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“Unless the LORD builds the house, the builders labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the guards stand watch in vain. In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat—for he grants sleep to those he loves.” (Psalm 127:1–2)

There is a growing movement among young women in America that promises total control over one of life’s most uncontrollable mysteries: conception and pregnancy. According to a 2025 report in WIRED magazine, a wave of social media influencers and holistic health coaches have branded the months before pregnancy as the “zero trimester”—a preparation window they say women must optimize through curated diets, supplement regimens, environmental purges, and courses costing up to $1,770. The hashtag #preconceptionhealth appears in over 100,000 Instagram posts. Individual TikTok videos on pregnancy prep have racked up over 13 million views. The message is seductive in its simplicity: “Healthy pregnancy isn’t chance—it’s choice.”

Consider Esther Rohr, a twenty-six-year-old wedding photographer from Oregon. Rohr has never tried to conceive. She has no known fertility issues. Yet she has spent three years overhauling her entire life in preparation: swapping synthetic workout clothes for natural fibers, replacing nonstick pans, unplugging Wi-Fi at night, undergoing a controversial OligoScan for heavy metals, completing two rounds of a cellular healing diet, and taking six to eight supplements daily. She described the process in her own words: “It was a brutal, brutal year.” Three years of preparation. No attempt at conception.

The influencers driving this movement frame pregnancy preparation as empowerment. Alexandra Radway, a functional nutritional therapy practitioner with a growing Instagram following, sells a “Baby Ready Body Book Bundle” for $97 and live courses promising to “balance your hormones, boost your energy, calm your nervous system, and prepare your body for a healthy pregnancy.” One of her signature recommendations? Watching sunrises. “It’s the equivalent of, like, 2,500 Brazil nuts of antioxidants,” she claims. “Everyone’s focusing on super foods. I’m like, ‘No, super sunrise.’”

But some experts in the field offer a different assessment. Dr. Natalie Clark Stentz, a reproductive endocrinologist at Michigan Medicine, offers a blunt assessment: “Any buzzy individual thing is likely sensational, whether that’s Brazil nuts, organ meats, or whatnot. The evidence-based things, they’re not sexy.” A 2025 study found that only five percent of the nutritional claims made on preconception social media accounts were supported by international guidelines. Fifty-four percent had no evidence at all. Dr. Kara Goldman, a fertility specialist at Northwestern University, warns: “You’re taking a very vulnerable, very highly motivated population of patients and targeting them with information that is kind of driven by financial incentives.”

“The evidence-based things, they’re not sexy.”

Here is what the promise ultimately delivers. Under an Instagram post promoting a book called 9 Months That Count Forever: How Your Pregnancy Diet Shapes Your Baby’s Future, one commenter wrote: “I feel so much guilt for not eating well during pregnancy. Definitely a bit triggered by this.” Another typed: “Well I threw up sometimes 10X a day until she was born so… Prayers.” The movement that promised empowerment ultimately delivered shame.

In the article, sociologist Miranda Waggoner, who actually coined the term “zero trimester” identified the problem: this trend “promotes the idea that there’s a causal and deterministic link between preconception care behaviors and birth outcomes, and that’s where I think it can be problematic.”

The promise was control. The cost is guilt for what was never controllable in the first place.

Rohr herself captures the theology at work beneath the lifestyle hacks: “Not knowing things is very uncomfortable for me.” That is not a statement about pregnancy preparation. That is a confession about the human condition—an admission that the deepest discomfort is not physical but existential. We cannot bear the uncertainty, so we build systems of control and call them wisdom.

Culture says a healthy pregnancy is a choice—optimize harder, spend more, control everything. Jesus says something radically different: “Unless the LORD builds the house, the builders labor in vain.” Preparation is wise. Stewardship of the body is good. But when preparation becomes a system of control designed to eliminate the need for trust, it has crossed from wisdom into idolatry. The Gospel does not promise us control over outcomes. It promises us a God who holds outcomes in his hands—and who grants sleep to those he loves.

Source: Currie Engel, “Why Are Some Women Training for Pregnancy Like It’s a Marathon?” WIRED, February 4, 2026.