Every pregnancy is unique. Expecting women experience a wide range of symptoms, moods, physical issues, and perplexing questions during the ten-odd months of their pregnancy. Women’s very personal experiences are up against a daunting societal and often arbitrary view of how they should feel during their pregnancy. Pregnant women consistently encounter not only glib, biased, and even inaccurate advice, but also frustrating, confusing, and disheartening anecdotes while they are either suffering their way through their pregnancies or genuinely coping and just looking to make well-informed decisions for themselves. This inherent conflict between what is happening and what friends, books, and even experts say can leave a woman absolutely distraught at the very time when she most needs to build trust in herself and her sources of reliable information.
We usually like to hold pregnancy as a celebration, and of course it is a wonderful life change, but it also potentially comes with a fair amount of grief and loss—the loss of who you knew yourself to be as a nonpregnant woman, the loss of your existing relationship to your body, and somewhat of a loss of control over what’s happening in your body. This book aims to help you harness some of that control back by enabling you to make informed decisions and allowing you to indulge in the natural (but often downplayed) attributes of pregnancy challenges.
A redefinition of the self comes along with pregnancy; this book will help you outline and define your specific issues and needs. The Field Guide to Pregnancy normalizes the barrage of symptoms women experience without diminishing the importance or relevance of both the feelings and the symptoms themselves.
It can be terrifying dealing with the various symptoms and occasional maladies that go along with both healthy and high-risk pregnancies. Becoming a mother means that your new full-time job is to worry. But The Field Guide to Pregnancy helps you define what to worry about and act on in your pregnancy—versus what to learn to cope with. Pregnancy is a heightened time. It is often difficult to see the forest for the trees. The Field Guide to Pregnancy helps tease out what is a medically legitimate concern versus what might be subjectively concerning for personal reasons but not necessarily a cause for real alarm.
Medicine is always changing, and this book aims to equip you with the ability to evolve using smart decision-making processes. This is a handbook to guide you, comfort you, and support you from a place of compassion, pragmatism, research, and just plain, good advice.
From the time my own mother made my baby food from her garden, I have been a lifelong student of nutrition and the culinary arts. My own avid urban gardening and study of plant-based medicines have been fodder for the research and recipes in this book. I draw on the idea of dipping into your own kitchen, in order to find food-based approaches to supporting the different stages and phases of pregnancy and preparing you for all that pregnancy dishes up, as well as a healthy birth, recovery, and life.
Nutrition is of the essence, and “you are what you eat” is never as true as it is when you have a developing baby inside you. The foods you choose will nourish and help determine not only a healthy pregnancy but also your child’s long-term health. The raw materials you consume become nourishment for you and your baby. Eating high-quality foods helps both of you derive the best potential from your health, and this book will give you choices to make and use as a basis for your own creativity and tastes.
Each recipe in this book assumes these general principles for you to follow when concocting your pregnancy foods:
• Choose organic foods whenever possible.
• Minimize the pesticide, chemical, or hormone exposure (such as from nonorganic meats) to give your body the best opportunity to send resources to baby.
• Lean toward eating more locally and seasonally—principles in alignment with Chinese medicine’s penchant for attunement to your environment as a state of optimal health.
Any good, replicable recipe is usually based on a little bit of science and a little bit of intuition. Pregnancy is no different. Although there’s no tried and true recipe for everyone, there are ingredients that people can modify to their own tastes to incorporate into their nourishment. I’ll talk about nutritious ingredients for each stage of pregnancy and offer up recipes throughout this book for you to modify as you see fit.
The use of plants as medicine is as old as mankind, which means it’s as old as the act of giving birth. Supportive eating can be as important or even more profound than taking supplements or even medications. However, there is certainly a time and place for supplementation, and The Field Guide to Pregnancy helps guide you through safe and thoroughly considered approaches on the gradient from lowest to highest interventions.
Often, pregnancy manuals include clinical illustrations or photographs of the developing embryo and fetus. I’ve opted against this type of visual size comparison in this book. You’ll know your baby is growing because your stomach is growing—and you may be having ultrasounds as well. I think it is more useful to picture your baby as a baby and begin to connect with the growth inside you in that way. Having a baby can be abstract and daunting enough without comparing it to a “grape” or a “raspberry” or any other fruit. Personally, I don’t think it’s helpful imagining birthing a pineapple. So, I’ll give you the normal growth ranges, which you can compare at your prenatal visits. You can also utilize the at-home measuring technique (see sidebar on page 55) to interact more with conceptualizing your baby’s size as it grows. Each chapter also begins with a helpful infographic for a glimpse of the latest pertinent developments with baby.
Chinese medicine is founded on the idea that the principles of nature are reflected in the body’s physiology, with very specific correlations between elements in nature and fetal development, which explain certain symptoms and tendencies during specific phases of pregnancy. In alignment with the idea of looking to nature for information and resolution of discomfort, Chinese medicine encourages you to draw on natural (plant and food-based) remedies to tend to pregnancy symptoms.
From a Chinese medicine point of view, imbalances fundamentally occur when we are not in harmony with nature. In the context of pregnancy, that really means being attentive to your own nature and learning to identify your unique personal needs and incorporating healthful ways to attend to them.
Each chapter of this book commences with a detailed description of the relationships of the Chinese organ systems to the stages of fetal development. Familiarity with this Chinese pathophysiology affords an understanding of the ways symptoms that we know about in Western medicine occur from a Chinese medicine perspective. The two models together can help us see why certain symptoms arise and correlate the symptoms with diet and lifestyle advice to address them and provide some insightful guidance on further caring for you and your baby during each month of pregnancy.
I find the Chinese medicine model helpful for bringing in a more comprehensive view of your pregnancy stages and using some of the figurative associations as a launching pad for understanding what’s going on in your body and how to care for yourself. So as not to be too confusing, throughout the book, I capitalize the Chinese organ systems and lowercase the Western systems:
| CHINESE MEDICINE | WESTERN MEDICINE |
|---|---|
|
Liver, Heart, Spleen, Lungs, Kidneys, etc. |
liver, heart, spleen, lungs, kidneys, etc. |
Being a practitioner of Chinese medicine is also about recognizing someone for who they are and what is right for them as an individual. This is why I don’t just recommend blanket acupuncture treatment protocols and herbs for everything and everyone! Being a Chinese medicine practitioner has exposed me to many methods of healing and treatment, and I draw on all of these modalities to give you options to pull from and experiment with to see what’s a good fit for you.