Deep Nutrition for Moms and Moms-to-Be
Obviously, this one is geared toward the moms, but when I looked again at the tips I gave, I realized every single one is also useful for anyone needing to recover from illness, boost their immune system, or just gradually increase their stamina from the inside out!
Sometimes when I sit down to write a blog post - or one of the dreaded “sales e-mails”🫣 - I am suddenly seized by “Imposter Syndrome.” As in, “Just who do you think you ARE to tell other moms how to eat?”
In this case, reason quickly sets in, and I remember those five babies I birthed and raised! Yep…I might have a thing or two to offer here!
In fact, I KNOW I have a thing or two to offer, because not all of my pregnancies were the same, and each time, the difference actually came down to FOOD.
(This blog may be a little rambling, because the stories behind my pregnancies are what give me my credibility here. Pardon, please.😊 Oh, and there is mention made of a placenta. So if you’re squeamish, you have my permission to pass this one right on by.)
Let’s start with Baby #1, Brendan. My Brendan, now 25 years old. Brendan, born “conventionally,” with a conventional OB/GYN in a conventional hospital. During this pregnancy, I had no idea of the importance of nutrition. I was working full-time, so there were lots of vending machine snacks. Worse, not being able to tolerate the prenatal vitamins, I guzzled orange juice by the quart “to get my folic acid.” And I craved - and gave in to - Taco Bell more often than I’d like to admit! At the end of the pregnancy, I was horribly swollen, somehow got PREeclampsia POST-delivery (huh?), on morphine for some reason I can’t recall…Bren had to stay in the hospital an extra day or two on antibiotics because of an elevated white blood cell count, and he suffered for years with the effects of candida overgrowth, rashes, asthma, and the like.
And all because…MOM’s diet was so poor? Woah. Can you say, “Wake up call!”???
(Funny little side note…Bren of all my children LOVES Taco Bell to this day and craves Mexican when he’s sick!!!)
By the time Baby #2 came long, Nick, now 23 years old, I was starting to get my act together. I’d found a midwife who taught me the basics of nutrition and how to avoid preeclampsia: ditch the white flour, white rice, and prepackaged foods, because preeclampsia can be brought on by sugar issues. And, Mom, do NOT drink orange juice with its high sugar content by the quart!
I obeyed - but I DID eat ice cream. LOTS of ice cream, which is, admittedly, much better for you than many other kinds of sweet treats, being so full of the fats that help your body process the sugars! How-EV-ER, the results of that much ice cream were what my midwife literally called “Ice Cream Shoulders.” Big baby. Stuck baby. Poor baby! 😁 (and Poor Me! Ugh. Dang.) So apparently a LARGE bowl of ice cream EVERY day during pregnancy is also OUT.
Well, shoot.
And…then there was Rebekah. Ah, Rebekah, now sweet 21. During my pregnancy with HER, I really started getting my act together. Not for myself, so much, but for my kids. Realizing that we were dealing with candida issues / gut imbalances, we buckled down and went on as perfect a diet as we could for a solid six months. No sugar in any form except for a little bit of fruit; organic meats, NO junk food at all. I really became a bit of a slave to my kitchen, fermenting vegetables, soaking grains, and cooking every single thing from scratch.
At the end of the six months, we looked and felt amazing. Some people, not understanding what we were doing, thought it was awful that I was “dieting” during pregnancy, but I wasn’t really “dieting.” I ate TONS of food, cashews by the handful, meat and eggs and milk and veggies - every good thing. AND lost weight, but it was weight I needed to lose. It was the healthiest pregnancy I ever had, and my midwives couldn’t stop talking about how beautiful, rich, and healthy my placenta was, even though Bekah, like all my others, was born late.
With my last two pregnancies, there was nothing interesting to report, and that’s a good thing.
By this time, seeking out good nutrition had become a hallmark of my kitchen, and the health of the kids just followed suit. The younger three never have had the food sensitivities, the illnesses, OR the behavioural issues (Key Point!) that the first two had.
I remember my midwife calling me one day to reschedule our regular appointment. She said, “I’ve got to go see to one of my Amish moms who is two weeks overdue with twins.” The comment passed unnoticed for a while, and then it hit me. “Wait. WHAT did you say? Two weeks overdue with twins? Is that even possible?”
