Best Tips During Pregnancy

Being pregnant may bring a lot of changes to your daily life. One of the most common and major changes are dietary habit changes. Even if you had a healthy diet prior to becoming pregnant, you may begin to look at what you eat and how you eat different now that you're expecting. Here are some tips to ensuring your diet is what it needs to be during pregnancy.

• Remember the food pyramid? It's gone. But the My Plate is a great place to start. It helps you to eat more foods from the proper food groups. This visual representation is great. Many places have handouts. It's a great tool to have for reference on the refrigerator.
• Variety in your diet is very important. It helps ensure that you're gathering the daily doses of recommended vitamins and minerals every day from the foods you eat. It also helps prevent boredom with your diet which can lead to straying.
• Bring on the water! Staying hydrated has many benefits for the healthy pregnancy, including avoidance of early, Skin (meaning more elastic), and general decrease in pregnancy that are annoying (constipation, swelling, etc.). Juice has a time and a place but the majority of your fluids should be water. Other "drinks" like soda, coffee, etc. should not be included in your daily count of 6-8 eight ounce glasses a day.
• Eat foods that remember where they came from! The closer to the source of the original food the better. For examples: green beans that are fresh contain more of the good stuff than those in a can; bananas are better than fried banana chips or a banana split!