Mind vs. Body: This Pregnant Vegetarian Gives Into Hamburger Cravings in Viral Video

If you've ever been pregnant, you may be familiar with the super intense cravings some parents-to-be experience while gestating their little bundles of joy. And while those cravings tend to be pretty specific to each person's tastes — pickles, ice cream, and some mix of salty and sweet are always popular ones — typically, people settle on one thing they can't get enough of and then they crave that for the duration of their pregnancy.

Unfortunately for one pregnant vegetarian, that single craving ended up being meat. Take a look at her TikTok confession, which went viral after she filmed herself chowing down on a McDonald's hamburger, and learn a bit about why some women have intense cravings during pregnancy.

When TikTok user @kennahags filmed herself driving up to a McDonald's, we had no idea she was about to break from her long-standing plant-based diet in favor of one of the fast food giant's best sellers. According to the pregnant mama, it's been about five years since she ate meat, which is why she was so shocked when she suddenly couldn't stop thinking about eating animal-based foods.

Of course, after five years of abstaining, @kennahags wasn't sure how she'd react to the burger once she ate it. Fortunately for her, she didn't seem to have any reaction as she polished off her meal, and it seemed like the only queasiness she felt was over the fact that she'd given into her meat cravings after so much time away from the products.

Fortunately, the comments she received from her followers seem mostly positive, and many people shared how they had fallen victim to intense cravings during their pregnancies as well. Then, of course, there were the folks who wanted to solve the mystery of why the vegetarian was suddenly so hungry for meat, and a few people shared their theories, which may not have been too far off the mark.

When it comes to pregnancy cravings, what you want to eat may have more to do with the stigma around those items than what your taste buds are actually yearning for. According to the BBC, research has shown that pregnancy cravings may be more mental than anything else and produced largely by the fact that pregnant people are viewed with less judgment when they decide to indulge.

So, where a non-pregnant person may catch some raised eyebrows for sitting down and consuming a pint of ice cream in a single sitting, someone who is expecting could write the whole experience off as a craving, giving them a dietary immunity that allows them to eat whatever (and whenever) they want.

Another theory is that it's the fact that some of these items are considered forbidden desires, which makes them that much more appealing.

For example, you may not normally drool over the idea of double cheese macaroni, but once you start to think about it and how it wouldn't exactly break your diet to have it, you may not be able to stop thinking about it, creating the illusion of an intense craving. While the research isn't exactly conclusive, it seems like there are a lot of different things that could be behind most pregnancy cravings.

That being said, as someone who spent an entire pregnancy so obsessed with balsamic vinaigrette that I was drinking it out of little shot glasses, I think there's a lot of merit to the idea that pregnancy leads you to eat weird or decadent things simply because it's acceptable for you to finally give into urges that you may have had all along. Hopefully, that's reassuring news to the OP, and she doesn't beat herself up too much for making such a drastic change during pregnancy.