This is a lovely and endearing video clip by the founders of Babble.com, a parenting website. The husband and wife team discuss a few parenting taboos that help appropriately manage the expectations of parents and parents-to-be. The intention is to adjust the expectations of parenting so that they can further enjoy the amazing and challenging journey of parenting. I enjoyed the entire segment but was particularly appreciative of the section on miscarriage.

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I was thrilled to discover that Dr. Oz had led a discussion on autism –  its possible causes and solutions. Several physicians on the show agreed that the quality of food that we feed our children (and ourselves!) is influential in many cases.  Other topics covered are the role of vaccines, environment, and mother’s age.

One in every 110 children born in the US will be diagnosed with autism.  Please click on the image below to view  the discussion among Dr. Oz, a panel of experts and pediatricians, and an audience of families.

With modern technology, research on brain development — especially with children — has become even more fascinating.  Since you’re expecting, get to know what your baby can do!  Below is a video provides better insight into how amazing babies are…

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My Cleanse: 4 Green Juices, 1 Spicy Lemonade & 1 Cashew Milk (Yum!)

Please note that this 3-day BluePrintCleanse was a complimentary cleanse to me.

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My Cleanse: 4 Green Juices, Spicy Lemonade and Cashew Milk

Please note that this 3-day BluePrintCleanse was a complimentary cleanse to me.

Related Content:

• My Detox: Eve of Day 1
• My Detox: Day 1
• My Detox: Day 3
• Cold-Pressed Juices
• Our Internal Pollution
• Healthy Juice: There’s Only One Type That’s Worth Drinking!
• As Mom and Wife, Why I’ve been Exploring A Holistic Approach to Health…
• The Health Benefits of Fasting
• The Raw Diet
• The Raw Diet: The Husband’s Perspective
• The Raw Diet: One Year Later…
• Grocery List of Staples

Beginning a new journey..

I’m very excited. It’s January 2011, a new year, a fresh beginning. It feels like the beginning of a new chapter.

Having delivered my beautiful second daughter just over one year ago, at the end of 2009, I spent most of 2010 nursing and totally sleep-deprived. No one seems to talk about this, but the post-natal period can often times be much harder than the pre-natal period! I was lucky with my body’s reaction to the delivery of my second daughter (it was much more smooth than that of my first daughter’s delivery), but nursing really takes a toll! Your body is burning 500 – 600 extra calories to produce the milk. That’s comparable to running 5 – 6 miles per day. Everyday. No break. For my second daughter, that was every day for 10 months. And I have no memory of getting even 6 consecutive hours of sleep since my first daughter was born more than 3 years ago!

Since sleep regulates our bodies’ rhythms, processes and systems, the lack of both sleep and consecutive hours of sleep can throw off many things. In addition, the nursing is very demanding, and it felt draining. As such, I found myself very out of touch with my body and craving tremendous amounts of meat. I think I just needed the fat, calories, and whatever else meat offers that I couldn’t get from my wanna-be vegetarian diet. During the last couple of months of 2010, I probably ate an entire cow’s worth of meat. And I felt awful — physically, energy-wise, emotionally… I also felt guilty and sad about it.

So, for months during 2010, I’ve been dreaming of this day. As I write this, it is Tuesday January 4, the eve before Day 1 of my detox experience. Now that I’m no longer breastfeeding, now that my body feels a little more recovered from pregnancy / delivering / nursing, I’m ready to prepare for the next pregnancy! =) I know… crazy in some ways… But I want to clean out my internal environment as aggressively (yet safely) as possible.

Who knows what is really true about detoxing. There seems to be no unequivocal evidence to prove detox claims made by raw foodies. There are just theories. But I know that there’s a lot of truth that can not be explained. So, we have to rely on personal experience. And we, at The S File, have been and continue to share ours, in case it inspires any healthy change in our readers.

