Nutrition
I have to give my husband the most credit for getting me started eating paleo. It all started in month 8 of my first pregnancy. I wasn't making the healthiest choices and which made him not feel as good because he eats mostly what I eat. One day he said, "cheese is gross if you really think about it." What?? I love cheese and with one month left of my pregnancy I am certainly not about to give it up! It sparked our discussion and he mentioned he had read a few things on the paleo diet and he wanted to try it. I wasn't completely on board (after all I was 8 months pregnant, who wants to get strict about their diet at that time?) but I did my best to cook meals that were mostly paleo so he would feel better. I noticed that I really started to feel better myself and after I had my first child it was the answer to me getting my body back too.
Fast forward a year and a half and what we keep in our house is almost exclusively paleo. We have tailored it to fit our needs. What I mean by that is we ate strict paleo with absolutely no grains, legumes, dairy, and processed sugars for 2 months and have since tried to add certain things back in and have found some things our bodies digest well, while other people may not feel well after consuming them. We drink organic whole milk, not a lot but we will add it to our protein shakes and give it to our daughter. We also use grassfed Kerrygold butter and occasionally goat cheese. Other than that we pretty much stay away from other dairy products especially highly processed cheeses. The other thing that I will buy on occasion is black beans for chili. It is an easy meal and I only use about half of what we used to and have not noticed any negative effects from them so we choose to eat them occasionally.
Here is what a typical day of eating looks like for us including during my pregnancy:
Morning: Fruit and Veggie shake- we put banana, organic frozen berries, an apple, carrots, kale, broccoli, homemade almond butter (if you have a vitamix this is super easy to make), organic milk, and water in it. This is really good for our daughter as we struggle to get her to eat veggies. She loves it b/c the fruit masks the strong taste of broccoli and kale that we would never be able to get her to eat plain.
We also eat eggs with our shake and on the weekends usually have a bigger breakfast with eggs, meat, sweet potatoes, etc.
Lunch: My staple is chipotle salads. Chipotle is by no means perfect but I really like how they use hormone free meat most of the time (except when their suppliers run out and then they post it to let us know), and you can stay paleo with the salad. I get lettuce, peppers & onion, chicken, pico, med salsa, and of course guacamole.
Dinner: Usually I make some sort of meat, vegetable, and sweet potato for dinner. I love paleomg.com and civilizedcavemancooking.com amongst others for recipe ideas. I buy free range, organic meat from the store and we also partner up with friends a few times a year to buy beef and pork from local farmers. Most of what I buy for fruits and vegetables is organic as well. Just because something is organic doesn't mean it is perfect (ideally we would grow it ourselves, which we do some of) but it is better than the alternative of buying things with a lot of chemicals sprayed on them that we prefer not to consume. When we have a sweet tooth after my husband is the king of paleo chocolate chip cookies so he makes them.
Snacks: We usually have on hand plantain chips, fruit, nuts, and protein for daily snacks.
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| Our Pantry |
Water!!!: I usually drink about 100 oz of water per day. We own the best water bottles I have ever tried, hydroflasks, which will keep your water cold all day, even when it is 110 degrees out in Phoenix. The bottles are stainless steel on the inside so you don't have to worry about all of the BPA seeping into your water like you do with regular water bottles, and it is less expensive than buying bottles of water.
One thing you need to know is even though these are the things we buy at home and do on a regular basis, that does not mean you will not see us out eating pizza as a family or at a coffee shop getting a latte. We enjoy indulgences, which usually come on the weekends but feel much better when our regular diet consists of the things above.
Supplements
During pregnancy you are usually advised to take prenatal vitamins which I did during my first pregnancy. Fast forward a year and a half and I actually started reading the ingredients on the prenatal vitamins and realized in addition to the vitamins of course they have soy in them and the folate is in a synthetic form of folic acid. Another important thing to take during pregnancy is a vitamin with DHA in it. DHA is found in the fish oil I take so for me my prenatal vitamins this time were Solgar Folate and PurePharma O3 Fish Oil. I of course discussed with my doctor first and as long as I keep a balanced diet taking these 2 supplements were all I needed.
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| Supplements I take during pregnancy |
For Information on the difference between folate and folic acid visit:
http://chriskresser.com/folate-vs-folic-acid
Household/Everyday Products
As I have changed my diet I have also started to change some of the other products I use. So many things these days contain unnecessary chemicals and additives. It is overwhelming to change everything at once so I have slowly introduced more and more natural products into our family. Here are a few examples:
- Sunscreen: I make my own sunscreen with Zinc Oxide as the active ingredient along with my doTerra essential oils. We need to protect ourselves from the sun, especially here in Arizona but it really bothers me to be lathering in all of the things found in sunscreen or even worse spraying it on so instead I made my own which is about SPF 20.
- Soap: I make my own baby soap with pure castile soap, olive oil, and essential oils
- All Purpose Cleaner: I make my own with vinegar, water, borax, and essential oils.
- Laundry Stain Remover: I make my own with castile soap, vegetable glycerin, water, and lemon oil
- Diaper cream: Maleluca essential oil and coconut oil
There are so many other things you can make yourself and eliminate or reduce your exposure to harmful chemicals. I have started with these few things and hope to make most of my own everyday household products.
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| Some of my homemade household products |
Workout Update:
I am 35 weeks in and hopefully only 5 more to go (fingers crossed)! In the last week I have seen the largest decrease in energy in quite a while. I had one day where I was even contemplating finishing just because I was so tired. I had just a couple sets of body weight movements left and I opted to finish after a short conversation with myself and feeling that I would be disappointed for leaving with only a few things left to do. After all I only have my 25+ lb training vest for about another month!
This weeks overhead squats were sets of 5. This was much harder than the sets of 3 from last week because overhead squats require so much midline stability, not something I have too much of these days. I was proud to finish my last set of 5 at 125 lbs without failure although it took me some time steadying myself between reps.
Saturday I also broke my no snatching rule. I do all my olympic lifting from the hang position (just above the knee) because it is so hard to maneuver all the way to the floor. I didn't go too heavy but did 95 lbs, which felt fairly easy. I am looking forward to getting back and practicing the snatch. My last 1- rep max of 100 lbs was in September of last year so I am really excited to work on improving that.
Our box was hoppin' on Saturday with a fun team training session. I got excited about working out just watching them do the WOD together. That is by far the hardest thing about crossfitting through pregnancy, watching, knowing you have the capability to perform when you aren't pregnant but also knowing that right now there are just things you can't do or do very well.
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