Morning sickness is probably the #1 complaint of pregnancy! Although, statistically, they say that only about 50% of women actually experience morning sickness, it sure doesn’t seem that way when you talk to REAL women!! (Who are “they” anyway??)

If you’ve had morning sickness in even one pregnancy, you know the misery. It can completely disrupt your life, and you wonder if you will ever feel normal again. Not to mention that it hardly ever happens just in the morning! It’s more like “all day sickness” for most of us….but for purposes of this article, I’ll just use the term morning sickness, since we all know what that means.

You’ve heard the usual mantra: soda water and salt crackers. And if you’ve tried it, you already know…that’s a prescription for disaster! Salt is fine….but the carbonation can irritate your stomach lining, and those white flour crackers provide zero nutritional benefit. You get a brief respite from misery as your blood sugar level spikes…..and then it drops to worse than it was before.

Good nutrition is the mantra here at BlueRibbonBaby.org! And it works on morning sickness, too. The trick is to eat BEFORE you get sick.

Your baby may not require a lot of calories in the early weeks to grow, but your placenta does. Morning sickness occurs because your body is busy trying to keep everything in balance while growing a placenta and you need a constant supply of nutrients to accomplish this. If you get behind on your nutrition, your blood sugar level drops rapidly, leaving you at the mercy of your raging hormones and feeling nauseated, dizzy and miserable.

The “vicious cycle” of morning sickness is typical: You might not even get around to feeling hungry before you start to feel sick, and once you feel sick you certainly don’t feel like eating, so you don’t….and then you feel worse and worse until the inevitable happens.

As you well know, the idea of food is not very enticing once you’re feeling queasy! But morning sickness is not the flu! The reasons for feeling sick are entirely different, and the reasons for vomiting are entirely different. You CAN eat when you’re pregnant, you can’t eat when you have the flu. So the key is to stay ahead of your body, by eating good, protein-rich foods regularly, in snack-size quantities, before nausea sets in. If you start to feel the least bit queasy….EAT!

Dr. Brewer recommended that pregnant women forget the traditional three meals day, and adopt a “grazing” meal schedule instead. In the later months of pregnancy, there just isn’t room in your belly for a big dinner AND a baby…but in the early months, you need to eat constantly to keep your blood sugar levels stable, and stave off nausea. You can still have three meals with your family when you eat a little more than just a snack, but don’t limit yourself to only three meals. Once a meal “wears off” you’ll start to feel queasy, and that’s when the vicious cycle of morning sickness sets in.

I personally tried this approach with my second pregnancy. In my first pregnancy, I had the typical morning sickness struggles. It completely disrupted my life, my work schedule, and any thought of enjoying pregnancy! I lived in fear of not making it to the bathroom in time, and I kept zip-lock baggies in my glove box and my purse “just in case”. I had no clue about good nutrition in the early months of my first pregnancy — all I had to go on was the “Best Odds Diet” and it wasn’t working for me. I experienced intermittent nausea and vomiting all throughout that pregnancy, and I never realized that I might have been able to do something about it.

By the time I was pregnant with my second, I had met Dr. Brewer and my entire world was changed! Pregnancy was a joy, I felt healthy, and I hardly had a trace of nausea. I had started eating right from the minute the line turned blue, and I breezed through the first trimester with only an occasional twinge of nausea — which I combated by EATING IMMEDIATELY! The tiniest hint of discomfort was my cue to eat, and it worked wonders.

I have since taught this concept to my childbirth students and any expectant moms I meet, and invariably the response has been the same: Wow!! What a difference!

Give it a try….you’ve got nothing to lose, and everything to gain!