See, I knew that in the conventional model, two weeks overdue with ANY baby is frowned upon, and twins are nearly always induced early or taken by Cesarean section as a basic protocol! In fact, during my first pregnancy, my doctor was annoyed with me for not agreeing to be induced two weeks early, for my insistence that I wait until I went into labor naturally. “There is absolutely NO reason a woman should be pregnant more than 38 weeks,” she boldly claimed. Boy, I had to close my mouth PRETTY tightly on the replies pouring up out of my soul on THAT one!
Things like, “Who died and made…” Well, never mind. I’ll leave it there.😠
Anyway, back to the twins. My midwife pointed out that her Amish moms, often eating plenty of raw milk and butter, fresh eggs, and the like, tend to carry their babies healthfully to full term and even slightly beyond, and then they deliver naturally just fine. Well, THAT stands the conventional model on its head!
So, after all that rambling, based on my experience, what suggestions would I give to moms and moms-to-be?
It really all comes down to Deep Nutrition.
Of course, I would recommend getting it from your FOOD, so you have to make sure your sources of food are trustworthy. If they are local and you can visit your farmer and SEE his or her methods, so much the better!
Eat plenty of good fats, including, if possible, raw dairy products and cultured raw dairy products like yogurt, cheese, sour cream, and butter. If you can find a good source of cod liver oil, this is EXCELLENT. There are varieties that don’t taste too strong, or you can find it in capsule form. Animals fats such as the skin on chicken and the delicious layer of fat surrounding a grass-fed steak are perfect!
Learn to love organ meats like liver. Here at The Cluckery, we do sell packages of chicken livers (in limited quantities), but my favorite thing to do is just sauté up the heart and liver in a little butter and nibble on them while the whole chicken is roasting in the oven. You don’t need gobs of liver. If you think about it, it is best to eat it as God put it in the animal. God gave us a WHOLE large chicken or a WHOLE large beef cow with one relatively small liver in each. So if you eat a little bit of liver and a whole lot of pastured meat, you’ll have a nice balance. If you HATE liver, you might be thinking of beef liver, which can taste quite strong. Chicken liver has a much more delicate flavor…it’s wonderful! You can even make a delicious paté to spread over crackers.
Organ meats tend to be something I eat on an as-needed basis. Sure, I usually do what I said above, cooking the liver and heart and eating them whenever I roast a whole chicken. But if I find myself pale and peaked and a little weak, perhaps a little anemic, I eat MORE liver daily until I find that I just don’t want it anymore, which is the point at which I realize my body is satiated and is back into balance. It may take a while to learn to read your body and what it needs, but you can do it.
Another option, if you just HATE liver, is to grind it or mince it finely and add it in with your ground meat in burgers or tacos. You’ll never even notice that it’s there - and, perhaps more importantly, your hubby and kids won’t notice it, either!😁
Eat plenty of good quality pastured meats! Meat (chicken, beef, pork) raised on pasture just isn’t even in the same category as the stuff raised in conventional feeding operations (organic or otherwise) when it comes to the nutrition it offers, including vitamins, amino acids, and proteins so critical for baby’s development.
Save your meat bones and make bone broth! And if you can get your hands on chicken feet, so much the better. (They sound so gross, but they really aren’t! During the process of plucking the chicken, the outer sheath of the feet comes away, so when you get the feet, nothing that ever touched the ground is actually there. Then there’s the added bonus that if someone is visiting your house and you really hope they aren’t planning to stay for dinner, you can fish one of the feet out of the pot of simmering stock and make sure it’s sticking out visibly. Works every time.😂) The feet are full of collagen and gelatin, critical for the formation of bones and joints. The broth (or stock - I use the terms interchangeably) nourishes mom at the same time, replenishing so much of what is lost to baby. I’ve got several blog posts with different methods of making bone broth, but if you prefer something more in-depth and in-person, keep your eyes peeled for my bone broth class coming up in December!
