Now that you’ve found out you’re pregnant, your whole outlook on life and the way you are living it begins to change—-and you begin to take notice of all the pieces of advice that people around you are dropping as if on cue. All those motherly types who know what’s best for you, even more than your doctor does, will tell you that eating for two is just what you need to do now, to build up your strength and make sure the baby is well fed. But the other side of the coin is just as adamant: “don’t overeat, no no no—be careful, don’t gain too much weight, you must stick to a diet during pregnancy”.
Well, I say, nuts to all that. Where were all these naysayers and do-gooders way back when years ago when plenty of healthy babies were being born, and the mothers did not gain a tremendous amount of weight and no one even thought of going on a diet during pregnancy—-that thought would have conjured up a bunch of belly laughs.
To them, pregnancy was just another fact of life, and yes it was celebrated, but not with the materialistic carryon that goes on today with rounds and rounds of showers, sonograms and what have you. Their lives were far more simple than ours with their limited technology—-but with lots of advantages that we don’t regard as advantages. There was no greasy, fat-laden burgers and fried chicken on every corner just begging to be eaten so they could clog up our under used hearts; no cardboard tasting TV dinners in the supermarket. They worked hard, did much more manual labor than we do today, walked a lot more, and ate fresh foods usually grown locally.
So, here we are today with all our conveniences and stressors and in some cases, whacked out ways of looking at pregnancy. What kind of a diet during pregnancy should we be following since our bodies have not yet genetically caught up with our technologically supported lifestyles. The emphasis here is on the word “diet”—-which way you take it to mean. Some of us who look at food and the calories jump from the food to our hips and thighs regard the word “diet” to mean just that—reduction of intake of calories so the weight gain during pregnancy is minimal.
Then there are those women who have been sylphs all their lives and don’t even know how to spell the word calorie; to them, diet during pregnancy has a very different meaning. They think of a pregnancy diet as the overall plan of eating that they should follow to stay healthy, with little or no emphasis on keeping calories under a certain level to maintain weight gain. To them, diet is how much water you take in on a daily basis, how much protein, vitamins, and a well balanced bag of vegetables and fruit, and lots of fiber to keep the inner works working. Calories?? What are those.
For the rest of us, and really for all of us that feel we should be maintaining the best diet during pregnancy that is possible, we should be following pretty much the same rules. No fatty, greasy fast foods that pile on pounds with empty calories and clog up your system, lots of fresh foods with emphasis on fruits and veggies, good protein sources, lowered salt intake—you swell up enough without adding the effects of too much salt—-lots of water, vitamins, and fiber. If you are a calorie and fat magnet, then you would want to watch your calorie intake for sure; but if you eat a well balanced plan for food and get in some meaningful exercise, you will find there’s not a whole lot of out-of-control weight gain.
You don’t have to be a mental giant to get the gist of all this—-these facts are nothing more than what you have been told all your life for healthy eating and reducing weight gain—the only difference is now you are maintaining this diet during your pregnancy for you and the baby, so make sure you stick to it faithfully. There are no extraordinary measures here, just good old common sense for healthy eating; and these days, we get so caught up in our whirlwind lives, that common sense is hard to come by.
Dawn Eastman creates and discusses articles on such issues as Lose Weight In A Week. For more information on Lose Weight Quickly visit our site.
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