November 2019 – A Good Life

People often find my food a bit funky. I live in the Netherlands, where lunch usually includes bread of some sort, so when I show up with my homemade salad with protein, people look at me in a questioning way. I used to get annoyed by people’s questions about my food, but I look at it differently now. People usually ask because they’re curious and not because they’re judging. If I keep this in mind, I can engage with people and tell them about the delicious lunch I’ve made.

When I got pregnant, several of my friends said they were surprised I continued eating in my ‘funky’ way. They had expected that I’d eat more ‘normally’ after I became pregnant, and I have to say I also didn’t know what to expect. But I noticed that my body felt best when I ate in the way that worked for me, emphasizing protein, vegetables, and healthful fats. I covered why I think that works well here, and I also talked about my struggle with nausea during the first trimester here.

So what did I eat during my pregnancy?

I will make this super practical and list my favorite meals during this pregnancy. These meals are not only for pregnant women; my husband eats them too, and he’s not pregnant! It’s just that they’ve worked really well for me during pregnancy, while I haven’t been so excited about some meals that I loved before pregnancy.

Breakfast

The breakfast I made for a long time was a frittata–basically, something like this. I usually put zucchini, carrots, and onions in it, but sometimes I switched up the veggies. 12 eggs go in there as well as some minced meat for protein. One such frittata lasts me for four days.

(Note: We often think of eggs as good protein sources, but in fact they don’t contain that much protein. A medium-sized egg contains about 5-6 grams of protein, and I aim for a minimum of 30 g of protein per meal (around 100 g per day). If I wanted to get all my breakfast protein from eggs, I’d have to eat 5-6 eggs… That’s a lot of eggs, and since they contain a lot of fat (in the yolks), I’d be overdoing the fat quite a bit. Therefore, I eat a couple of eggs with my breakfast and some minced or other meat to get my protein needs met and have stable blood sugar throughout the morning. But I make sure to also eat my eggs because they are great sources of choline as well as other nutrients which are super important for pregnant women as well as for people in general. With this type of breakfast, I’m only hungry again after 4-5 hours, which people say is impossible for pregnant women. Well!)

After a while, I got bored of frittata for breakfast though. Now I’m in a period of breakfast soup (it kind of looks like this). I put carrots, parsnip (I live in the Netherlands, where they have lots of parsnips, so let’s use all of these delicious root vegetables!!!), zucchini, and bok choy in a pot as well as spices and herbs. I let them cook (in water) until they turn into a nice soup. I boil eggs on the side and also cook some sort of protein (usually sausage because it gives a nice flavor to the soup). Every morning, I warm up a portion of the soup (the rest stays in the fridge or is frozen), cut up a sausage and two eggs into bite-sized pieces, and add them to the soup. And that’s it! Super simple and tasty.

Lunch

There are many lunch options, but I’ll list my favorites. My current love is a salad with grated carrots and apples and some celery. I usually have a pre-cooked chicken breast on the side and half an avocado with it. On a food prep day, I usually put 4 chicken breasts with spices and salt in the oven (2 for me and 2 for Jacob). I take out the food processor and grate approximately 8 carrots (depends on their size, but about 2 per person per meal) and 4 apples (one per person per meal). I also cut 3-4 celery stalks into small pieces. Then I mix the vegetables and add a dressing of olive oil, freshly squeezed lemon juice, garlic powder, and salt. It’s super simple and amazingly delicious!!!

We also make a similar salad with grated carrots and beets; I prefer it without celery, while Jacob likes that one with celery too. Oh well, no celery it is. That one goes well with a dressing of olive oil, white wine vinegar, powdered mustard seed, and salad. Also super nice! Both of these salads we eat with protein such as chicken or really any other type of protein. If the meat doesn’t contain a lot of fat (such as a chicken breast), I add half an avocado or mayonnaise from avocado oil.

Another lunch I love is meat sauce with vegetables (kind of like this). We put onions in a skillet, then add the minced meat, then add the tomato sauce, spices, herbs, etc. and, if we’re feeling fancy, fried eggplant. On the side, we steam vegetables such as zucchini or broccoli. Then, we serve the vegetables topped with the meat sauce. It’s so simple and super delicious! I like to sprinkle some feta cheese on top for extra flavor (feta cheese is, luckily, one of the few types of dairy that doesn’t upset my stomach as long as I don’t overdo it).

Dinner

I love dinner meals that are made up of some sort of protein, vegetables, and nice herbs/spices/sauces. This gives countless options!

One of my current favorites is salmon cooked in butter, garlic, and lemon juice; baked sweet potato with salt; and steamed brussel sprouts with olive oil, salt, and herbs (I never knew, before moving to the Netherlands, that brussel sprouts can be so delicious!! Now I want to eat them all the time…). I also love this vegetable combo with mackerel, which is, similarly to salmon, also a fish high in healthful fats. And I find it delicious!

Another favorite dinner of mine is chicken leg (baked in the oven for 100 minutes!! only with salt) with sweet potato and roasted cauliflower or broccoli. Super simple and tasty.