Even though I’m no longer pregnant “or in danger of becoming pregnant” 😁 I drink bone broth all the time. Especially if I am under the weather or if I know I’ve got a hectic, stressful time coming up, I will drink mugs of salted broth daily, and it supports me beautifully. And, of course, having good quality bone broth from good pastured chicken or beef bones in your freezer makes whipping up a nourishing soup just a breeze!
Make good quality herb teas a part of your regular daily routine. Check with a knowledgeable, trustworthy herbalist and your midwife or OB/GYN to be sure what you’re thinking of taking is safe. Herbs like raspberry leaf are traditional for women, especially for prenatal support, but the truth is that if you just find a nice assortment of good herbs that you enjoy and make them a part of your daily routine, you will gradually increase in strength and vitality by the slow, gradual addition of nutrition that they’ll make to your body. Nettle and alfalfa are MARVELOUS nutritive herbs! Just make sure to source good herbs or even harvest or grow them yourself. I like the online resource Jeans Greens for the herbs I don’t grow and don’t have on my property. Again, do make sure to research the herbs, as some are not indicated for pregnancy and may interfere with pharmaceutical medications. Sometimes people think natural remedies must be “safer,” and they generally are, but there are contraindications that do need to be taken into consideration.
One lovely tea for pregnancy is a simple blend of Raspberry Leaf, Peppermint, Mallow, and Alfalfa. A marvelous addition to any tea blend is an infusion of Milky Oat Tops, which are just so calming; they aren’t strongly flavored, so they are a marvelous addition to any tea or drink blend. If you don’t grow these on your property (and peppermint and mallow are especially easy to grow around here!), try sourcing them from Jeans Greens, like I mentioned above!
Get acquainted with the Weston A. Price Foundation! This invaluable organization has a plethora of good information as well as resources for where to find what you’re looking for. A large part of their focus is on women and children, particularly during the prenatal phase. They even emphasize good nutrition for the father in the 6 months to two years before conception! Amazing. DAD’s nutrition doesn’t get much emphasis in our modern American society, but perhaps it should.
Richly-colored vegetables like beets help to build the blood, which obviously is a huge help during pregnancy! (At least as recently as a couple decades ago, they served beet soup -borscht - in the hospitals in Russia…a practice our hospitals here would do well to pick up!) They build the blood, they cleanse the blood. When my little Rebekah was small, she occasionally became very pale and peaked looking. I’d serve some pickled beets or Harvard beets with supper that night, and by the next day her pretty little cheeks pinked right up! It was just like magic.
Find a source of top-quality pasture-raised eggs. I wish I could offer them to you, but I am “full up” on egg customers and rarely have enough to fully supply the demand. But finding pastured eggs is probably even easier than finding pastured chicken (which I DO have!😊😊😊), so look around for a source near you. In fact, that Weston A. Price Foundation I mentioned above has excellent “find this near me” resources for things like raw milk, and I’ll bet they’ve got them for eggs, too.
Do I even need to mention sufficient hydration and sleep? Probably not - unless only as a reminder. I get plenty of sleep NOW, although it’s just a fact that as a new mom you don’t! It’s just the way it is. You’ll get through, Mom! And this lack of sleep makes deep nutrition so much MORE important. And sufficient hydration makes the world go ‘round, aiding in detox, assimilation of nutrients, and every good thing.
Take advantage of that “nesting” instinct before baby comes to put some fully-cooked meals into your freezer! I remember making a large pot of mashed potatoes and dividing them into those little disposable freezer tins to be reheated in the oven; mashed potatoes don’t usually freeze well, but somehow if you add cream cheese to the mix, they do! Then make a few casseroles, roast and cut up two or three good chickens, and so on! It makes SUCH a difference to have HEALTHY, homemade, prepackaged meals in the freezer!
Finally, make yourself a handy little chart of your favorite deep nutrition sources. I’ve got one I keep in my planner for when I sense I need a little “something.” See, when I’m feeling down, I don’t always make the best decisions, so having a go-to list is a wonderful help! Here’s mine:
My handy-dandy Extra Nutrition list, kept right in my planner as a reminder of “what to do” when I’m feeling a little depleted!
I hope this little ramble provides some useful insights for you, and sparks some new ideas of how you can boost your own nutrition - and help your baby develop at the same time!