Healthy Calories vs. Unhealthy Calories

It is important to note at this time that no two calories are created equal. There are 300 calories in a protein bar and a banana smoothie, and there are 300 calories in the average piece of cheesecake. Guess which one is going to be better for your baby?

The difficult part of counting calories when you’re pregnant is that you need to maintain a careful balance on several levels. First and foremost, you want to make sure that you’re eating enough to give your baby what it needs. Secondly, you want to make sure that the calories you are eating are “good” calories, calories coming from foods that are going to provide your baby with nutritional benefit as well.

On the flip side, you do not want to consume too many calories. If you do you will gain too much weight, potentially putting you at risk for early labor, pre-eclamsia, diabetes and heart problems. You also do not want to restrict your food intake too much. Pregnancy can lead to some pretty intense cravings, and ignoring these cravings can lead women to do some crazy things.

Unless you have one of the weight problems mentioned above you are probably better off considering your calorie intake guidelines to be just that-guidelines. It’s not going to hurt you to go over every once in a while and indulge in a piece of cheesecake or a chocolate chip cookie. Just don’t do it too often or too excessively. (Binging and eating a half a gallon of chocolate ice cream once isn’t going to hurt you, although it might make you sick, but doing it every day could be a problem.)

Try not to count your “junky” calories as part of your daily necessary intake. This will help you to continue eating the required number of “good” calories in a day, making sure that your baby is getting the nutrition that it needs. (That half gallon of ice cream is going to account for about half of your daily caloric intake, which means that half of the calories that your baby needs to grow today just went down the drain.) It is also going to help keep you from doing it too often, since consistently eating five to six hundred calories over your recommended daily intake is going to lead to excessive weight gain. The first time you step on the doctor’s scale and see you’ve gained ten pounds in a month the urge to binge flies out the window!