I feel like a really fragile human, I told my husband this morning. It’s the day after I took baby boy to his two-month pediatrician visit. I’ve quickly learned that I become anxious before all baby’s doctor appointments, and I generally enjoy them about as much as him. Which is not at all. We both came home feeling fragile. He whimper-napped and whimper-ate all day, and I cried with him off and on.
There are SO MANY challenges to being a parent in most of the phases, but the combo of months of inadequate sleep due to a newborn and a baby in pain, is absolutely right up there. This weekend, I have hopes to rest as much as I can, shower even more love on baby, and take care of my mental health by going slowly, being gentle with myself, and getting some time in moving my body.
With that, I’m still moving slowly into flexing my creative muscles. I’m back to work very soon, and it feels imperative that I soak up the last of my less rigidly scheduled routine until then.
Reading
- Delights
- Baby on Board
- Anna Brones Midsummer Creative Retreat
- Nutritional Strategies for Optimizing Health, Sports Performance, and Recovery for Female Athletes and Other Physically Active Women: A Systematic Review: I particularly like the section mentioning a study on including oatmeal for breakfast. A breakfast of oatmeal with skim milk vs. milk alone before a workout led to less reactive oxygen species production post-workout –and thus would correlate with lower inflammation and better recovery from exercise. Big oatmeal fan here!
Enjoying
- The Hippie Bowl from Sara Forte’s Sprouted Kitchen Bowl + Spoon cookbook. Bonus that William told me it’s one of his favorite meals I make!
- My own version of the Courgette Flatbreads with Lots of Herbs from Gill Meller’s Root Stem Leaf Flower. This is one of my all-time favorite cookbooks for seasonal meal inspiration, and an absolute work of art as well. I used my sourdough pizza crust, which is still the best gluten-free pizza base I’ve tried.
- Our boysenberries are nearly done for the year, but the black currants are still practically dripping off the bushes. So many to harvest!
- Aviva Romm’s new Mama Pathway group/program. It is sooo helpful to have a community of like-minded individuals and experts to gather with and gain answers from. It’s a new parent re-assurance goldmine.
- Slowly easing into longer runs after baby. I’ve been trying to be very conservative in coming back to running postpartum due to the extreme taxation that childbirth has on the pelvic floor and core muscles (I now fully understand why childbirth really is like having a major injury!), the inability to recover from day to day due to lack of sleep and always being on, and the nutritional taxation on the body from breastfeeding. Ooof. Together, it’s quite the combination!
Nutrition and Food/Cooking Questions
- Why do you say you can have digestion dysfunction even without GI symptoms?
There’s a saying in Ayurvedic Medicine that when the diet is right, there’s no need for medicine. And when the diet is wrong, medicine will do no good. That may seem a bit extreme in today’s modern world, but truly, the majority of medicines are actually band-aids on bodily imbalances, and they are not “curing” diseases or treating the root cause. In the majority of cases, an imbalanced digestive system is at the root of other health imbalances.
Let’s use a common challenge with many: overweight, obesity and blood sugar challenges. Much of what we are now seeing at the gut level is dysbiosis (meaning microbial imbalances and overgrowth) driving food cravings and inflammation, slowing down metabolism, and impairing liver function, as well as glucose and insulin. When we can get to the root cause by rebalancing the gut, we can chip away at a lot of the subsequent symptoms. This isn’t to say that by rebalancing the gut that someone who has been overweight their entire life will suddenly become thin (we all have different body constitutions we’re born with), but it can mean we’re as balanced, symptom-free and at the appropriate weight and health in our body as we can be. - Do you meal plan?
I do! It started out as William buying me a five-year diary over a decade ago. I’d use it to write what I made for dinner each day. After filling up the journal, and each year realizing I was making similar foods on the same weeks of each year, I noted that seeing what I made at the same time in other years was super helpful in deciding what to plan for meals. The super-seasonality of how we eat means I often don’t make the same thing more than a couple times throughout the year.
Now, I keep a multi-year table in my OneNote application, which I can access on my computer and phone – and I make a list of five to seven main meals for each week. And I still take inspiration from looking at past years when I’m out of ideas. I also update it throughout the week, making note of what produce and ingredients need to be used first to prioritize what to make each day, and/or move meals around if I need something that comes together faster or the weather dictates something different from day to day each week. - What do you think of fasted exercise? Like running first thing before breakfast?
Like all nutrition questions, I’ll say it depends. For women of child-bearing years (essentially from puberty to menopause), it’s a huge stress to do fasted exercise, particularly if it has any intensity beyond a really short, easy run. The reason is because women’s hormones are quite sensitive to even subtle changes in the environment (and a hard workout on “empty” after an overnight fast is beyond subtle). Fasted exercise in this life phase can throw women’s hormonal and endocrine health completely out of balance if done long term. But for men and post-menopausal women, my answer might be different. But it depends on the person, situation, and context.
Until next time ~ Rebecca
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