No, this is not a segment about nutrition. I don’t know the first thing about beta carotenes or triglycerides. The most scientific sounding food I ingest is Haagen-Dazs. But I do know a thing or two about the dynamics of pregnancy eating.
The first dynamic is what I call the “I Have to Eat Now!” syndrome. I know you’ve experienced the hunger sensation before you conceived. Your tummy would growl and you’d be a little lightheaded. But you don’t know hunger till you’ve experienced pregnancy hunger. All of a sudden you turn into the “Feed Me” plant from Little Shop of Horrors. You body is burning is a lot of calories to make this baby, and your metabolism is changing. Because of this, your blood sugar will drop like the price of tech stocks during the crash.
When you experience one of these blood sugar drops, you’ll need to eat and you’ll need to eat fast! You'll invade your kitchen like a locust on corn. Anything will do. Raw hot dogs, frozen peas, even powdered cake mix. Soon, your blood sugar will stabilize and you can rest. You’ll catch a glimpse of your reflection in the toaster and see the face of a crazed animal after devouring a zebra carcass.
There are a few things to do to avoid this scene from a National Geographic special:
1.) Try not to have an empty stomach. Eat a lot of little meals throughout the day.
2.) Keep healthy snacks available -- a bag of trail mix in your purse, some peanut butter crackers in your office drawer, and so forth.
3.) Eat protein instead of sugar. Protein takes longer to digest and fills your stomach for a longer period.
The second dynamic of pregnancy eating is cravings. Suddenly, you’ll have a strong desire for a certain kind of food. It may be one of your favorite foods or one that’s grossed you out in the past. It’s all a crap shoot. Not all pregnant women suffer with cravings to the same degree, but almost every one of them will experience some type of noshing urge.
Personally, I never had the kind of intense cravings that I saw on TV. I wished that I would have. Nothing would have pleased me more than to send my husband out during a blizzard to fetch me some turkey jerky. But my cravings were never that strong and besides, we live in Southern California. Still, it would have been the least he could have done, considering my condition.
As with almost everything else in the world of pregnancy ailments, cravings are caused my hormones, which should stabilize around the third or fourth month of your pregnancy. And as your hormones stabilize, so will your cravings. You’ll still have them, but they won’t be as intense.
Believe it or not, cravings actually serve a purpose. When you get an urge for a particular kind of food, it means that your body needs it for some purpose. You may be nutritionally depleted in some area or need something to help with nausea, and your cravings let you know about it. I found that most of my cravings revolved around protein. I found myself eating loads of meat, chicken and milk shakes (they have protein, don’t they?). It seems that every day your baby takes vitamins and minerals from you that it needs to survive. Yes, that embryo that you adore is basically a tick sucking away your life force. So go ahead and eat. If you have a hankering for some kind of food, and it’s not going to harm your precious parasite, by all means, scarf it down.
© 2003, Joanne Kimes with Sanford A. Tisherman, M.D.
from Pregnancy Sucks: What to Do When Your Miracle Makes You Miserable, Adams Media Corporation, 2003