Your time spent during pregnancy can be a puzzling and confusing one for a number of reasons. You may experience rapid shifts in emotion which you find difficult to control properly. You might feel a great deal of nausea and physical sickness which you can find little to alleviate. However, one thing which will most certainly change is your appetite and which foods you will find yourself craving at various points during your pregnancy.
Now that you are eating not only for yourself, but for your baby too, you’re going to have to take much greater care with what you’re putting into your body and ensuring that your baby gets absolutely everything it needs to grow properly and to eventually be born as healthy and as strong as it should be. This, of course, will mean that your meals might take a little bit more research and preparation that they otherwise would if you were simply eating to satisfy yourself. However, just because you have to keep a conscious eye on the exact content of what you’re eating, doesn’t mean that you still can’t enjoy delicious meals regularly.
There are a wide variety of dishes you can make and cook up that will please both you and your baby, and a great many of them are very simple too. Furthermore, eating as healthily as possible will benefit your own body a great deal, not just the second one growing inside you, and will serve to ease a great many of the trials and pains which come along with pregnancy. So, for your convenience, here are just a few ideas of some simple foods you could try to help you get started.
Whole Grain
It’s extremely important that you are aware of the various nutrients which exist and which will not only help your baby to grow properly and to have the absolute best start in life, but will also help you to maintain your strength and your health throughout the whole period of pregnancy. There is very little more important during your baby’s formation than pregnancy nutrition, but there are a number of vital food groups high in nutrients which you can learn and remember. For example, any foodstuffs which contain high amounts of whole grain will be extremely beneficial for you and your baby, as they prove to be high in both fiber and nutrients which are very important to help promote your baby’s proper growth and development in the womb. Furthermore, they contain phytonutrients, which are compounds found in plants which serve to help strengthen and protect cells in humans.
Bread and pasta will both contain large amounts of whole grain, so these are good food groups to consider. However, when choosing your products, ensure that they note somewhere on the packaging that they are, in fact, “100% whole wheat” as this is the only way you can be truly sure of getting the nutritional content you’re after. Rice is also a good source of whole grain, but it’s a similar story there - you want to be purchasing brown rice at every opportunity, as should you be selecting the white variety, the grand majority of all its nutrients will be lost. You can go even further down the whole grain rabbit hole by trying out black or red rice, both very high in whole grain content also. You can check out this Asian Grilled Chicken and Rice Salad for a healthy and easy-to-cook meal which will go a long way to helping you meet your baby’s whole grain needs.
Eggs
Eggs will ensure that both you and your baby receive the required amount of protein which you both will need to maintain your strength throughout the pregnancy. Moreover, protein is the very substance which makes up the building blocks of your baby’s cells, so anything protein-rich that you consume will be having a direct beneficial effect on your child’s development. Other vital substances contained within eggs include choline, a material which assists with the development of the brain and spinal cord, and helps prevent any problems about these areas before your baby is born. There are a great many recipes rich in eggs which prove quite simple to prepare, so you can easily take your pick and consider what appeals to you. Something like a quiche might prove suitable for a mother who wants something a little more challenging or interesting than a simple omelette or plate of scrambled eggs, while the heaviness of its content will mean that it should serve to fill you up (even with that extra small and hungry body to feed on top), while still remaining a very healthy and nutritious choice.
Fruits and Vegetables
Just as with any healthy diet, during pregnancy, a great deal of fruits and vegetables will need to be eaten to receive your proper intake of valuable vitamins for both you and your baby. During pregnancy, the more leafy the vegetables, the better, so you should prioritize items such as spinach in your diet. Bright colors are also a helpful sign that there’s a good amount of nutrient content in the product, as well as the healthy vitamins A and C, so prioritize selecting these when you are shopping for the coming week. There is, of course, a wide variety of ways in which you can introduce these foodstuffs very subtly and naturally into your everyday meal plan. You could combine a few into a tasty smoothie for your morning, or you could work at maximizing the vegetable content should you feel like cooking up a stir-fry. Salads are also a very easy way to combine a lot of various fruits and vegetables, while also serving as a good place to experiment with new ones and find out what you like. However, you could also try out a more unconventional recipe like this Broccoli Rabe Potato Pizza which contains a fantastic amount of darker, leafy greens as well as carrots and hazelnuts, all of which are foodstuffs of substantial nutritional content.
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