Pre-Pre Natal Care for Women and Men - Get Ready For Your Baby!

 

Did you know that childbirth is supposed to be an orgasm? No pain. Only ecstasy. 

This body that we nurture every day nurtures us back. We are stuck in it. And sometimes, it’s scary. But it doesn’t have to be.

I’ve written about health many times and it all boils down to something we all learned in school. Again, I’m saying it - it seems to me there are only two kinds of people in the world, those who paid attention in school and those who didn’t. Maybe you had a loser for a teacher and you coasted but you missed out on a lot that could be useful to you now. That loser had a lot to teach you.

In all of the pandemic, I only heard the WGBH Boston journalist, Adam Reilly* say what we all learned or should have learned in school (I’m paraphrasing) - “All you really need to do to strengthen your immune system and be healthy is to eat real nutritious food, get enough sleep and exercise.” 

That’s three things.

And, nobody does it.

I was lucky. I was brought up Italian, eating only whole foods from the Italian market in Haymarket Square, Boston. My grandfather and my uncle used to go every week and come home with wheels of cheese and hunks of prosciutto that the family shared. Every day was a fresh loaf of bread. Fresh fruits were abundant. My mother even foraged for dandelion greens. My grandmother grew her own arugula, tomatoes and red pepper in a tiny backyard garden in East Boston. 

My mother cautioned us to never eat anything from a factory! Candy was kept on a top shelf. Anything packaged was suspect.

I was thirty-one years old and eight years macrobiotic when my daughter was born. She popped out after only four hours of labor; she was pissing, pooping and screaming! I won’t say it was painless, it wasn’t. I did it without drugs and there comes a point, where, like Catholic saints, you pass the pain and drift into nothingness. 

Ecstasy.

But it’s not about pain or no pain. It’s about health.

A friend of mine delivered her ninth child herself behind the counter of her natural food store. Health.

Every time I see a commercial for children in a cancer ward, I shudder, because NO CHILD SHOULD HAVE CANCER! No, nor any other degenerative disease.

It is my opinion, and you can take it or leave it, that eating junk food as food causes cancer. “White bucket” fast food restaurants, where the ingredients come out of white plastic buckets instead of out of the garden or from the farm. Anything made in a factory - artificial “food-like substances” (Michael Pollan*, author, nutritionist and chef) that we eat as our daily food.

Feed yourself and your children real nutritious food! Everyone must learn how to cook! Every man, woman and, yes, every child as soon as they are able! 

Cooking is not an inconvenience. It is an opportunity. A chance to get better, to be better, to feel better!

NYC Mayor Eric Adams healed his diabetes and the blindness in his left eye 

by changing his diet 

What is good nutritious food? Here is the Food Pyramid we learned in school. It changes sometimes, but the basics remain the same. In macrobiotics, we lean more toward whole grains and vegetables with occasional servings of chicken, fish, dairy and eggs.

Here’s what to do for good pre-prenatal care and it’s the same for everyone’s everyday health. You don't have to be macrobiotic to be healthy! Get as close to this as you can!

Pre Pre Natal Care For Women and Men: Get Ready For Your Baby!

1. Learn to cook real whole foods. When you are a young adult (think high school!) stop all junk food as food. Junk food is a cheat meal, only for fun, not for food. Children cannot develop properly on a diet of sugary breakfast cereal, pizza and hot dogs. Not in life or in the womb - you must pre prepare for pregnancy to give your baby the best chance at health! 
2. No drugs, limit alcohol. 
3. Cut your sugar intake in half - or more!
4. Get enough sleep. This can be hard when you work and commute. But you must try.
5. Exercise. Keep your body as strong as possible. Keep your blood circulation pumping! Your own good quality blood made from good quality food is the best healing medicine for you!
6. Drink plenty of water! Water is the only drink that can truly hydrate you! Dehydration can sneak up on you.  It has many, many symptoms that can be dangerous!

Drugs, alcohol and sugar take from the body. Obviously, no hard drugs which can take your life as well as your baby’s life. Use other medications in moderation at all times. (Check with your doctor.) Nowadays women do not drink alcohol when pregnant. Many women also stop coffee. My mother never heard of these restrictions. I did drink coffee and everything was fine. I was advised by my European macro friends that European women drank good quality beer while pregnant to ensure plenty of breast milk. So, I drank the best beer I could find at the time, Pilsner Urquell. I had lots and lots of milk! I was also advised to eat a fermented soy product called natto for skin health. “No stretch marks,” commented the intern who cared for me. The doctor wouldn’t come down to the delivery. He said since it was my first, there was plenty of time. An intern and several nurses attended me. Initially, I had planned to use a mid-wife with doctor/hospital back-up. However, the doctor felt my hematocrit (number of red blood cells) was too low for mid-wife conditions. I studied what that meant and adjusted my diet to change my condition - I reduced my coffee intake and I made a hearty miso soup for my lunch everyday, bringing my hematocrit up to an acceptable level. The doctor couldn’t believe I had done it.

