
Hello, Readers! I’ve been MIA for some time now, and with a pretty good excuse — Greg and I (but mostly *I*) are pregnant! This is a murky ultrasound of Dax at only 8 weeks and some change, but I am now at 14 weeks, and the little guy or gal has shed his or her tail and become quite a bit more human in the past several weeks.
Dax, through no fault of his or her own, made me quite ill through the first trimester and I am only just coming out of that now. The consequence of the nausea, headaches, fatigue, and picky taste buds (picky is actually an understatement) was that I fell off the vegan wagon entirely and not even in a casual way. My body was saying NO WAY to green foods and whole grains and even beans, so the lack of nutrients unfortunately started to signal the need for all those old foods in my life, cheese and meat, to fill the gap in my diet.
I’m writing here today to simply say that it was very hard to be in this state, and Greg struggled with it too as we momentarily lost our bond in eating. I felt sick to begin with and the food that I was eating was not helping me feel better. I felt strange, too, having to eat against the principles that I had developed over the course of being a nutritional vegan.
It’s a little disconcerting to be in that state and to open a book or a website that tells pregnant women to eat their greens and their beans to keep healthy. Even my favorite nutritionist, Dr. Fuhrman, doesn’t really offer a lot of good advice for this dilemma, although I will let you queasy readers know that a homemade fruit smoothie (Fuhrman has a bunch of recipes for these in his books) with some spinach added in is a fantastic way to trick your body into consuming some greens, because you can’t taste the spinach and you can’t smell it either. Also, while I once sort of scoffed at the idea of a multi-vitamin, I realized that I needed to be consuming all those vitamins and nutrients that had once been included in my daily meals. Going on my sister’s advice, I chose this prenatal vitamin
. (After I attempted to take the same brand’s Prenatal One Multivitamin
, I quickly realized that I could not swallow a horse pill everyday due to a pretty bad gag reflex, so I switched to the Petite version.)
I have a lot to say about pregnancy and diet, and a lot more time to put in being pregnant, so now that I feel better I will be updating about topics related to this more often. I’ve been able to put aside most of the cheese and meat and start to get back to a plant-based diet, but I will not forget this time in my pregnancy, and I really have to imagine that a lot of you out there are experiencing the same thing. Although everyone I talk to in person seems to have had a really easy, no quease pregnancy, studies say that nearly 75% of women get nausea in the first trimester — so from the perspective of this blog, I’m going to update with some things that you can have around the house to make you eat well and feel a little better!