Prepare Your Pregnancy Pantry!

In the last email I sent you on nutrition we talked about how certain foods act as toxins in your body and pollute your system, making it harder to control things like morning sickness, extreme fatigue, water retention and swelling and other pregnancy ailments.

I asked you to make a note of what you've been eating over the past 3 days so that you can start to identify which foods you rely on most and which of those foods are on the banned list. So by now you should have a pretty good idea of where your weak points are.

So today we are going to kickstart you on the way to nutritional success over the next 9 months by sorting out your cupboards, so that you always have a healthy option to reach for.

First off, I want you to take a good look at your food journal and pick out all the items on there that are classified as one of the toxins we identified earlier this week. These are:

Alcohol

Wheat

Processed Dairy (execpt eggs, live yoghurt and real butter)

Processed foods (anything that has non-natural ingredients, like chemicals additives and stabilisers)

Caffeine

Sugar (including natural sugars like honey)

Microwaves

Now that you know what those items are, I want you to come up with an alternative meal or snack that contains only natural food sources. So for example, if you had cornflakes, (a processed food), and milk, (processed dairy), for breakfast, you could replace this with steel cut porridge oats cooked with almond milk - two naturally occuring foods that have no tampering involved in their manufacture.

Or if you regularly have a sandwich for lunch on wheat based bread you could replace this with rye bread, millet bread, rice bread or another wheat free alternative.

Once you have a list of all your alternatives, the next thing to do is clean out your cupboards and replace all the toxinous food items with their natural alternatives. Simple, but highly effective!

Now be sure to throw out all the banned items. Don't be tempted to put them to the back of your cupboards for "later" as I guarantee you'll be tempted to eat them!

Control sickness and fatigue through your belly!

How did you get on yesterday with your vision board? Hopefully you'll have started creating something wonderful and positive that will give you that boost every morning (and whenever you look at it or add to it), that will help you stay on track with your perfect pregnancy all day every day!

So today we are going to move onto the second principle in my system for the perfect pregnancy and that is metabolism.

Now this concerns your nutrition and hydration. Ever hear that little saying:

"what you put in = what you get out "

Well it's particularly true now that you are pregnant and I'm pretty sure that you want only the best performance out of your body, so that you feel great and your baby gets the highest possible concentration of valuable and essential nutrients.

It's fairly easy for us all to guess at what should be included in a healthy diet - vegetables, fruit, good quality proteins, wholegrains...right? But did you know it's just as important to know what you should be excluding from your diet to get the most out of your pregnancy?

Well there's the obvious things like raw eggs, undercooked or rare meat, mould ripened chesses like stilton or blue cheese, but there's also a lot of things that just aren't obvious at all - like wheat!

Yes that's right - even wholegrain. This is because wheat is one of 6 foods that our bodies treat as a toxin. The others are:

*Alcohol

*Processed foods (basically anything that has stabilisers, additives, colourings, or words you can't pronounce on the label)

*Processed dairy (except live yoghurt, real butter and eggs)

*Caffeine

*Sugar (in any form - yes even honey)

When we take in toxins frequently in our diet it becomes too much for our bodies to deal with and what you get is toxic overload. What this means is that instead of flushing toxins out we stop trying to fight them and start storing them instead. Accomodating toxins in our bodies means that our performance slows down and in pregnancy we become more predisposed to things like extreme fatigue and morning sickness.

Toxins also divert water from our cells. As toxins are poisonous to our systems, we have to dilute them to be able to hold onto them without allowing them to do too much damage. So even when you are drinking 2 litres of water a day, you can still be dehydrated. The water bypasses our poor dehydrated cells in our organs and tissues and goes straight to the toxins to dilute their effect on our bodies.

Dehydration in pregnancy is a serious issue. In non-pregnant women just 2% dehydration renders you 25% weaker, 40% less mentally elert and 37% more likely to hold onto body fat. In pregnancy the effect is much greater and the more dehydrated you are the worse your symptoms will be.

By eliminating toxins from our diet we allow our systems to clean themselves up and everything revs back up into 5th gear. We find we have more energy, we eliminate food cravings and providing we eat regularly and from only natural food sources nausea and morning sickness, subside considerably.

In my Complete Pregnancy Support System I take you through a gradual and safe 30 day detox for pregnancy; unfortunately I don't have the space to go through this in full detail here, so instead, over the course of this series I'll give you some easy pointers to follow to help you get the most out of your pregnancy nutrition without it becoming a real chore.

In the next nutrition post we'll look at how to prepare your cupboards for a succesful pregnancy diet.

Until then, start taking note of what you are eating on a daily basis so you can identify which foods you rely on and what you can do to change them to pregnancy friendly options.