You don’t need us to tell you that pregnancy is exhausting, from those early days when every symptom feels new to the aches and pains of the final weeks before delivery. A new study is shedding light on just how much energy it actually takes to carry a baby, and you’ll be entirely unsurprised to find out that scientists had previously underestimated it by a lot… a whole lot, in fact. In the study, which was recently published in the journal Science, Australian researchers looked at the metabolic output required during a typical pregnancy, determining that the caloric demand equals around 50,000 dietary calories—the equivalent of about 50 pints of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream, which is apparently far more than the scientists had believed beforehand.
