I Won't Tell You What To Eat When You're Pregnant, I Promise
Five months pregnant, racing as fast I can towards the snacks.
My playbook for how to eat, up until I got pregnant for the first time, was a loosely held, unorganized scrappy folder in my brain—conscious and subconscious layers of rules for eating according to what was considered nutritional “wisdom.” It was a compilation of random scraps from sources over the years such as my high school track coach (“Carb load the night before a track meet, then don’t eat anything for several hours before the meet! Eyeballs to the walls, girls!”), health recommendations of the 90s (“Low-fat everything is the best everything! And no-fat stuff is even better (oh wait—those non-fat chips might make your bowels leak)!”), and countless “tips” from the media and women’s magazines over the years (“Don’t drink juice or soda! Always have some low-fat protein with any carbs and the carbs need to only be a certain kind! Eat small, balanced snacks throughout the day and then have a dinner of plain chicken breast with steamed broccoli and brown rice! Which really meant: being hungry is your fault, you could just have discipline and not be hungry like all of these models if only you tried harder!”). The enemy of the moment changed over the years (Fat is evil! Now carbs are evil! Nope, sugar is evil! Trans fat is definitely evil! Alcohol is good as long as it’s red wine. No wait that’s bad too!), but the message was the same: there is one right way to eat, until the next right way to eat comes along.
It’ll be uncomfortable at first, but then it’s going to feel great after you just dive in.
One can only hear the same nonsense for so long, wondering if you’re the crazy one, before something has to give. For me, it was pregnancy that drove me to shake off the nonsense and finally listen to my body and what it needed. Before, I paid some attention occasionally but mostly drifted along with the standard societal mind-body disconnect, exacerbated by the pressures of being a high school and college athlete.
Like so many women, though, once I had another person growing inside of me whose health depended completely on mine, I suddenly wanted to do the very best I could. It wasn’t cool anymore to drift along with my old patterns that swung wildly according to what was “good” or “bad,” or how “good” or “bad” of a person or an athlete I was feeling like that day.
Skiing pregnant or eating a turkey sandwich while pregnant: which is sketchier? Definitely the sandwich.
Feeling virtuous, I bought a book, “What to Eat When You’re Pregnant,” and when I read the potential consequences for my baby and myself if I were to stray from the strict guidelines within—Cognitive Difficulties! Childhood Obesity! Lowered Brain Mass! Preclampsia! Listeria!—it sent me straight back into my college spiral of self-worth being tied to my body and what I ate.
This time I called bullshit (or perhaps the baby inside did that, already practicing her now well-honed skills for not taking BS from anyone). Pregnancy is already stressful and hormone-fueled enough, I did not need another layer of self-esteem crap added on top. No, I didn’t go out and start eating cold cuts, sushi, and soft cheeses from the buffet—certain things like listeria are really serious and have nothing to do with nutrition and everything to do with very real heath risks of potential food-borne bacteria. There was a lot of very real, important info in the book and I don’t want to downplay the seriousness of those risks—I’m very glad this book exists, happy that I read it (as it was informative and also because it prompted a lot of this self reflection), and thankful that important work is being done to understand health during pregnancy. But the diet prescriptions about not gaining too much weight, not giving in to pregnancy cravings, and eating the “right” foods felt like they were designed for those models in the women’s magazines who eat like robots, exactly according to a list of recommended foods on a sample menu. I have known a few of these people over the years, friends who can simply say “oh I’ve already had my allotted calories for the day so I’m not having dessert,” and they are practical, efficient, organized, and smart. I am not one of those people! I am capricious, prone to whims and cravings, and my heart/gut tends to override my brain in most practical matters. This comes in handy for many things but not for choosing what to eat in the omnivore’s dilemma of modern processed foods everywhere, layered with a constantly changing landscape of nutritional recommendations.
Which way do we go from here? The choices are endless, and the map keeps changing.
Before getting pregnant, a few years of noticing my own patterns and reading about intuitive eating had me beginning to recognize that trying to follow food rules only made me feel like a failure, which made me want to eat what I envisioned to be a fitting meal for a failure, i.e., a few bowls of Cinnamon Toast Crunch (or later when I could afford it, the hippie organic version). Telling myself that a certain food was off-limits only made me want it more (except for American “cheese” because as we have established before, that’s not actually food), and thus for many years I had lived according to a very food-snobbish code that said I couldn’t, shouldn’t eat certain things and if I did then I was a bad person, or at least probably not a real athlete.
Luckily, the growing baby inside grabbed me by the umbilical cord and told me I was being ridiculous. She let me know that if I truly listened to my body—meaning that I actually paid attention this time to 1) what made me feel good both when I was eating it and also later after I had eaten it, and 2) that it felt good both to my body and my mind and that 3) it was without the distraction of trying to follow what was supposed to be “right” or “good,” the outcome was that we both would be getting what we needed. I ate pretty normally, mostly natural, unprocessed foods, lots of fruits and veggies, and then sometimes a bowl of hippie organic cinnamon crunch squares. I began to feel surprisingly great. I had cravings for gummy and sugar candies which I had rarely ever felt like eating since I was in college, and I discovered that if I paid attention, it turned out that sometimes I actually wanted a few gummies (or a lot of gummies) but most of the time I wanted some sweet-sour fruit like pineapple or green grapes. A little apple cider vinegar in water helped keep the acid reflux at bay. I didn’t want too much red meat at all. And a craving for apple fritter donuts meant usually I wanted a bowl of homemade cinnamon granola with sliced apples, and once or twice during the pregnancy it meant I made a batch of homemade apple fritters and then took them to a potluck so I wouldn’t scarf the whole batch and then feel ill afterwards. Eating according to my body doesn’t mean that I don’t want or need or have treats—it just means that I’m hopefully more in tune with when having a donut will satisfy both my mind and body, not just make one part of me feel temporarily good while leaving the rest of me grouchy and hangry.
Just follow what you think is right! Or what the kids tell you, they usually know best.
And then the kid came out. I don’t think I’ve ever been so hungry as the first few weeks after having a baby, nursing and sleepless, mostly unable or unwilling to get up off the couch to even prepare food since that would mean I would have to set the baby down and endure the screaming while I scrambled to make something I could shove into my face one-handed. It would have been very easy to mainline hippie organic boxed cereals three meals a day. The difference was that now I had a completely new appreciation of my body and what it had accomplished, and I wanted to treat myself like the baby-making masterpiece I had become. Plus, I had a few trimesters of practice listening to what I truly needed, and it turns out that most of the time it isn’t a whole box of cereal. It’s messed up that it took that long to feel like I finally deserved to make the connection between my body and my mind that I had ignored and suppressed for so long under the guise of what I was “supposed to do,” but I’m just grateful that I could finally see what was there, deep down all along.
It was the first big step in a constant journey of learning how to do the best for myself (and now my kids) in the vast wide world of choices and information about food, and the next step (which I will talk about in a future blog), was to take on my food-snobbery. Spoiler alert: it’s still clearly a work in progress.
Just trying to do the best we can! Photo: Chandra Llewellyn
