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.
The main factor in the difference between their lives and ours was and is the fact that they had no fast food joints beckoning to them on every corner; with fat, grease, salt and sugar pouring their messages into our psyches: there was much less technology, so the mother-to-be was physically exerting a lot more energy and burning calories on a regular hard-working basis: and pregnancy was a fact of life, not a celebration of the correct clothes to wear, or sonograms, or rounds of baby showers—life was much simpler then, and no one really worried too much about weight gain.
So, as a result of all these factors in their lives, they really didn’t give much thought to a diet during pregnancy. Today, we are genetically not ready to live the technologically advanced lifestyles we enjoy today—our DNA has not evolved fast enough to keep up with all the new advances—so what is the end result? Lots of fat people with heart problems and almost everyone who is having a baby is now worrying about their diet during the pregnancy and how to stay healthy and keep the baby healthy too.
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.
I guess, for all of us as a mixed bag of body types, and metabolisms that run the gamut of the scale; the answer lies in the middle area of a little of both ways of looking at things. A good diet during pregnancy for the good of the average female would be one that is well balanced nutritionally, includes lots of water, a goodly amount of fiber, lowered calorie intake, almost no intake of fast foods or prepackaged drivel from the grocery store, and daily exercise to keep the calorie furnace burning at maximum efficiency.
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 losing weight after having a baby. For more information on ebook on losing weight after pregnancy visit our site.