First Foods…Postpartum!
Congrats mama, you just gave birth to a beautiful human you've been growing for roughly 9 months! For the last nine months you've dealt with cravings, aversions, heartburn, and more. Now that baby is earthbound, you cannot wait to start eating your normal eats.
Give me steak! Give me fried chicken! Give me cake!
STOP
Let's think about this idea of the first foods we put into our body now that baby is no longer hindering your digestive system...
You just went through a major physical event. An event that is calming down as your uterus normalizes in size, your digestive system finds it's way back to normal placement, and there's so much inflammation from the birth that you walk into the bathroom with an apprehension hoping you can pee and poop without too much discomfort.
So, what foods should you think about putting into your body at this time? Which foods should you avoid?
Well, let's focus on two things when we're eating:
Keeping inflammation at bay while healing
Gut healing
With those two thoughts in mind, we don't want to reach for a big fat steak because that'll be really hard for your digestive system to digest right now! (Though the iron is helpful in your healing) We don't want to fry it up because, well, fried foods = inflammation. And cake = sugar = inflammation (but you could get creative in finding desserts with less sugar and grains).
My number one recommendation:
BROTH
Preferably homemade, but that's not always possible. Why broth?
Highly nutritious of vitamins and minerals
Reduces inflammation
Helps heal the gut
Easy to digest
May help with sleep
May help with joints (you know the joints that just opened up to let you push out your beautiful chunk of joy!)
Can be easily enhanced with more nutrition with other foods/herbs while you're making it
You could just drink the broth, or you can prepare some various soups with broth that are ready to go after you have baby.
In the picture above, I'm prepping a soup to freeze while preparing for baby #3! I used a "soup bone" cut from our grass-fed cow that still contained the marrow in the bone (you can see the marrow by my fork in the broth picture). Did you know bone marrow has it's own superpowers too? It can help with:
Reducing inflammation
Providing extra nutrients
Reducing joint pain
Great healthy fat
Easy to digest
After cooking the soup bone's meat in the instant pot, I left all the fat 'run-off' in the pot, cut off the meat, and plopped the bone back in there. I filled the pot with water, added a couple onions and garlic, salt, pepper, and oregano, and let it slow cook for at least 12 hours. When I woke up the next morning, I had some of the best healing food ready to go!
You can just freeze the broth from there, or make up a soup like I did!
Here's what I made with this broth:
Sautéed 3 chopped onions and 3 minced garlic cloves in olive oil
Sautéed 6 small red, organic potatoes
Added cooked soup bone meat and 2 cups of peas
Lastly added the broth and freeze (if you're prepping before baby)
Easy as that!
Here are a few other easy food ideas:
Apple sauce
Toast with cinnamon and honey (but not too much bread!)
Berries
Smoothie (a few days postpartum so the cold doesn't shock your digestive system)
Foods with turmeric to help with inflammation
Oatmeal with cinnamon
Nutritional shakes
There are so many other foods, and as long as you're thinking "will this be easy to digest?" and "will this promote health?", you'll be going in the right direction!
Questions? Let me know!
