Morning Sickness: A Rant

I try to make healthy, balanced and sustainable food choices.  That is always my goal in shopping and cooking and selecting restaurants.  And one would think, wouldn’t one, that during pregnancy, this goal would only be that much more important?  One would.  Think.

But here is a sampling of a typical pre-pregnancy menu in this household:  Pot Roast of locally raised beef and garden veggies, local greens salad with homemade bread.  Or lamb chops with a balsamic reduction and local blue potato wedges with garden squash pie.

Now, during the worst phase of the first trimester:  Pizza and cookies.  Fast food hamburger and fries.  Major-chain restaurant spaghetti and meatballs.  Velveeta Shells and Cheese.  Seriously, the best (healthy balanced and/or sustainable) that I can do for a satisfying meal is a loaded baked potato, fruit and a green salad, but preferably prepared by someone else.   And then I’ll need a cupcake in a couple of hours, and another before bed.

The culprit here: morning sickness.  The very mechanism that is designed to help me make safe food choices is the stick in my culinary spokes.  Before I was ever pregnant, I envisioned morning sickness as passing waves of nausea, punctuated by some vomiting.  The version that I’ve gotten, though, is the constant seasickness that has changed my entire relationship with food.  I know that it is temporary, but I am appalled at my food choices lately.

I realize that the biological point of morning sickness and the weird cravings/aversions is also to help my body gain excess fat to store, as well as to keep a safe distance from potentially hazardous things like raw meat.  But the things that I’m craving have their definite downsides:  The processed food with the preservatives and additives and high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils and food coloring and…….ech……just making myself feel ill.  I’m sure you get my point:  When you rely on food that someone else has made for you, and that relationship is a distant one, you tend to ingest a lot of crap that is not beneficial to your own body, let alone a tiny vulnerable bean growing inside you.

When I first found out about my first pregnancy, I quickly ordered the book “Eating for Pregnancy” to make sure that my nutritional i’s would be dotted and t’s would be crossed.  I never made a single recipe from the book, though – as soon as morning sickness kicked in, I couldn’t even look at a recipe, let alone shop productively in a grocery store.  I lamented to my OB, who assured me that my former pre-pregnancy diet would be enough to sustain my body through the first trimester.  “If you ate well before you were pregnant”, she said, “you’ll be fine”.  I hope to heck she’s right.