If you want to avoid excessive weight gain during pregnancy & stay healthy, do NOT eliminate any food groups from your diet.
Now that doesn't mean you should go crazy eating muffins, cakes & biscuits! What it does mean is that you should be trying to eat a healthy well-balanced diet, including good quality carbs, to make sure both you & your little one are well taken care of nutritionally.
So what exactly are "good quality carbs"?
Examples of good quality carbs include brown rice & whole grain oats. The general rule is to stay away from things made with white flour & loaded with fat & sugar.
As a rule of thumb,eat foods as close to their original state as possible - so the grittier the texture, the better.
Whole foods are foods that have not been processed & stripped of nutrients. When foods are packaged, bleached, refined & processed, the 'good stuff' is taken out & you're pretty much left with a meal of empty calories (such as white sugar products like white bread, crackers etc).
So, stay away from all of those packaged & processed foods. For example, choose brown rice instead of polished white rice or an apple instead of concentrated apple juice. The same goes for eating "no fat" or calorie reduced foods. Often the fat is taken out & replaced with less-than-optimal ingredients, so beware!
SHOULD YOU REDUCE OR CUT OUT FAT?
Do you find yourself looking at calories (especially fat calories) & only choosing foods that are low fat, no fat or reduced fat? For years now the diet industry has been telling us to cut out fat - the only problem is, fat free foods are loaded with sugar & other preservatives!
Think about it, take away one ingredient & you probably need to substitute it for something else...? In this case, the fat is taken away & the sugar & preservatives are added to make it taste better (because fat is often the ingredient that makes things taste good!).
So even though you're consuming less fat calories, you're actually increasing your intake of sugar calories, not to mention your overall calories because you think you can eat more.
So again, eat the real thing, but eat less of it.
And what you really need to be doing is increasing your intake of good fats. This means the Essential Fatty Acids (or EFA's) found in cold pressed olive oil, seeds, nuts, avocados, oily fish or supplements. These fats are absolutely essential for your own health, but especially for vital development of your baby's brain & vital organs.
WHAT ABOUT CHOCOLATE?
Well, there's no mystery involved when it comes to figuring out why chocolate has such an uplifting (and addictive!) effect:
1. It helps the body make serotonin, the feel-good neurotransmitter that regulates mood, sleep & appetite
2. It has a high sugar content which boosts energy levels, giving a quick lift & good feeling, even though the high doesn't last very long
3. It allows more L-tryptophan, a mood-regulating amino acid, to enter the brain, which also makes us feel good.
The good news is that chocolate contains both magnesium & iron, two vitamins that pregnant women need a lot of (in fact, if you're craving A LOT of chocolate it might mean that you're anemic). It's also been known to help women with morning sickness (slightly more appealing than ginger tea?!) Dark chocolate is also good for you because it is rich in flavonols -which help to protect you against coronary heart disease.
The bad news for all you chocoholics is that even though chocolate contains protein, fat, magnesium & iron -it's not a good enough source of any of these nutrients OR a good enough excuse to indulge (especially if you want to lose your pregnancy pounds with relative ease!).
And never mind those extra pounds, if you're struggling with heartburn, chocolate is certainly NOT your friend. Why? Because chocolate is a natural laxative that relaxes the upper passage into the stomach & allows the acidic contents to rise up & irritate the lower end of the oesophagus.
So, my recommendation is - go ahead & give yourself a treat every now & then, but make it the good stuff (organic, dark & minimum 70% cocoa solids) & DON'T overindulge!
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