5 Things to Include

1. Consume a variety of foods – each food has different vitamin and mineral compositions and it’s important to make sure we’re getting a bit of everything so that baby can develop correctly. If you like carrots, fabulous! But you don’t need to eat them every day all day. Make sure your plate is colorful and switch it up day to day.

2. Eat more raw – Heating and cooking kills enzymes that are needed for proper nutrient absorption. Making sure you eat raw foods allows your body to fully use everything you consume. This includes fruits, veggies, and even milk ,yogurt, and butter.

3. Drink plenty of water – Water is essential to life and we need to make sure we’re drinking enough of it. Urinating is one was our body rids itself of toxins and we need to make sure we are constantly flushing them out. it’s also important to make sure you’re not necessarily drinking plain water, but water that has some nutrients in it. So try herbal teas or lemon water.

4. Make sure you consume good fats each day – fats like butter, ghee, coconut oil, lard/tallow. Eating fat allows your body to actually absorb fat soluble vitamins like A, D, E and K. Making sure your diet includes good fats and cholesterol also helps your body to produce the hormones needed to sustain a pregnancy and helps baby develop properly. Diets low in fat soluble vitamins are more often associated with degenerative diseases in children as well as poor bone structure and crooked teeth.

5. Add probiotic foods into your diet every day,  like yogurt, kefir, or sauerkraut. Not only do eating these foods help keep you from getting sick, they will pass on to baby and help populate and protect their gut. This helps baby absorb nutrients correctly and protects against disorders associated with leaky gut syndrome like ADD, autism, and allergies.

5 Things to Leave Out

1. Stay away from refined sugar and flour. They rob your body of nutrients needed for baby and cause a rapid rise and fall of your blood sugar levels. With large fluctuations in blood sugar levels, your hormones may have a hard time balancing causing issues with sustaining a pregnancy as well as morning sickness.

2. While controversial, I personally think that soy should not be included in a healthy pregnancy diet. Some studies say the phytoestrogens in soy help your body make it’s own estrogen. Other studies say it mimics estrogen in the body and therefore causes your body to slow down production of the hormone. The Weston A Price Foundation mentions that soy also includes something called phytic acid which can severely rod your body of nutrients. There is also the fact that 90% of the soy grown in the US is genetically modified and studies are showing that GMO foods are not compatible with life. In any case, we do know that they way people consume soy today (soy milk, veggie burgers) is not the way people ate soy even 50 years ago.

3. Vegetable oils are high in omega 6′s and in turn upset the balance between themselves and the omega 3′s, which our body is supposed to have more of. This and the fact that many of the vegetable oils (corn, canola, and soy) are also genetically modified.

4. I feel like even after the refined sugar and the vegetable oils I still need to say that processed foods should not be part of a healthy diet either! These foods have been completely changed from their original source and the nutrients are altered. They rob your body of vitamins and minerals as you try to absorb the damaged nutrients and can affect your growing baby’s neurological system with the pesticides, chemical flavor enhancers, and coloring.

5. The folks from Responsible technology left a comment on one of my fertility diets posts mentioning that all Genetically Modified foods should not be consumed as well, and I agree! Here’s what they found:

“The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM), for example, issued a policy statement that all physicians should prescribe non-GMO diets for everyone, citing a long list of disorders found in animal feeding studies.

A team of scientists re-evaluated data from three rat feeding studies by Monsanto, and published evidence showing “signs of toxicity” in major organs.

Two institutes in Russia found that by the third generation of feeding hamsters GM soy, most lost the ability to have babies. And the infant mortality was 4 or 5-fold higher than controls.

Scientists from the USDA, Purdue, and elsewhere, are now publishing reports about how the overuse of Roundup herbicide, used with GM Roundup Ready crops, may be depriving our food of key minerals.”

So what do you think? What’s the hardest to abide by?

What’s the easiest?

Tell me about your pregnancy diets!

This post is linked to: Fight Back Friday

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Here’s the “recipe” I used to make my post partum sitz baths.

1/2 gallon boiling water
1/2 cup sea salt (or epsom salt, but it doesn’t have the same healing properties)
1/2 cup comfrey leaves
1/4 cup uva ursi leaves

Mix together and let sit, covered, for at least a few hours to steep. Basically what you’re doing is making a really strong herbal tea. Strain into a clean container and keep in the fridge, or freeze in Ziploc bags if you make it ahead.

It can be used in the bath after delivery: just pour a couple of cups into a warm bath and soak for at least 15 minutes. This is my favorite!! Not only do I get a few minutes of “me time”, it has really helped relax my sore muscles.

Can be used in a squirt bottle to use after going to the bathroom.

Can also be used to make “ice packs”. Just pour a bit onto panty liners and freeze. Then place over a regular pad to help ice your perineum. They don’t stay cold for long though. Oh, and they don’t freeze solid since it’s salt water.

Not only does this sitz bath help promote healing because of the herbs and sea salt, it does wonders for sore and achy muscles. And after hours of contractions, you’re muscles are gonna be sore!

I sure wish I had known about herbal baths after my first delivery, I think it would have made a world of difference in how I felt!

All images and content are protected under US copyright laws, please do not copy and paste.