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In your third trimester, your baby was old enough to start getting a taste of the foods his or her mommy likes. Now that your baby is here and you’re breast feeding, your baby will get an even better taste of your favorite food. Typically if you are nursing your baby you should produce anywhere from 23 to 27 ounces of milk a day. In order to do this, you need to increase your calorie intake by about 500 more a day. You also have to increase your water consumption to at least 2 1/2 to 3 quarts of water a day. You may notice that you are thirstier during nursing session. This is because the water you drink goes right to milk production. Try not to drink more than 3 quarts of water a day. Anything more than 3 quarts can reduce the amount of milk your body produces. As stated earlier, you need to up your calorie intake. Plan to take in about 2500 calories a day or more if you are planning to nurse for longer than three months. These extra calories should not come from junk food. Junk food and sweets are just empty calories and offer no nutritional value to you or your baby. Eat more protein. A good rule of thumb is to eat 1 gram of protein each day for every pound you weigh. If you weigh 150, aim to eat 150grams of protein a day. If you were not doing so during pregnancy, adopt the six meals a day program. Eat breakfast, a midday snack, lunch, a mid afternoon snack, dinner and a night time snack. Your body is going to be making milk continually so it is a good idea to keep it charged with calories through out the day. There are some foods you might want to avoid during pregnancy. Pretty much everything passes through breast milk and to the baby. This is why the first thing pediatricians advise nursing moms to do when their baby has colic is to look at what they are eating. Chocolate has been blamed in many cases of colic and can cause an upset tummy for most babies. f you have a baby with a tummy ache think back to see if you had a candy bar or even a cookie in the hours before you nursed. The best advice is to stay away from chocolate while you are nursing. Stay away from greasy and spicy foods while you are breastfeeding. Greasy foods sometimes upset adults stomachs, imagine what it would do to your baby’s immature stomach? Wait until your baby is older and no longer nursing before you start making trips back to McDonalds. You may also want to stay away from garlic and onions while you are breast feeding. Both of these can flavor the breast milk and you may find that your little one will not nurse if you have eaten these. Your little one may be just a tad too young to appreciate the taste of garlic and onions anyway. Remember it takes a few hours for the food you eat to make its way into your breast milk. You may have eaten one of these foods right before you nurse and see your baby is fine but by either the following nursing session or the one after you might find your baby having a reaction then. Your breast milk does not only taste like what you eat, but also what you drink. Just as with pregnancy, you should stay away from a lot of caffeine while breastfeeding. You might need some coffee or caffeine filled soda to keep you functioning and a cup or two will not hurt you or your baby, but too much could have disastrous effects. Just as we experience the jitters and shakes from too much caffeine, your baby does also. Keep your caffeine down to a minimum. You have made an excellent choice breastfeeding your baby. Keep it up by making good choices as to what you eat.

For some women the thought of exercise during pregnancy is as appealing as a root canal without novacane. In their minds they have a nine month pass to keeping up with their gym routine. The first three months they are battling morning sickness and exhaustion. The next three months they are beginning to show. The last three months are so uncomfortable that walking ten feet to the bathroom is pure torture, so there is no way they will be able to walk on a treadmill for ten minutes. On the other side of the coin, there are some women who do not let something as little as creating a life stand in their way of exercise. These are the women we might see actually teaching a class at the gym, or speed walking throughout our neighborhood with their protruding bellies. Most of us however fall somewhere in the middle and that is just how their doctors like it. Exercise comes highly recommended when pregnant. Not only does it help control weight gain, but some women swear it helps with delivery also. There are some things to keep in mind in order to protect yourself and your growing little one. For starters you need to keep an eye on your heart rate as you are working out. Letting your heart rate rise to high could be dangerous to your little one especially in your first trimester. You want to maintain a steady heart rate and should do the talk test throughout your workout to make sure you are at a safe level. The talk test is when you talk during your workout. If you are having a hard time talking and wind up huffy and puffing more than getting out actual words, then you are working too hard and need to take it down. Most doctors recommend that you work at a pace where talking is challenging but still doable. Pregnancy is not the time to try out new exercise routines. This means that you should not try the new spinning class that your gym offers. Stick with the routine you have already been doing and that your body is use to. You may find that you have to make some modifications to some of your exercises as your pregnancy progresses. If you are a runner, a modified low impact jog through out your first trimester is fine but once you enter your second trimester and begin to show, your jog has to be brought down to a walk. For those of you who love sit ups, crunches and floor pushups, you can continue to do these up until you hit about 14 weeks or so. After that time period no floor exercises are recommending.If you do not have any sort of exercise routine in place before you get pregnant, this still does not give you a free pass. Almost every doctor will tell you that walking is a great exercise for any pregnant women who are not high risk. Walking at least thirty minutes, three times a week is a safe way for a pregnant woman to stay active.Walking is something you can do through out all three trimesters though you might find yourself moving at a slower pace by your third trimester. Another great plus to walking, especially as you approach your due date, is that walking can actually bring on labor. Many doctors will advise their patients to walk, walk and walk some more in the weeks leading up to their due dates to get things rolling. Some women who have walked throughout their entire pregnancy have an easier delivery and recovery period. The days of pregnant women kicking their feet up and not moving from the couch for nine months are days of the past. While strenuous exercise is a no no pregnancy is no longer a good excuse to stop moving.

