 From experiences of not only my own, but of those I know and those I have read and heard about, I have ZERO doubt about the impact that nutrition plays in our overall health and wellness. Combined with good dental care, chiropractic care, herbal and holistic medicine and vitamin therapy, I strongly believe white coats won’t be needed. Along with that, I believe in vegetarianism.
I do my best to adhere to the Brewer Diet though I am not really a meat eater. I do not like red meat and actually have a tough time getting it down if eating it to be polite when served someplace other than my home. I get my proteins elsewhere and sufficiently. In the past ten years, I have, for the most part, (about 7 years of the past 10) maintained a very healthy, well balanced lacto-ovo vegetarian diet. I birthed two babies as a vegetarian (I ate chicken, however, when pregnant with Zoe and I think I had two hamburgers, but I craved them for some strange reason,) and both of them remain very healthy vegetarian children with the exception of fish on occasion.
The Brewer’s Diet is an excellent diet for getting everything one needs when pregnant to keep oneself healthy and grow a healthy baby and can easily be adapted to a meatless diet.
My first pregnancy, I knew NOTHING about health and natural wellness and nutrition. I gained nearly 70 pounds. I lost it all plus some, but I still gained WAAAAY too much weight. With Zoe, I am unsure how much weight I gained, as I UPed the second half of my pregnancy and we do not own a scale as I care not what a number is. I probably, if I had to guess, gained about 30-35 pounds with her, which I lost most of before becoming pregnant with Sprout. I was a marathon runner then, at peak physical condition for myself, vegetarian and drank A LOT of water. Very healthy. I did not, however adhere to this diet.
I am attempting this diet this time around (BTW, a diet is how you eat, not trying to lose weight) and I am curious what it’s results will be. Does anyone have any experience they might like to share? I know of one UCer who does the Brewer’s Diet (Jenny Hatch) and she has success with it, so Jenny, if you happen to read this, please share your insights on the Brewer’s Diet!
9 comments
Comments feed for this article
August 4, 2007 at 12:38 am
kate
T~just checking in, how are you? I am thrilled to hear of your sprout!
Love and light to you
K
August 6, 2007 at 4:58 pm
Jenny Hatch
I taught the Brewer diet in Bradley Class while eating a hygenic diet during my second pregnancy. I ate strict vegetarian and suffered greatly for my lack of adherence to the very principles I had been teaching in childbirth class. See, I thought the hygenists were superior to Brewer and arrogantly ate those properly combined and vegetarian foods thinking I knew it all.
I did not eat enough salt, was protein deficient during her early days of nursing and she was a baby who nursed around the clock every twenty mintues. I am convinced this was because of my lack of protein.
With my boys I faithfully ate the brewer diet and added lots of meat and dairy into my post partum diet for breastfeeding (I was eating something like 175 grams of protein a day) and made gallons and gallons of breastmilk that flowed like thick cream for years. I was an EATING MACHINE and my eleven pound son doubled his birth weight in seven months and I was tandem nursing my two year old son while this happened.
For those seven months it felt like all I did was shop for groceries, cook food, eat, sleep, do dishes, and nurse the boys around the clock.
You are right that it is possible to eat vegatarian and make a healthy baby, but so many veg eaters get a huge amount of calories from chocolate and sugar, and don’t focus on protein. I encourage women to focus on the brewer diet as outlined,
http://www.blueribbonbaby.org/
and then when they have fixed those protein and sodium deficiencies and tamed the sugar and chocolate beasts, (Sugar cravings are signs of protein deficiency and chocolate cravings are signs of magnesium deficiencies) gradually learn how to exchange bean and whole grain combinations in place of meat.
No women should become a vegetarian while pregnant. If you have been healthfully eating a vegetarian diet and become pregnant your body will do better than the mother who has been a meat eater all along and then decides for the “sake of her child” she is going to “go healthy” and start eating vegan.
This is often your ticket to a preemie four pound baby, a c-section for failure to progress and Toxemia.
Just eat the brewer diet as is and if you want to go vegetarian do it very, very gradually over years of whole foods eating.
Mothers who have experienced Toxemia would do well to master the principles of the Brewer diet and then eat it for a couple months or years before trying to conceive the next baby.
I try to purchase all organic animal foods, with an emphasis on butter, eggs, milk, and cheese and a little bit of meat but also supplement those foods with huge amounts of whole grains, organic beans, and fruits and vegetables.
I believe the whole unassisted childbirth movement would greatly benefit from adopting the Brewer Diet as our Standard of Care but I have been involved in enough chat rooms to know that even talking about it will be met with stony silences and out of hand rejection.
Oh well, we all have to live and learn. If you would like to build a healthy nine, ten, or eleven pound child, birth it in a matter of mintues or hours, and have an abundant milk supply eat the brewer diet!
Jenny Hatch
August 6, 2007 at 8:00 pm
More On Nutrition « Womon and Sprout
[...] healing, pregnancy, babies, health Firstly, thanks go out to Jenny Hatch for responding to my Brewer Diet post. In my opinion, her knowledge is top notch on the subject, and I value it and am so thankful that [...]
August 6, 2007 at 8:28 pm
halfpintpixie
As a vegan, the brewer diet wouldn’t be for me, but I definitely agree with the above advice, pregnancy is not the time to be drastically changing your diet, it’ll be very hard on your body to adapt. I was veggie then vegan for a good few years before getting pregnant. I had a healthy pregnancy and natural birth at 42 weeks, babypixie was 8 1/2 pounds, exclusively breastfed till 6 months and now being gradually introduced to solids, still mostly breastfed, she’s almost 22 lbs now.
