I mentioned in a previous blog posting about my midwife’s “Insurance Policy.” This really has nothing to do with policy coverage, hospitals, or insurance companies; this is a different kind of insurance policy.
With her extensive experience as a nurse midwife, she has seen time and time again the value of her insurance policy as she attends to expectant mothers. Her insurance policy is based on maintaining optimum health, which is something EVERYONE should be concerned about. This is how she can almost guarantee a healthy mother, a healthy baby, and a complication free pregnancy and delivery.
My midwife’s insurance policy is based on three areas of optimum health: nutrition, hydration, and exercise.
Nutrition is more than just eating foods that are considered healthy, this is about eating the right kinds of foods for pregnancy. She requires her expectant mothers to eat one hundred grams of protein (especially animal proteins) every day. That really is a lot of protein and I asked her how I could eat that much protein every day without gaining too much weight. She said cut back on the grains. Human beings really weren’t designed to eat grains, we didn’t evolve on grains, we evolved on various kinds of vegetation and meat. Grains are high in calories, and while the may have a place in the human diet, the energy they provide needs to be burned rather quickly otherwise they turn to sugar and are stored as fat (so that’s why my love handles won’t go away!). Additionally, grains don’t provide any nutrients that we can’t get from other foods. Another component of nutrition are supplements. Not only am I taking a prenatal vitamin, I am also taking fish oil, a probiotic, calcium, and vitamin D3. We’ve also discussed drinking raspberry leaf tea. Basically nutrition has two parts. The first part involves eating nutrient dense whole foods as chemical free as possible which are high in protein while limiting grains. The second part involves taking vitamin and mineral supplements to make up for any nutrient deficiencies.