, is a team sport (to the SMBC queens conceiving with donors, we bow to you.)

Finally, and IMO most egregiously, there is a splinter faction of this trend selling “going into pregnancy looking hot.” Ehm, wtf? On top of holding down a job in an age of AI, paying bills and generally trying not to disintegrate, we are now meant to be hot for conception. Hard no. No one needs to go into pregnancy looking hot. What is this? A breakup movie plot line in the 90s? Please. That one can go where the sun definitively does not shine.

I think that’s my daily allowance for ‘Bitter Crone’, so I’ll leave it there. To anyone reading this who is thinking about getting pregnant and feeling a little anxious, I promise you your underwear is fine, your occasional Tylenol is fine, Windex is fine. In fact, you are fine. In all senses of the word. Go forth, fine queen.

Take care of yourself this weekend.

Warmly,

Tess

Co-founder & CEO