Funnily enough, I ate cashew nuts and popcorn a lot, because I really felt like I needed the salt.
I had to work at my diet and keep on top of it while pg and now while bf, I believe it’s the most important way to keep healthy. It wreaked my head seeing pg women eating crap just because they were meateaters and didn’t think they too needed to watch their diet. I know if I eat loads of empty calories that I won’t have as much milk, so I make sure to load up on beans, tofu, grains and my secret milk-maker, oats!
Sorry to go on, I’ll leave now
August 6, 2007 at 11:48 pm
Jenny Hatch
My secret milk maker is sweet potatos and brown rice! I roast the potatos, and cook the brown basmati with some flax seeds and lots of sea salt. Then I stir fry the rice in a couple tablespoons of olive oil and throw in the potato in chunks. I eat this and then the milk blasts into my breasts a few minutes later. If I feel the need for extra protein I will throw a half cup of grated cheese over this and chow it down with some soy or cows milk.
Flax is mommas ticket to a beautiful baby! I toss flax seeds into EVERYTHING I cook. Brown, Golden….it is my source for essential fatty acids and aids greatly with depression issues and also keeps hair and skin beautiful!
Thanks for your promotion of the Brewer diet! If every mother could be educated in these principles we would immediately see the deaths from toxemia disappear from our society.
I hope everyone reading this thread has a chance to go to the web site http://WWW.blueribbonbaby.org and surf around. Vegans and vegetarians and twin mommas especially should be introduced to this diet.
Big heallty placentas, a strong uterus, and huge healthy babes with milk flowing so strong baby doubles and then triples easily that birth weight in a year. My big guy Andy, tripled his birth weight in a year and was walking at seven months. He is ten now and a whole head taller than his peers. I think it is going to take him three or four years to grow into his feet. It took him three years to grow into his head as a baby, but his feet are just huge right now. We have spent so much money on shoes and clothes for him because he just keeps going up up up.
While the statistics for low birth weight and preemies continue to go up in our society, those of us who know the truth about nutrition can loudly yell to anyone who wants to hear the FACTS of building healthy babes.
I had one woman in a chat room tell me that the Brewer Diet is a farce that was set up to guilt trip preemie mothers. Now tell me, what sicko person would do such a thing? She said this with such authority and confidence I did not have the heart to challenge her on it.
I have had other mothers tell me “small babes run in my family” “Toxemia runs in my family” and “my body just could not make the milk.”
When mommas take the opportunity to claim their feminine birthright of being personally responsible for first and foremost their own health by cleansing internal organs and getting educated with the facts of what makes a healthy baby, such a beautiful and divine process begins to take place.
Conversely, when momma starves herself during her teens and then tries to build a healthy baby on microwave popcorn and diet soda. The pure trauma that comes into her life and the life of her children is just horrifying to watch.
So, yeah, I unapologetically promote the brewer diet and challenge any toxemic mother to take on the challenge with her next baby. Just try it. And watch and feel the difference!
Jenny Hatch
August 7, 2007 at 12:29 am
Womon in the Woods
Thanks for the link Jenny! That is a great site!
September 23, 2007 at 11:30 pm
Joy Jones
Here’s another website that explains the Brewer Diet.
http://home.mindspring.com/~djsnjones/index.html
JJ
December 16, 2007 at 9:26 pm
Catherine
Hi! I know the last comment to this was posted a few months ago, but I want to second what Jenny Hatch wrote about the Brewer Diet’s outcomes for her.
I had Toxemia during my first pregnancy. Thank God I discovered, by accident, Bradley classes in my area early in my second pregnancy and my husband and I did the course. I was on the Brewer Diet during my second pregnancy for 7 of the 9 months (the first 2 months I hadn’t discovered Bradley and Brewer yet). No Toxemia this time around, I ran every day faithfully 2-3 miles the entire pregnancy, BP never went up and I had no swelling at all. I gave birth on 30 Oct 2007 at home and labored only 5 hours, pushing lasted only 12 minutes. It was awesome. 4 weeks after giving birth I was out running 2 miles a day and now at 6 weeks post-partum, I am up to 3 miles a day. I have TOO MUCH milk…such a change from my first pregnancy when I never had enough. I am still on the Brewer Diet and think I will be forever…it is so balanced and makes me feel great. I also have increased my protein intake to about 150 grams a day for breast feeding, accomplished easily by eating a tub of lowfat cottage cheese and lots of hummus everyday, in addition to all of the other foods Brewer requires.
Bradley and Brewer don’t address Omega-3 issues, and I had PPD after my first pregnancy. I have been taking tons of fish oil while pregnant and continue to while breast feeding now, and have no PPD at all, so I really recommend this to prevent it. Breast feeding really depletes Omega-3 supplies in the body–it all goes to the baby. I believe this is why so many women in the US/Canada/UK tend to get PPD at higher rates than those in Japan, Korea, etc. We don’t eat the fish we need. So take fish oil and you can probably prevent Omega-3 deficiencies which research has really suggested contribute to PPD.
-Catherine
August 25, 2008 at 11:22 am
Appt. with nurses today---bp up! not good... - SheKnows Message Boards
[...] following the Brewer’s Diet http://www.blueribbonbaby.org (hopefully their bandwidth is fixed soon) Brewer’s Diet « Womon and Sprout [...]