Jacob really liked stews, while I’m not a big fan. But he makes a truly delicious stew with stew meat (duh!), onions, pumpkin, carrots, and beets. The key is to put enough pumpkin 😉 as well as nice spices and herbs. I don’t like broccoli or brussel sprouts in a stew because they give it a less pleasant taste, in my opinion, but spinach, kale, and zucchini work well in a stew.

Snacks

Sometimes I get hungry between meals, although I have to say that on some days I’m perfectly fine with just my three meals. If I need a snack, I usually have about 10 macadamia nuts. They’re delicious and rather filling, so they do the job. I also like brazil nuts and almonds; other nuts irritate my stomach, unfortunately.

If I’m not very hungry and just need a small snack, I drink a glass of bouillon or bone broth. It’s tasty (we make it at home), and it contains lots of good stuff for me and the baby such as collagen, but it’s also good for non-pregnant people.

I also have a favorite cocoa drink: 2 teaspoons of cocoa powder, a pinch of cinnamon, hot water, and a teaspoon of honey or some stevia. The taste of warm cocoa is super comforting, especially in the autumn/winter months!

If I want something sweet to eat, I eat our dark chocolate with caramel and sea salt (yummy!), but I can’t eat it too late or I don’t fall asleep because cocoa has some caffeine (people who drink coffee before bed will find this hilarious, but oh well…).

I also like baked apples with cinnamon in the oven (super simple and delicious!!), blueberries with honey, or just tangerines. One of these is usually my dessert in the evenings.

How do carbs figure in this way of eating?

Picking up the thread from my previous blog post, you may have noticed that I don’t really eat processed carbs (except on exceptions) since there is no bread, dough, cereal, or other such source in the foods I’ve described. I still get carbs, though, from vegetables. In my breakfast, there’s parsnip; in my lunches, there are beets, apples, or tomato sauce; in my dinners, there are sweet potatoes or pumpkin. I don’t include a lot of carbs in my meals, but it’s what works well for me. Other people might need more or less carbs than this to feel their best.

Do I ever eat other foods?!?!

People have asked me, “Don’t you ever eat other foods?” meaning ‘less healthy’ foods or foods that don’t work so well for me. Of course I do! There are times when I decide that it’s worth it to have something that I don’t usually eat.

I just need to take into account how I’ll feel afterwards. If I have something sweet in the afternoon, such as the pecan pie in the photo above or a fantastic brownie, that’s usually fine. I get a sugar peak and a dip and some bloating, but once in a while it’s not so bad. If I have a cheesecake or tiramisu, I’m in for more trouble because the dairy gives me more digestive issues, and I may be pretty uncomfortable for a while.

Gluten is another one that I have sometimes. If I don’t eat too much of it, it’s okay (such as in a cake or so). But if I eat a whole pizza, I’ll have issues for a couple of days afterwards, so it’s rarely worth it for me, especially since there often are gluten-free options for these things.

A difficult one is sushi. I love sushi, and one of the most difficult things about this pregnancy has been that I can’t eat raw fish (this recommendation may change in the future, but we’ll see). Still, I sometimes ate sushi with cooked fish during my pregnancy. While I loooooove it, the rice seriously expands in my belly afterwards. With an already big, pregnant belly, there isn’t that much space for extra expansion due to rice, so I’m not eating too much sushi these days 😦

And then there are foods that I just don’t eat. Spicy (as in ‘hot’) foods give me lots of pain and wreck me for days, so I avoid them completely. I also avoid alcohol because it makes my stomach upset for days after that. Oh, and since I’m pregnant, it’s probably not the best idea 😉

I know many pregnant women say they miss wine or beer the most and can’t wait to have it again once the baby comes. For me, that’s not particularly appetizing because I already wasn’t drinking for about 2 years before getting pregnant. But the things I really look forward to are raw fish and a medium-rare steak!!! This baby is supposed to come out in 2 days (or soon after), so I’ve almost made it! Just a little more patience…

Since I got pregnant, people have been even more intrigued by my food. “What are you eating? Can you eat that? You should eat/drink this and this when you’re pregnant.” Sometimes people ask because they’re curious and they’d genuinely like to know how I’m eating. I appreciate that approach, but I don’t appreciate it when people try to tell me what to do.

Pregnant women are constantly being told from multiple sources what they should and shouldn’t eat. There are certain accepted dietary restrictions for pregnant women such as no raw meat, no unpasteurized cheeses, and no alcohol. But there’s also a lot of confusion out there about how a woman should eat healthfully when pregnant.

What should a pregnant woman eat?

Pregnant women usually hear that they should gain weight but not too much weight. They should try to slow down their weight gain in order to avoid many scary-sounding complications. But how is a pregnant woman supposed to do that? One’s hormonal landscape is quite different from usual during pregnancy, so hunger cues and cravings can be all over the place. Dealing with those is difficult with “normal” hormones, so what is left for pregnancy hormones!

Most websites and apps recommend a common high-carbohydrate diet to pregnant women. Basically, women are supposed to eat lots of vegetables with some protein, not a lot of fat, and a decent amount of carbohydrates, especially whole grains and fruit.

