When men get pregnancy symptoms

“I was throwing up and retching a lot and couldn’t keep anything down,” one man reported. “I was constantly hungry all the time and had an unstoppable craving for chicken kormas and poppadams. Even in the early hours of the morning, I would get up and prepare myself one,” another subject said. In this paper and in subsequent research, the symptom list has seemed to include almost everything: diarrhea, constipation, leg cramps, a sore throat, depression, insomnia, weight gain, weight loss, tiredness, toothaches, sore gums. The symptoms also seemed to follow a pattern similar to a physical pregnancy: peaking during the first and third trimesters, and in many cases disappearing after the birth of the child. Some symptoms didn’t appear at all in the beginning; some continued postpartum. Regardless of when couvade arrived, it seemed to carry a stigma. “In the U.K., it appears that the syndrome arouses little interest and men who display its symptoms are usually ignored, ridiculed or remain undiagnosed,” Brennan wrote. Yet the symptoms keep appearing. In 2019, during his wife’s second pregnancy, an NBA player for the Washington Wizards, Bradley Beal, went public about how food cravings and weight gain left him drained and ashamed when his partner was pregnant. “I was up at 3, 4 o’clock in the morning eating ice cream when I shouldn’t have been eating ice cream,” Beal told NBC. “That’s all because momma was pregnant and I had the exact same symptoms.”