Читать книгу An Unfit Mother: How to get your Health, Shape and Sanity back after Childbirth - Kate Cook - Страница 5

I really hope that you are picking up this book in the bookshop and are having a browse, newly pregnant. I can save you a lot of time and trouble, and I can get you to re-claim those jeans much more quickly—or even a pair of lusciously sexy new ones. All ears? Start now. Yes, you heard right, start now! I am not talking about a slimming diet, goodness no, us nutritional types don’t talk in terms of an actual diet, just a better diet, an optimum nutrition diet.

Us Brits have a really poor attitude to food. As I am definitely not a shrink and only a humble nutritionist and wise old owl, I don’t really know about all the psychological reasons behind this. However, I do know that lots of parents use food as reward right from a really early age.

* ‘Be a good girl and eat up all your food.’

* ‘You only get the chocolate chip cookie when you have finished your cabbage.’

Surely, no contest? Gollup down the cabbage and get ‘the nice stuff’, while holding your nose and practically gagging on the cabbage. You have just been told that cabbage is yucky and that chocolate is nice—a reward, in effect. Years later when we are in charge of our own nutritional destiny as an adult, you can therefore skip straight to the chocolate chip cookies and there is no one there to make you eat that cabbage. ‘Oh joy! Tee hee! See if they can stop me (etc).’

The downside is that chocolate chip cookies in large amounts cause our girths to expand. And there really is no getting around this. Sorry.

So a great many of us have the concept of reward in food. ‘If I am going through a really hard time and I have been good, I need a treat or I will feel deprived.’ And if we do have a so-called healthy diet, we bottle up all this goodness and, lo and behold, when the doc tells us that the Stork is due to pay you a visit, you say, ‘Great, now I can eat what I want!’ You can’t. Sorry.

‘Tell us, oh Guru,’ I hear you cry, ‘Tell us. Oh, what is the secret? What is this Optimum Nutrition Diet that I must follow to be both slim and wise like you, oh great and worthy one?’ The secret is…that you must:

* Eat loads of fresh and luscious vegetables washed down with pure water.

* Eat plenty of health-giving fruit, some whole grains full of vitamins and minerals.

* Consume fish and a little meat, if you like. That’s it!

So remember that:

* A healthy attitude to food saves you an extra trouser size or two.

* Start to look at your nutrition and exercise before you actually get pregnant.

* A splurge from time to time means you are human and not an alien being.