Now, there are some good and some bad things about this advice. Lots of vegetables? Great! Most people benefit from eating lots of vegetables, as they deliver important nutrients, provide fiber to improve our digestion, and help us stay satiated.

Protein? Yes, please! Protein is super important to keep our hormones balanced, to stabilize our blood sugar, and to promote satiety, thus reducing ravenous hunger and cravings. While the protein recommendations on most pregnancy websites and apps are still too low, some health professionals have started emphasizing the importance of sufficient protein.

Another note on protein: Recently, healthful eating has come to rely less on animal protein, which doesn’t work for a lot of people. I see protein recommendations for pregnant women including, for example, feta cheese, almonds, and chickpeas. While those do include some protein, cheese and nuts have more fat than protein, and chickpeas and other legumes include more carbohydrate than protein. What’s more, humans absorb protein better from animal sources (such as meat and fish) than from plant sources. So these common protein recommendations for pregnant women often don’t meet one’s protein needs. Alternatively, if one eats enough of the food to get sufficient protein, then she is getting too much fat or carbohydrates for her needs, which leads to eating too many calories or unstable blood sugar.

That’s me with a big belly and a bowl of chocolate beans.
Credit: Ani Manahova (a.k.a. my mom)

Confusion: How much carbs should a pregnant woman eat?

Back to the commonly recommended pregnancy diet, many websites encourage women to eat lots of carbohydrates. Paraphrasing from one source (because I don’t want to throw any one organization under the bus), pregnant women should eat lots of starchy foods such as wholegrain bread, jacket potatoes, rice and pasta because these are good sources of vitamins, fiber, and energy. Starchy foods are supposed to take up one third of a woman’s meal. Whoa!

The main problem with this advice is that starchy foods raise blood sugar unfavorably for many of us. When blood sugar is high, insulin is also high because it tries to lower our blood sugar and store the energy from the food in our fat cells. While this is a normal and healthy process, if blood sugar is too high, insulin is also rather high, leading to more fat storage than what we would consider optimal. Therefore, it’s useful not to eat foods that raise our blood sugar too much too often.

This can vary from person to person, but there are some important commonalities between pregnant women. When a woman is pregnant, she is more insulin resistant than usual, meaning she stores fat more easily. This is a smart way for the body to make sure she retains enough fat to fuel the baby’s development throughout pregnancy and afterwards through breast feeding. But in today’s industrialized world, our foods often contain too much carbohydrates for our activity levels, leading to unwanted weight gain and health complications along the way.

Once blood sugar has been driven high by eating lots of starchy foods, it can often drop rather low afterwards. This leads to light-headedness, intense hunger, and cravings for sweets. Is it a surprise, then, that pregnant women, who are encouraged to eat lots of carbohydrates, often report insatiable cravings and ravenous hunger? Once again, pregnant women’s unique hormonal situation also makes them more prone to these swings in blood sugar.

A vicious cycle

This can lead to a vicious cycle. A pregnant woman eats more carbohydrates than she needs for her metabolism and activity levels, her blood sugar spikes and then drops, she feels light-headed, hungry and irritable, and feels that the only solution is to eat something sugary. She consumes something sweet, and the cycle begins anew.

This can lead to too much weight gain, upon which the woman’s health practitioner might tell her to “slow down her weight gain.” But how is she supposed to do that if she’s on the blood sugar roller coaster? The ravenous hunger and intense cravings are way beyond our will power, so, naturally, the steep weight gain continues.

This may be one of the factors contributing to the high levels of gestational diabetes seen today (gestational diabetes is a type of diabetes that develops during pregnancy and can have significant consequences for mother and baby). Interestingly enough, one of the main treatments for a mother with gestational diabetes is to tell her to eat less carbohydrates. Wow! Maybe we should have started with that in order to try to prevent some cases of gestational diabetes in the first place?

Please note that I’m not saying pregnant women should eat no carbohydrates. Not at all! Carbs are an important component of our diet, and many of us need them to function optimally. However, the amount of carbs pregnant women are usually told to eat is way too high for their needs (metabolism and activity level) and ends up causing unwanted issues. It’s time we recognize that and learn how to help pregnant women better.

“You’re pregnant, you can eat whatever you want!”

Pregnant or not, you can always eat whatever you want! You’re an adult (I assume) with a wallet, so you can go to the store and buy whatever food you want. The point is to recognize how your choices are working for you. Once you know how a food affects you (does it give you stable energy, does it make you ravenously hungry a few hours after eating, or does it give you cravings soon after eating), you can link the food to the consequences and decide when/how often to eat it.

Nobody’s ‘diet’ needs to be perfect according to any standard; it just needs to work for you. Many pregnant women would like to avoid excessive weight gain and related health complications, so they need to find foods that allow them to achieve these goals. Unfortunately, the commonly recommended pregnancy diet is not optimal for many people. I wish more women had the tools to figure out what foods work for them and allow them to achieve their health goals.

What do you think pregnant women should eat? If you were ever pregnant, did you experience ravenous hunger? Let me know by commenting below or on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

A Good Life

Month: November 2019

What I’ve been eating while pregnant