What to expect when you're expecting (42 page)

Keep it simple when you’re cooking healthy. For a quick meal, broil a fish fillet and top it with your favorite jarred salsa, a little chopped avocado, and a squeeze of fresh lime juice. Layer tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese on a cooked boneless chicken breast, and then run it under the broiler. Or scramble some eggs and wrap them in a corn tortilla along with shredded cheddar and some microwave-steamed vegetables.

When you don’t have time to start from scratch (when do you ever?), turn to canned beans, soups, frozen or packaged ready-to-prepare healthy entrees, frozen vegetables, or the fresh prewashed veggies sold in supermarket produce sections (the ones you can microwave in the bag are especially convenient).

“I try hard to stay on a healthy diet, but I eat out so often, it seems impossible.”

For many pregnant women, it isn’t substituting mineral water for martinis that poses a challenge at the restaurant table; it’s trying to put together a meal that’s baby friendly and doesn’t break the calorie bank. With those goals in mind, and the following suggestions, it’s easy to take the Pregnancy Diet out to lunch or dinner.

Look for whole grains before you leap into the bread basket. If there aren’t any in the basket, ask if there are any in the kitchen. If not, try not to fill up too much on the white stuff. Go easy, too, on the butter you spread on your bread and rolls, as well as the olive oil you dip them into. There will probably be plenty of other sources of fat in your restaurant meal—dressing on the salad, butter or olive oil on the vegetables—and, as always, fat adds up quickly.

Go for a green salad as a first course. Other good first-course choices include shrimp cocktail, steamed seafood, grilled. vegetables, or soup.

If soup’s on, look to ones with a vegetable base (particularly sweet potato, carrot, winter squash, or tomato). Lentil or bean soups pack a protein punch, too. In fact, a large bowl may eat like a meal, especially if you toss some grated cheese on top. Generally steer clear of cream soups, and take Manhattan-style when it comes to clam chowder.

Make the most of your main. Get your protein—fish, seafood, chicken breast, or beef—the lean way (good words to look for.
grilled, broiled, steamed, and poached). If everything comes heavily sauced, ask for yours on the side. And don’t shy away from special requests (chefs are used to them; plus, it’s hard to turn down a pregnant woman). Ask if that chicken breast can be broiled plain, instead of breaded and pan-seared or if the snapper can be grilled instead of fried. If you’re a vegetarian, scan the menu for tofu, beans and peas, cheeses, and combinations of these. Vegetable lasagna, for example, might be a good choice in an Italian restaurant, bean curd and vegetables in a Chinese one.

Be selective on the side, scouting for baked white or sweet potatoes, brown or wild rice, legumes (beans and peas), and fresh vegetables.

Consider a fruity finish to your restaurant meal (fresh berries can be surprisingly satisfying). Fruit alone doesn’t cut it (at least not all the time)? Add whipped cream, sorbet, or ice cream. Craving serious sweets? Join the “two spoons” club and share a decadent dessert with others at your table.

“I’m eager to eat well, but it’s difficult to figure out what’s in the products I buy. I just can’t make sense out of the labels.”

Labels aren’t designed to help you as much as to sell you. Keep this in mind when filling your shopping cart, and learn to read the small print, especially the ingredients list and the nutrition label (which
is
designed to help you).

The ingredients listing will tell you, in order of predominance (with the first ingredient the most plentiful and the last the least), exactly what’s in a product. A quick look will tell you whether the major ingredient in a cereal is a refined grain or a whole grain. It will also tell you when a product is high in sugar, salt, fat, or additives. For example, when sugar is listed near the top of the ingredients list or when it appears in several different forms on a list (corn syrup, honey, and sugar), you know the product is chock-full of sugar.

Checking the grams of sugar on the label will not be useful until the FDA orders that the grams of “added sugar” be separated from the grams of “naturally occurring sugar” (those found in the raisin part of the raisin bran you’re considering, for instance). Though the number of grams of sugar on the present label may be the same on a container of orange juice and a container of fruit drink, they aren’t equivalent. It’s like comparing oranges and corn syrup: The real OJ gets its naturally occurring sugar from fruit; the fruit drink contains added sugar.

Nutrition labels, which appear on most packaged products on your grocer’s shelves, can be particularly valuable for a pregnant woman counting her protein and watching her calories, since they provide the grams of the former and the number of the latter in each serving. The listing of percentages of the government’s recommended dietary allowance (called DRIs), however, is less useful because the DRI for pregnant women is different than the DRI used on package labels. Still, a food that scores high in a wide variety of nutrients is a good product to drop into your cart.

While it’s important to pay attention to the small print, it’s sometimes just as important to ignore the large print. When a box of English muffins boasts, “Made with whole wheat, bran, and honey,” reading the small print may reveal that the major ingredient (first on the list) is white, not whole wheat, flour, that the muffins contain barely any bran (it’s near the bottom of the ingredients
list), and that there’s a lot more white sugar (it’s high on the list) than honey (it’s low).

You Can’t Tell a Fruit by Its Cover

When it comes to nutrition, the darker the color of most fruits and vegetables, the more vitamins and minerals (especially vitamin A) you’ll be able to harvest from them. But keep in mind that it’s the color inside—not outside—that signals good nutrition. So while cucumbers (dark on the outside, pale on the inside) are lightweights in that department, cantaloupes (pale on the outside, dark on the inside) are standouts.