Eating healthy throughout your pregnancy is the greatest gift you could give your unborn baby, but there are also a lot of rewards in it for you to. It’s common for many moms to be to forget that they also benefit in eating healthy through out their pregnancy. What you eat has a direct effect as to how well your body copes and recovers from all the physical changes it goes through. It also helps with the physical and emotional challenge of carrying and delivering a baby. The truth is, most pregnant women rarely walk around all nine months with that rosy glow everyone talks about. The first three months some of us walk around a nasty shade of green and in a hazy fog thanks to the tiredness we feel those first three months. The second three months are a little better, and we are no longer green but we deal with other issues such as varicose veins and leg cramps.The third trimester, we are back to the hazy fog again and have other issues such as swelling and heartburn just to name a few. Some of these can be avoided with a good diet. Eating foods that have some complex carbs can help reduce your tiredness and staying away from fatty foods will help with the heartburn. Research has shown that pregnant women who eat healthy throughout their pregnancy usually have a safe and uncomplicated pregnancy. Studies have shown that some pregnancy complications such as preeclampsia or high blood pressure can be directly related to deficiencies in a pregnant woman’s diet. High amounts of sugar and polyunsaturated fats increase this risk as well as having a low intake of vitamin c, e and magnesium. Perhaps for some women one of the biggest benefits of eating healthy during their pregnancy is that it could help you during labor and delivery. A well balanced pregnancy diet has been said to help prevent preterm labor, which is labor before 37 weeks. A good diet can also help you cope with labor and delivery better. Any woman who has given birth knows how much energy it takes to endure hours of contractions and sometimes hours of pushing. Eating healthy will ensure that you have the energy and the stamina to get through your little one’s delivery. Once you have delivered your little one, it is still important to continue your good habit of healthy eating especially in the postpartum period. Your body needs a lot of resources to recover from all the stretching, blood loss and not mention sleep deprivation and still take care of a newborn. It is just as important in the months following your delivery to continue to eat well. As my doctor put it, it is essential to eat as though you were pregnant for at least three months after delivery. A final added bonus to eating healthy throughout your pregnancy is that you may never stop eating healthy. This is setting up the groundwork for a lifetime of eating healthy for not only you but for your children. If you continue to eat healthy you are setting a prime example for your children.

Just as gaining too much weight can be harmful to you and your baby, not gaining enough weight can be harmful also. There are some women out there who are so terrified at gaining weight that they eat next to nothing during their pregnancy. Please do not do this, you could be depriving your baby of the vitamins and minerals it needs and you increase your chances of having a small baby. Babies who are underweight at delivery are at a greater risk for health problems than babies who are of average weight at delivery. If you find that you have gained nothing during your first trimester, do not worry. Some women do not gain anything during those first three months and some even lose some weight thanks to morning sickness. Your baby’s needs are relatively tiny at that point. It is when you are in your second and third trimesters that you should make sure you are gaining weight according. If you find that you are not gaining as much weight as you should, you should try to fatten up your diet. Increase your fat intake by a serving or too. This will increase your calorie intake but won’t decrease your appetite. Do not increase your fat by more than a serving or two. There are better and healthier ways to increase your weight gain. If you are one of the lucky few women who do not gain weight easy, you might not want to foods with the lowest amount of calories. You can still eat healthy but you want to up your calorie intake. Try eating avocados and more cheeses along with some beans too. Indulge in some snacks also. Try to add at least three snacks into your schedule. Make sure you have a decent amount of calories but not so many calories that your ruin your appetite for your next meal. If you are not allergic to peanuts, try some apple slices with peanut butter or some whole wheat crackers which some low fat cheese slices. Take some time out of your busy life to relax. Not gaining enough weight could be a sign that you are doing too much. You could be burning up the calories you eat instead of using them to nourish your baby. Try cutting back on your exercise if you have an exercise routine. You also want to make sure you eat after a workout to replace the calories you just lost. If you are working while you are pregnant and it is a stressful job, make sure you take the time out of your busy day for lunch and snacks. Throughout all of this, check in with your doctor. Your doctor may want to run some tests to make sure that you do not have a thyroid condition or any other undiagnosed medical problem that might keep you from gaining weight. You may also want to keep track of what you eat so you can show your doctor and talk about any changes that might need to be made to your diet. You may not be eating enough and you may find that you need to eat more.