Since my husband and I hope to experience a healthy pregnancy in 2011, I have limited amounts of time to detox. With all that I’ve read, and with recently completing the book, Fetal Origins: How the First Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives, detoxing as aggressively but safely as possible before trying to get pregnant is important to me. Check back here to follow the journey!

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• The Health Benefits of Fasting
• The Raw Diet
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• The Raw Diet: One Year Later…
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Wondering what to get the mom-to be? Empower her to give her child the healthiest start possible! Below is a list of books or products that I wish I had during my two pregnancies. Both mom and child will thank you!

For your convenience, you may purchase any of the items below on Amazon by clicking on the images.

The S File™ Pregnancy Gift Guide

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Check out The S File’s other Gift Guides: Health, Parenting and Household.

A friend just sent me a link to the CNN video clip below. I had been thinking about writing a similar book but journalist Annie Murphy Paul beat me to it! Her book, Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives, was just released. My copy is in the mail. Will let you know how it is!

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In early 2009, I became aware of the raw diet and whole-heartedly integrated that philosophy into my family’s lifestyle.  A lot of what I read resonated with me and the more I tried the raw diet, the more I craved it.  For about one month, I was hard core — drinking cold-pressed vegetable and fruit juices; eating lots of avocados, nuts and seeds; switching to sprouted grains; and making other changes per the suggestions in “The Raw Food Detox Diet” and other books.  I genuinely enjoyed the food / meals.  I really felt amazing — I had unprecedented levels of energy and mental clarity.  It was addictive.

Then, I got pregnant.  And everything changed.

My Pregnancy Cravings

Ever since I can remember, I’ve always preferred “light” foods, such as vegetables, fruit, and seafood.  It’s just been my preference.  I never really cared for meat and fried foods.  With my pregnancy in 2009, however, I was horrified at what I was suddenly craving — steak, cheeseburgers and fries, grilled cheese sandwiches, Hot Tamales, Whoopers, … anything with high fructose corn syrup and white sugar — the WORST!

I became quite depressed as the cravings for these unhealthy things felt irresistible.  And the cold-pressed juices and any type of vegetable made me want to vomit.  At the same time, with all my recently acquired perspective on food and health, intellectually, I really wanted to eat 80 – 100% raw.  Physically, I wanted processed foods, fried foods, meat and dairy.

Then a friend (a nutritionist) who had heard about my funk called me.  (She started a lovely organization, BeamGreen, which is responsible for opening up my mind to the raw diet, among other things)  She called because she heard that I was depressed about my unhealthy cravings and wanted to assure me that my pregnancy cravings were not bad.  She recommended a book, “Clean Plates NYC”, to help me find healthier sources for my food cravings.  This phone call, coming from a nutritionist and raw foodie, led me to feel better.

Pregnancy and Raw Food

During the summer 2009, while pregnant, I received an email about an online ”raw mom summit.”  Moms who had been eating a raw food diet for decades came together online to share their experiences.  I was interested to hear that during their first trimesters, a number of them mentioned not being able to eat raw foods.  I became quite curious about this, as it wasn’t just me.

Some interesting sections from by Dr. Andrew Weil, M.D. states the following:

From page 7: There are surprisingly many toxins in the food we eat, both natural and man-made.  Celery, basil, the common cultivated white mushrooms (Agaricus bisporus), chickpeas, and many other vegetables contain natural toxins; most, but not all, are destroyed by the heat of cooking, which is a strong argument against raw food diets…  Alfalfa sprouts, so loved by raw food enthusiasts, contain a natural toxin called canavanine, which is definitely not food for you.  Peanuts and peanut butter are usually contaminated with traces of aflatoxin, a very potent natural carcinogen found in a mold that grows on peanuts and other seeds.

