Friday, 15 August 2008
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Giving Up Your Favorite Food for Your Baby
by Mama Whale 
While I was pregnant and after Baby Whale was born there was one thing that I couldn't eat -- Japanese food. It was one of my all-time favorites so not having raw fish for 1 year and 9 months was extremely hard for me to battle. I had huge cravings for raw fish, but I knew that I had to restrict myself from it for the good of my daughter's health. I personally believe that it's not good to eat raw fish while still breast-feeding because the fish that I eat aren't clean and have parasites, bacteria, or some types of fish have a lot of mercury, which can hurt the baby's brain. Here's the info that I pulled up about eating raw fish while breast-feeding:
Can I eat sushi?
Yes; just make certain that you are comfortable with the source and care of the raw fish (reputable sushi bars are very careful about this). Like any raw food, sushi can carry parasites or a bacteria called "listeria monocytogenes" (see below for more on listeriosis), and some species of fish should be avoided due to high mercury levels. The consensus among breast-feeding experts seems to be that eating raw-fish-sushi doesn't pose a problem for a breast-feeding baby (though it has the potential to make mom sick).
So after weaning my daughter, I'm glad I'm back to eating my favorite food, but it was a huge sacrifice for a very long time though.
Did you give up any favorite foods during pregnancy and/or breastfeeding? How did you fight the cravings?
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Comments (12)
um well I love soft cheeses and such, but while pregnant I gave them up, and omg we eat a toy of home cooked pastas and its a family thing, wine...red wine with my pasta and gravy I missed that. Now though I have to watch dairy intake..she doesnt care for it I guess and I LOVE IT I mean I get my own gallon of milk a week, cheese and crackers yogurt had to scale all of it back and for millk now its soy...so yeah I give and gave stuff up BUT...in the long run it will only last for up to a year when I wean....I can take it...
oh yeah and a great dirty martini...thats the plan for after I stop nursing a very very dirty martini and a steak...mmmmmm
I LOVE coffee. I mean really LOVE it. The moment I found out I was pregnant, I stopped drinking it cold turkey for the 1st trimester. Although I thought I'd miss it and crave it all the time, I actually didn't think about it much in the beginning. I guess a lot of is psychological... the moment I knew I couldn't have it, a switch went off in my head!
During the first few weeks of breastfeeding, I couldn't have anything spicy because it made my daughter gassy and miserable. That was a bit hard since a lot of Korean food is spicy. Thankfully, that only lasted a month or so, and I was able to eat most things after that.
I looked up info on this while pregnant and found sources that said if the fish is flash frozen at some point in the packing process then the parasites will have been killed off by the freezing. You can ask at sushi restaurants how their fish has been shipped and prepared to check for this.
I never questioned all the restrictions they put on pregnant women, until I was pregnant in Europe... where many of them were practically unheard of. The US freaks out about sushi, while in Japan it's all pregnant women eat! I also never worried too much about mercury-- sure I avoided fish that are known to be high in mercury levels, but otherwise I ate fish when it was available because I've seen studies of the incredible benefits of the omega-3 fatty acids in fish and how they outweigh any possible negatives from mercury levels.
But, to answer your question... my son has a dairy allergy, and I'm breastfeeding, which means I can't have any dairy products or beef (the meat has a similar protein that also causes allergic reaction). Dairy is one of my favorite food groups, was one of my daily staples, and especially living in Switzerland and not being able to have the Best IceCream I've Ever Tasted during these last months here... um, it's been a battle. I feel bad saying it, but honestly if he hasn't outgrown the allergy by 1 year I may have to wean him so I can have my favorite foods again.
@mizzshoez@xanga - Many soft cheeses are pasteurized (I've even read that ALL cheese sold in the US, unless it comes from a specialty store, tend to be pasteurized but you can check labels to be sure). If it's been pasteurized then it's ok for pregnant women to eat. So there you go for next time.
raw sushi and tea.
i'm loading up right now before we get going on #2. haha 
i was okay with not having them.
I gave up coffee for the first two trimester. I love a caramel latte, but I didn't have any. At one point, my mean husband got one and I took a sip and nearly scratched his eyes out for taking it away from me. ;)
Later in my third trimester, I got half-caff for home, and I have about half a cup every morning. It's enough to get me going (probably more psychological than anything), without being too much caffeine. I will give in every so often and have a soda though, but not much. I think when I have the baby, I'm robbing the Starbucks up the street from the hospital for all of the caramel lattes I can get.
yup.. I had to give up sashimi which i love too... then my daughter is allergic to soy and dairy and nuts and shellfish... so i had to cut off all those food when I was nursing her... she weaned at 8 months but I continued to pump out breastmilk for her until she was 1 years old.. that's when I switched her to Alimentum... I went food crazy and gain alot of weight.. lol but eating sashimi didn't last too long cuz I got pregnant agian 3 months later.. so now I'm back to no sashimi diet :(
I'm borderline diabetic so my doctor put me on a diet. It's the hardest thing I've ever had to do. I never knew how much I loved my carbs and sugars! I'm doing this for my baby, so she's born healthy, but gosh its hard haha I can't wait til I can eat as much pasta and potatoes as I want!
I gave up coffee and sushi when I was pregnant. As soon as she was out though, I went back to my regular diet of whatever I want. She was a bit gassy in her early months and that might have been because of certain foods I was eating and then breastfeeding but the way I figure, people are just gassy, there are way too many foods that give you gas and gas is a natural byproduct of digestion anyway, so even if I restricted myself, she'd still have gas. Now that she is eating solids along with BF, I give her pretty much everything we eat too with a few exceptions, just to be safe.
@SwissMama - NO NEXT TIME bite your keyboard...
let me say this, I am a food snob I get imported and I looked it up llike you said, however, my husband Demian was like babe please just for a while so I was like..... ok
I thought if he was that concerned I would be supportive of his "male pregnancy"
but we are concitered of "advanced maternal age" so we had all this crazy genetic testing going on, he was worried about me mowing the law, walking...everything, so the soft cheese was and easy thing...hahaaha
Ugh, I had to give up caffeine when I was nursing my daughter, which is when you totally need that extra energy, you know? But she was very colicky, so I started doing food/diet challenges to see if what I was consuming was bothering her. Dairy, nope. Juice, nope. Veggies, nope. But the cup of coffee that I had in the AM to recover from 6 hours straight of screaming the night before, until 3 AM, that was the culprit. As soon as I stopped, she was happy as a clam.
I ate sushi while pregnant...it's fine, so is tuna fish as long as you aren't eating big portions every day of it. Small amounts are just fine.