You are twenty eight weeks pregnant! Congratulations, you have made it to your third trimester with a picture perfect pregnancy. You go in to see your obgyn for your appointment and the bomb drops. You have gestational diabetes. Gestational diabetes is one of the most common pregnancy complications that women face. It is when pregnant women have high blood sugar levels during their pregnancy. It is not really known what can cause gestational diabetes. Some experts say that overweight women have a higher risk of developing gestational diabetes, but there is not much evidence to support this. What is known about gestational diabetes is that one of the only cures is to deliver the baby. After delivery your blood sugar level will go back down to normal. The common treatment for gestational diabetes has been insulin shots. Just as if you had diabetes when you were not pregnant, you would have to take shots each day. Some women find though that by changing their diet, they are able to manage their gestational diabetes without having to give themselves a shot of insulin. If you are looking to make dietary changes your doctor will probably refer you to a nutritionist. They will look at several factors when designing a meal plan for you. First they will look at your weight before you got pregnant and how much you have gained since them. Next they will look at your activity level and your blood level. Then they will work with you to design an eating plan that has just the right amount of carbohydrates. Some of the guidelines you should follow are to spread your carbs out through out the day by eating three small meals and two to four snacks. Breakfast might be a meal where you will want to eat less carbs since they can cause your blood sugar to rise quickly. Instead eat a protein filled breakfast with eggs, or even meat. Giving up sweets is one of the best things you can do if you have been diagnosed with gestational diabetes and will make your meal plan easier to follow. It is also important to that you do not skip meals or try going on a low carb diet. This is going to cause your blood levels to fall to low levels and can leave you exhausted and legatheric. Chances are you will have to test your blood sugar levels regularly to make sure you are at a safe level. Some women are so sensitive that they can tell when their levels are low and know what steps to take to correct it. Not taking the steps to keep your gestational diabetes under control not only puts you at a risk of developing type 2 diabetes’s later in life, but you are also putting the life of your baby at risk. Babies born from moms who were diagnosed with gestational diabetes tend to be larger than those who aren’t. Most doctors will not let a women go past her due date if she has gestational diabetes and a few will not even let them go as far as their due date before inducting them. Larger babies could mean more delivery complications and increase your chance of a c- section. Gestational diabetes is so common these days that no one bats an eye if you say you have it. By eating a healthy diet and watching your sugar level, you will be able to control your blood sugar level and continue with your perfect pregnancy.

Ask any pregnant woman who is in her first or third trimester how they are feeling and the answer will almost always be “tired”. One of the first clues that many women have that they may be expecting a visit from the stork is the fact that they find themselves droopy eyed in the middle of the day for no reason.You may find that doing a simply task as walking around the block leaves your desperate for an afternoon nap. The energy you use to have is now faced with the challenge of growing a baby and your body is hard at work. You are also producing more blood, using more water and nutrients and have a higher heart rate and metabolism when you are pregnant. While the best defensive against the tiredness you will face is to get more sleep. There are also some healthy foods choices you can make that will help you get through your day if you do not have the opportunities to take naps. First, adjust the size of your meals. Anyone who eats a large meal is going to feel tired afterwards regardless of if they are pregnant or not. Being pregnant is going to make the effect of a big meal that much worse. Most of your energy is going to be used towards digesting the meal so of course you will feel sluggish and drained. Eat smaller meals and eat more often. Eating six small meals a day will help you combat fatigue. Eating a good breakfast is the best way to start your day. You are refueling your body after a long foodless night with a good breakfast. A good breakfast is not a cup of coffee and a piece of toast. You want to stick to complex carbs and protein. Whole grain cereal and a banana for example. These foods will stay with you and keep your blood sugar and energy level up for quiet a while. Do not skip lunch. There are many people who skip lunch thinking they will make up for it by having a big dinner. This is bad when you are not pregnant but it’s even worse when you are pregnant. You need that midday meal to help refuel your body. As with your breakfast, you should keep it filled with whole grains and protein. Have a whole grain pita and stuff it with chicken salad and add a side of grapes or an apple.Plan to eat most of your calories during the day. A pregnant woman needs an extra 300 calories a day throughout their second and third trimester. The first trimester those are not needed yet. You should eat these extra calories through out the day in the form of healthy snacks such as nuts, cheese, veggies and dip. Do not save your biggest meal until the end of the day. Your body needs these calories to help you get through your day. Steer clear of the quick sugar fixes like candy and soda. In the end these will only make you more tired.Lastly, make sure you are getting enough iron. Eat iron fortified food such as spinach and lean red meat to keep your energy up. There are times when extreme fatigue could be the symptom of an iron deficiency and you might need an iron supplement also. Besides eating well, make sure you get plenty of rest even if this means pushing your bedtime up and giving up those late night TV talk shows. As any parents of newborns will tell you, get your rest while you still can.