From pages 44 – 45: Both raw and cooked vegetables should be in the diet, but you have to know which are good to eat raw and which are not.  As I mentioned earlier, always avoid raw legumes and legume sprouts, including alfalfa sprouts.  On the other hand, garlic loses some of its virtues when cooked.  It is still good to eat, but if you want to take advantage of its ability to fight germs, eat it raw.  A salad of different kinds of lettuce, radishes, carrots, cucumbers, onions, and tomatoes is a good way to get some raw vegetables in your diet…

… many vegetables contain natural toxins.  The sprouts and green skins of potatoes are poisonous and should always be removed before cooking.  Celery, especially when affected by a very common fungus disease called pink rot, contains natural toxins that sensitize us to sunlight and may damage our immune systems.  Pink rot is responsible for the brownish patches that discolor many celery stalks.  Avoid these.

Most of the natural toxins in vegetables are heat-labile; that is, they are easily destroyed by the heat of cooking.  All cruciferous vegetables (the cabbage family), for example, contain such toxins.  Small amounts of raw cabbage and cauliflower will not hurt you, but they (and Brussels sprouts, kale, collards, mustard greens, and broccoli) are better for you when lightly cooked.  They may then offer some protection against colon cancer by affecting the chemical environment of the colon in a favorable way.  Raw spinach, chard, and beet greens contain oxalic acid, which removes calcium and iron from the body and may have other harmful effects; light cooking breaks down this compound.  Raw cultivated white mushrooms contain three natural carcinogens.  Two of them are destroyed by heat, but the third (agaritine) is not and is enough of a worry that I urge you to be cautious about including these mushrooms in the diet at all.

Here are some guidelines about how to eat vegetables:

NEVER EAT RAW: peas, beans alfalfa sprouts, lentil sprouts, mung bean sprouts, mushrooms, peanuts.

BEST WHEN COOKED A LONG TIME: beans, lentils, chickpeas, eggplant.

BETTER COOKED THAN RAW: beets and beet greens, chard, spinach, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collards, mustard greens, winter squash, green beans.  Do not overcook green vegetables.

GOOD BOTH RAW AND COOKED: carrots, celery, onions, garlic, chives, scallions, summer squash, turnips, endive, asparagus, sunflower sprouts, tomatoes, peppers.

BETTER RAW: lettuce, other salad greens (arugula, radicchio, watercress), cucumbers, radishes, buckwheat sprouts.

Conclusion

Confused about how to eat?  My husband was when I showed him the excerpts from Natural Health, Natural Medicine by Dr. Andrew Weil, M.D.  The key thing to remember is what the authors of Clean Plates NYC write in their book:

There is a dream diet for everyone — it’s just not the same for each person…  We’re all biochemically — genetically, hormonally and so on — different and the idea that this should guide our eating habits has recently begun to excite the leading-edge medical and nutrition community.  Experts are beginning to talk about the benefits of individualizing our diets rather than giving advice based on recommended daily allowances (RDA) or the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) food pyramid, both created with the “average” person in mind.

As nutrition pioneer Richard Williams writes in his groundbreaking 1950s book Biochemical Individuality, “If we continue to try to solve problems on the basis of the average man, we will be continually in a muddle.  Such a man does not exist.”

Women have especially unique needs since we experience menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, recovery of pregnancy / childbirth, and nursing.  Seasons also influence my cravings: I want raw food much less in the cold winter months than I do in the hot summer months.

During my pregnancy, I eventually let go of trying to force myself to eat based on what my intellect was telling me and just gave into my cravings more, which was very little raw food. After reading and hearing more about why a pregnant woman may have an aversion to raw food (to protect the baby from the naturally occurring toxins), I was reminded again at the brilliance of our bodies.

Funny enough, after my beautiful baby girl was born, I immediately (literally) craved cold-pressed vegetable / fruit juices!  I downed 16 ounces within the first half hour after the baby was born.  I craved this, and craved more (raw and cooked) vegetables and fruit immediately after the delivery.  My food preferences changed drastically and immediately.  Bizarre.  Yet another reminder to listen to my body because it knows what it needs.  (Disregarding the cravings for the Hot Tamales and Whoopers!)

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