Growing a baby – my food and diet approach to pre-conception and pregnancy

I have been inspired to approach my pregnancy and parenthood by a wonderful organisation that I came across last year, who celebrate traditional diets and have helped in my recovery from Candida.  Following my diagnosis last year with Candida Albicans and embarking on a detox and overhaul of my diet to regain my health, I was told about the Weston A Price Foundation (WAPF).

I’ve been through so many ‘foodie phases’ since my Uni days: eating lots of Asian food; exploring ‘health’ foods; buying organic, then local; being obsessed by buying recipe books and watching cooking programmes; growing my own (which has stuck), and many others I’m sure I’ve forgotten.

Raw French butter

Looking back on this I see how lost and confused I was in this vast world of food opportunities and how I was just desperately seeking something that clicked for me.  A way of eating and cooking that just felt right, and natural.

When I started to read about the WAPF everything just seemed to fall into place for me.  Here was this organisation encouraging and teaching all about traditional foods and cooking – it was like someone had designed a guide based on what I was feeling inside about food.  In a funny sort of way it just seemed so much simpler and less complicated than all the other food ways I’d experimented with before.

And I trusted it.  I didn’t worry that in a few months, or years, I’d be told “sorry, that advice we gave you to eat that, well it’s wrong, stop eating it.”

Soaked and dehydrated nuts for yoghurt topping

Last year Mr Rigg and I had been talking about starting a family, but I’d just been feeling so unwell in myself that it wasn’t until I started to heal the effects of my Candida that I thought I could really consider it.

I was seeing fantastic benefits from the detox I was doing, but I was concerned that I was cutting out some major food groups that I felt I needed to be eating in order to be getting a balanced diet. I just didn’t feel it would be right to try and get pregnant as I currently was.

Me and Mr Rigg

I saw all the benefits of detoxing and cleansing my body, or allowing it a chance to heal, but I desperately felt I needed things like dairy back into my diet in order to be in a positive place for my body to create and grow a baby.

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My personal fight with the wretched Candida Albicans and how I’ve helped heal myself with food

Happy and much healthier after 6 months fighting my Candida

Please note, this post is a little deeper than my normal ones about eating dinner at the allotment or what DIY we’ve been up to, but it’s about time that I shared it for a number of reasons.

I’m also not one for sharing too many personal photos of myself or my Mr, but for the sake of illustrating different times last year as I began to feel better I am including a couple of photos of myself.  I’m especially not one for sharing pictures of myself where I don’t think I look nice…argh!

Pressing ‘Publish’ on this post has been a challenge…

I’m not really one for sharing my inner most secrets online, I’d rather share the mainly happy cheerful bits.  After all, who really wants to admit to half these things on a forum as big as the internet?

About a year ago I discovered that many ‘ailments’ that I’d been suffering from for about 8 years were in fact something called Candida Albicans.  I want to share a little of my journey to discovering what was wrong with me and how I healed myself (with a little help from some kind, understanding and knowledgeable people) through food alone.

It is important to me to share some of my journey because once I had been told this is what I was suffering from, I was straight away online trying to find out everything about it.  Having felt so alone for so many years, it was such a lovely feeling to discover that other people had been through similar experiences and come out the other side happier and healthier.

It’s because of those people who so openly and candidly shared their experiences that have encouraged me to share a little of mine – if someone like me a year ago, comes across this post and feels better because I talked about it, then that’s why I’ve decided to bare a little more than usual.