Pregnancy is an adventure in nutrition. At the beginning it was just about getting enough calories as I dropped pounds and had trouble holding down food. Now that I'm mostly doing better with that (with a few exceptions here and there), I've been trying to eat a well balanced diet, getting enough of the important things and eating junk in moderation. Now, this should be something that I just do in life, but eating for 2 (in terms of nutrition, not calories) certainly helped to accelerate the process.
Earlier this week I went to a seminar talk on nutrition. Some of the things the speaker talked about were straight forward to me and things I already do. Avoid "fake" sugars like aspartame (although he said that stevia is good, I think in 10 years he'll go back on that idea), avoid fried foods, avoid farmed fish, avoid processed carbs, avoid high fructose corn syrup, drinking enough water, etc.
And then he said some things that sounded more off the wall to me, like limiting whole grains and avoiding dairy. Dairy? No, that can't be right, no one argues that dairy is good for you. Do they?
So that piece of information I took with a grain of salt and decided to look it up. Apparently there is some serious debate about the benefits of dairy. My 26 year long belief that enough dairy will help build my bones is probably wrong. For example, this website. They reference all sorts of international studies where the countries with the highest milk consumption are often the ones with the highest rates of osteoporosis. Really? That's not good.
But I'm pregnant. And my memory is that if I don't get enough calcium in my diet, my child will leech it out of my bones and teeth. I'm not even sure if that's true now. But there are so many things out there done by the national dairy council that I don't know what to believe anymore. I've been working so hard to introduce more dairy into my diet, and maybe that was the wrong idea. I have no idea.
Between pesticides on produce, hormones in meat and milk and all of the artificial things that are put into my food, I feel like there are pitfalls left and right. Real food takes time. I need to learn to readjust my thinking about food and learn to spend the time and effort required to not only go shop for the good things (because I believe they are out there), but continue to stay on top of the research so I know what the good things are. Then I need to understand that eating well will require me to devote time and thought into the planning and preparation of good meals. I know it can be done, and I'm confident that I can do it without thinking of it as a burden, but I'm not there yet.
This morning I ate multigrain cheerios with 1% organic milk and some organic greek yogurt. And I've had water to drink, probably around 16 oz in the last 2.5 hours since I woke up. If I had presented this to myself a few years ago I would have been proud at how "healthy" I was eating, but today I'm not so sure.
Next Adventure: Registering, a whole new can of worms!
Days Pregnant: 170
Days to go: 110
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