I was so happy to be gifted The 3rd edition of ‘Eating for Pregnancy: Your Essential Month-by-Month Nutrition Guide and Cookbook’.
If you know me, you know I love to research. Researching makes me feel less fearful when I come up to something intimidating… like being a first time mom! When I first got pregnant, I read a bunch of books on pregnancy nutrition and even took notes.
This nutrition guide and cookbook was recently released in July 2019 by Hachette Book Group and it had SO much information! It was written by specialists in perinatal nutrition, OB/GYN, and high-risk pregnancies.
RECIPES
I didn’t think about getting a cookbook but I’m glad I received this. When I was too sick to cook or shop, it was nice being able to hand over these recipes to Dutch. He knew exactly what to stock the fridge with every month and could make me the meals easily.
The 150 recipes were definitely not boring. Eating them made me feel better about my diet restrictions! Instead of fixating on the foods I couldn’t eat, I was happily carried away by recipes that happened to involve things I could eat. There were a lot of recipes that were fun, fresh and delicious. There were also vegan and vegetarian recipes and gluten-free and dairy-free options! For any mom dealing with gestational diabetes, this book is also the only pregnancy nutrition-cookbook with recipes for women with diabetes.
MONTH-BY-MONTH
I love how each chapter in this book highlights a different month of pregnancy. There’s even chapters on preconception and postpartum.
Each chapter opens with how Baby is developing that individual month, then dives into the ideal nutrition to address those developments. I really appreciated the monthly lists of optimal foods which helped us with grocery shopping and made it fun to think up additional recipes to eat.
During my pregnancy (even past the first trimester) I had a hard time enjoying food or even eating at all. Knowing what foods were best for my baby’s stage of growth each month made it easier to strategically get what me and Baby needed when I could only manage to graze and eat small meals.
It was cute thinking about how the food I was eating was contributing straight to what Baby was developing that month! It made me feel a bigger connection with my Baby - like I was offering Baby building blocks!
LOTS OF DETAILS & INFO
For anyone who gets a bit anxious about specifics, this book has a hefty introduction.
The introduction of this book could almost be it’s own short book within a book! I found stuff I had to piece together from so many books and then some! I liked nerding out in this section. It addressed some things I was worried about. There’s information on daily intakes, supplements, nutrient sources, environmental concerns, common annoyances, exercise, and high-risk pregnancies.
For most of my pregnancy, I had a hard time maintaining and gaining weight. This book had helpful charts but also enforced the value and priority of eating well. I found helpful information like a breakdown of the suggested pregnancy weight gain for different women and how much of that weight would be the actual baby!
I also appreciated the information on how certain macronutrients and vitamins function in the pregnant body. Growing a baby in my belly meant taking in more vitamins and concentrating on nutrients I didn’t have to worry too much about before. I had to eat things I wasn’t use to eating and this information made it easier for me to understand why it was so important for me to change it up!
