Eating for Two

publishersweekly / cc

As someone who has an unhealthy love of food, I was really looking forward to being able to “eat for two” in pregnancy. Imagine my sorrow when I learned that pregnant women really only need an additional 300 calories or so—and only in the second half of pregnancy. WTF? So uncool.

My sorrow didn’t last long, as I was wracked for several long months with “all-day sickness” (another lie: morning sickness—it’s not just for mornings!) and couldn’t keep down much more than oatmeal and, on a really adventurous day, apple sauce (sprinkled with ginger instead of cinnamon, in a desperate and ill-fated attempt to fight the nausea naturally).

Skip ahead to months five through nine, when I could finally eat like a real person. I tend to gravitate toward foods in the starch and fat family (potato chips are the perfect food), but I knew that I’d be setting my kid up for a lifetime of obesity if I snacked on nothing but garbage all day. I’ve already been down the fat path and don’t really want to go back. Before I went vegan six years ago, my cholesterol was 250 (which, incidentally, was also about how much I weighed—fine, perhaps, if I were 8 feet tall, but at 5′6″, not so good), and I definitely wanted to give my kid the best start I could.

Since I don’t eat artery-clogging, disease-causing animal flesh, I felt like I had a pretty strong head-start on the whole “eating well” thing, but here are a few tips and tricks I eventually settled on:

1) Hummus and baby carrots are my friends. Hummus is packed with protein and healthy fats, and carrots have all that great vitamin A (they’re the best source of it, actually, unless you’re super keen on eating liverwurst, animal livers, or cod liver oil. Mmmmm, tasty!).

2) Soy milk is easy, fast protein. Starbucks will sell me a lovely bucket of steamed soy milk for a few bucks when I forget to go to the grocery store and buy my own.

3) Woman cannot live on pasta alone, but she can add a few Nate’s frozen “meat”-balls and make a nice balanced dinner.

4) Go back to the basics. Peanut butter and jelly on whole-wheat bread with a little apple sauce cup and a handful of raw vegetables is a good lunch, not to mention easy and cheap. On a fancy day, I’ll do Tofurky with Vegenaise, pickles, and tomato.

5) You can make a nutritious and protein-packed smoothie (if you’re veg, people will hound you even more about the protein than they did before you got pregnant—brace yourself) in about five seconds. Here’s my friend Dawn’s recipe (makes two):

2-4 bananas
4-7 leaves of fresh kale, stripped from the stalk
A big spoonful of peanut or almond butter
Soy milk

If you really want to make something with more than four ingredients (might as well relish it now, because I hear that after the baby is born, there’s no time for that kind of nonsense), you can add any of the following:

A few big spoonfuls of soy yogurt
Crushed red pepper, to taste
A dash of vanilla extract
4 tablespoons of flaxseeds (grind them first, if you can)
Small spoonful of maple butter or syrup
Half an avocado
4 dates or figs (soaked first)
Walnuts
Frozen strawberries