Eating for Four or More: Nutrient Dense Food Choices

Eating for four sounds like an excuse to eat a whole cake for dessert but eating for four becomes an exercise in quality not quantity. When you are starting out, the babies are only the size of a golf ball and later in your pregnancy, your stomach will seem the size of a golf ball and you will have a hard time eating large quantities. You need to eat quality nutritious foods right from the start, not only for your babies, but to nourish your own body as incubator extraordinaire. 

When I was pregnant with my triplets, my belly was big but it was also exceptionally dense. I compared a singleton pregnancy to having a basketball in my belly, bulky but kind of spacious. Being pregnant with triplets was like carrying around a medicine ball, bulky and heavy. When I was pregnant with singletons, I gained weight and had a cushion of fat and fluid all over, but when pregnant with triplets, I seemed to only have extra fluid, the fat was being sucked up by the babies. Every bit of nutrition was being gobbled up by the babies so I had to make every meal and snack count to deliver high quality nutrients. 

Food Selection:

When making choices about foods, go for bright colours such as dark green, orange, blue, reds and browns. No more low nutrient white bread or white rice until after your pregnancy. 

For nutrient dense foods, think of Mother type foods in nature: Milk (cow to calf food), seeds (plant startup nutritional unit), eggs (animal startup nutritional unit), nuts (high protein plant startup nutritional unit), fruits (portable seed delivery unit) & honey (plant to pollinator food).

Top 25 Food All-Stars for Pregnant Women: 

Yogurt; Milk; Cheese

Eggs; Coldwater & Shellfish

Apples; Avocados; Cherries; Oranges

Barley, Bulgur, Oatmeal; Wheat Germ

Cashews, peanuts, walnuts

Asparagus; Broccoli; Cabbage; Pumpkin; Spinach; Sweet Potatoes, Yams; Tomatoes 

(Luke & Eberlein, 2005) 

Make up a grocery list of these nutrient dense foods for your grocery shopper. Start looking for recipes for these types of foods.

Ursula's Tips:

Start getting used to giving your babies’ snacks between meals and at bedtime even while they are in uetero.

Have a protein shake at bedtime. Pack it with frozen yogurt, berries, honey, protein powder, banana, etc. A bedtime snack will help you maintain your blood sugar levels as you sleep (reducing morning sickness) and helping you pack in all those food servings.

It takes 9 months to put on those pounds and will likely take 9 months to take them off. Don’t worry, you will be busy. 

Try swinging on a swing set to gently get your abdomen back into shape after a cesarean section.

Sweet Potato Fries

Sweet Potato Fries

1 sweet potato

vegetable oil

cayenne pepper

salt

Preheat oven to 450F; peel a sweet potato and chop into 1/4 - 1/8 inch wide spears; place in a bowl and toss with 2-3 tablespoons of vegetable oil; drain slightly; place on pan or cookie sheet and sprinkle with cayenne pepper and salt; cook for 15-20 minutes; flip half-way through if you like. Fries will be limp but flavourful. 

You can also deep fry them so they are crispy, but be careful that you don't consume too much fried food.

Serve with Parmesan cheese, sour cream, mayonnaise, Tzatziki sauce, cheese sauce or gravy. 

Cook on the same pan as store bought potato french fries. If you chop up a big sweet potato, freeze what you don't think you can eat and cook from frozen next time.

In part, previously published in the September 2010 Multiplicity Newsletter for TTMAC: Twins, Triplets and More Association of Calgary. www.ttmac.org  Republishing permission granted. Thank you to L. Nielson for editorial work.