Be advised - 

Pre-Prenatal care also applies to boys and men! When they eat, young men are preparing the quality of their sperm which contains the program of their good or bad health. When they eat, they are creating the quality of their health which they are passing to their child! How many young men do I see leaving the convenience store at lunch time with a huge bag of chips and a huge bottle of Coke! Not a nutritious lunch for a working man! We could go into the eating habits of our mothers and fathers which also influence the quality of our health. Again, I was lucky. My parents’ generation did not have a lot of junk food around and most of it was too expensive for them to buy. That’s no longer true.

We are further and further away from that naturally healthy generation. Possibly four generations removed. In many cases, we could go back to great-great-grandmothers before we reach someone who cooked real nutritious food every day. And THAT effects our health, our children’s health and our future children’s health! The good news is, the body reacts quickly and powerfully to good food and good habits; we can reverse most damage that has been done.

This body that we were given. This body that we nurture will nurture us back.

If we don’t take good care of our body, it will seem to attack us one day when we least expect it.

But, it’s not an attack, it’s our body reacting to what we gave it.

Give your body goodness. Get ready for your baby!

©Patricia Goodwin, 2022

• I am not affiliated with journalist Adam Reilly, nutritionist Michael Pollan, or Mayor Eric Adams, and they have not endorsed me in any way. 

• I am not a doctor, nor a medical professional. I’m just a person who has enjoyed the benefits of a macrobiotic diet and lifestyle for nearly 50 years. I’m 70 years old and not on any medications. When something goes wrong, I am able to consider what caused it, make adjustments and watch things heal. However, by law, I am required to say that any advice you see in my blog is not meant to be followed without first checking with your doctor.

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation. Her latest novel is Low Flying, about two women suffering psychologically abusive marriages who find and nurture each other. Her newest poetry books are Telling Time By Apples, And Other Poems About Life On The Remnants of Olde Humphrey Farme, illustrated by the author, and Java Love: Poems of a Coffeehouse.

Within this blog, Patricia writes often about non-fiction subjects that inspire or disturb her, hopefully informing and inspiring people to be happy, healthy and free.

***Disclaimer: The information on this blog is not meant to substitute for medical care. Please consult your physician before beginning any new dietary guidelines. 

REAL FOOD or DEAD FOOD?

“The bleached, gassed, and colored remnants of the life-giving grains are roasted, toasted, frosted with sugar, embalmed with chemical preservatives, and stuffed into a box much larger than its contents. Fantastic amounts of energy are wasted by sales and advertising departments to sell these half-empty boxes of dead food – money-back coupons, whistles, and toy guns are needed to induce…women to lift these half-empty boxes off supermarket shelves. [take them home and feed the contents to their children].”  William Dufty, Sugar Blues, 1975

     I get real nervous when I see a baby reaching for Cheerios. I get shivers when I see that baby putting Cheerios into his/her innocent mouth. Moms are proud to announce Baby’s First Cheerios on their blogs like it’s some sort of development milestone. Apparently, General Mills has been promoting Cheerios’ cute little donuts as a good transitional food for baby from baby food to solid food.

     Recently, General Mills announced that Cheerios would be GMO free. To quote Forbes: “The move was relatively easy. Cheerios are primarily oats, and there are no GMO oats. The comparatively small amounts of sugar and cornstarch in the mix required nothing more than a switch from beet sugar to non-GMO sources.”

     But GMOs are not the only reason to not eat Cheerios. Or any other refined breakfast cereal.

     Cheerios are dead food. In fact, the whole row of breakfast cereals in garish boxes going down your grocer’s aisle are dead unless they still contain whole oats, steel cut oats or a true whole grain (even if the box says WHOLE GRAIN, it’s not) that has NOT gone through the process of extrusion, that is, the forcing of the breakfast cereal mud through the molds that turn the slush into miniature donuts, fish, charms, or flakes. Extrusion requires a high heat that kills any nutrient left in the grain, including the artificial vitamins added, which the human body cannot process anyway. Good riddance. Moms, your baby, who desperately NEEDS real food in order to develop and grow, is NOT getting fortified with vitamins.

     The worst thing about dead food is that it doesn’t just fill you up and make you feel good for a while and then get chucked out of your body via your natural elimination process. Nope. The worst thing about dead food is that your body has a hard time digesting it, if it can digest it at all. Dead food that does not get eliminated, gets dumped into the body as fat or something worse, tumors.

     No, I take that back, the worst thing about dead food is that it takes from your body. Yes, your adult body. But, taking nutrients from the body is especially dangerous when talking about growing children and babies.

     You’ve heard the jokes, “You’re better off eating the box!” Well, unpublished studies have been done wherein the rats that ate the cereal box actually lived longer than the rats that ate the cereal. In fact, before they died, the cereal-eating rats became weirdly vicious, acting out in strange violent tantrums against each other. Sound familiar?

     We all know by now that breakfast cereals have a lot of added sugar in them. Studies have been done about sugar that have told us sugar takes nutrients from the body. Again, anecdotal and unofficial - People who have been lost and forced to eat candy bars or toothpaste have been much less healthy when found than people who only drank water. Dr. Lindsey Duncan ranks sugar up there with drugs and alcohol as taking nutrition from the body: “Overall, I’ve been studying, researching, practicing and living nutrition for the past 30 years, and if you asked me to pick 3 things that destroy and age the human body faster than anything else on the planet they would be: 1) Sugar 2) Prescription & Recreational Drugs and 3) Alcohol.  And the reason why is because they rob you of your life force, of your nutrition, of your immunity, your positivity and your overall wellbeing.  They are the ultimate thieves in the night!”

     Now, think of that when your baby reaches for Cheerios! I think about it.

     What can we do?

     Well, a baby should be eating Mama’s milk until being weaned on to soft baby food. Baby food has to be the easiest thing in the world to make. I made my own baby food. I began with brown rice cream. Brown rice made with four times the water, then blended till smooth enough for a baby with no teeth. I made enough for two days. My daughter was nearly two years old when I weaned her. I also made green vegetables and other vegetables (organic, when possible) by boiling the veggies in spring water until soft (maybe 4-10 minutes depending on the vegetable), then blending the veggies with the cooking water until smooth enough for baby. Thus, baby is getting fresh, warm nutritional food with every meal.

     As for adults, like baby, we should be eating real food. I like organic eggs for breakfast, but many macros eat brown rice cream, miso soup, green vegetables, tofu omelets, really the variety can be endless.

     I stopped eating flour products years ago. Again, dead food. The occasional cookie, pancakes, bread, scone or muffin won’t do too much harm, if you really need to eat baked goods, but the only nutrition is coming from the milk, butter, eggs, that are added to the recipe. Milled grain begins to lose its nutritional value immediately after being broken down. If you want to get real food value out of your whole wheat, you can buy a hand grinder for anywhere from $28.00, $128, to $1,200. I wish I had a photo of my dearest friend, Joan, as she clamped her stainless steel hand grinder on to our kitchen table, sat down, planted one barefoot and ground ONE CUP OF FLOUR for her recipe! I think it took her 5 minutes. And, we got as much nutrition as we possibly could from the wheat berries she ground. Plus her loving human energy added to the food! Real food, real love!

     I also have a personal theory about flour products and all baked goods. After many years of macrobiotics, I suspect baked foods, or as Michio Kushi used to call them, (I can hear his accent, plain as ever, emphasizing HARD!) “HARD BAKED foods” of causing some cancers. Cancers in particular that form in the lower parts of the body, and, often, in the smaller organs like the cervix and the prostate. Scientists do not even consider what macros know about the quality of the energy of the food effecting the human body, as in "hard baked." Again, only my humble informed opinion after years of observation.

     What can we do?

     The human body needs a balance of foods that grow up and foods that grow down, like leafy greens and whole grains (up) and root vegetables (down). Science will never believe this idea. The closest they will come to recognizing the dangers of hard baked foods is saying, “Keep hydrated.” Yes, hard baked foods are very dehydrating. And, dehydration is very sneaky. It has many, many symptoms, some very serious, and yet, dehydration is so simple to solve. Drinking water is not enough. You have to begin by not getting dehydrated in the first place. Balance is the only way. Whole foods that grow up and down.

     How did I get here from babies eating Cheerios?

     Simple! Dead food. Sugar. Hard baked foods. Dehydration.

     Your baby sucked dry of nutrients. I could say, “Cheerio!”

     But, it’s not funny.

©Patricia Goodwin, 2014

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation. Her newest poetry books are Telling Time By Apples, And Other Poems About Life On The Remnants of Olde Humphrey Farme, illustrated by the author, and Java Love: Poems of a Coffeehouse.

Patricia Goodwin has enjoyed the macrobiotic lifestyle for over 40 years and has written many articles about GMOs and food. Please visit patriciagoodwin.com to read these articles and see other work, including videos of events and poetry.