Pre-Eclampsia
You are pregnant. Your feet are swollen. Your blood pressure is high. And now you're being told that there is protein in your urine. You may have pre-eclampsia. If nothing is done, the symptoms can multiply and you may be moving quickly towards life threatening (to both mother and baby) toxemia.
Dr. Tom Brewer studied these symptoms and made the realization that pre-eclampsia is caused by lack of adequate nutrition and can be reversed quickly with better nutrition. Yes, as simple as that.
When I was pregnant with my first child, I presented with all the pre-eclampsia symptoms and the doctor gave me a prescription for meds. I just happened to be reading Dr. Tom Brewer's first book where he wrote that if your doctor prescribed this specific drug to you (a blood pressure drug) , to call him ASAP! So I called him. He wrote in his book that these drugs are the equivalent to Thalidimide. (google that). He spoke to me for over two hours and educated me. He "prescribed" that I should eat a dozen eggs and a gallon of milk each day for two weeks. After the two weeks, he asked me to just follow his diet plan which included a certain amount of protein daily.
At the end of the two weeks, all of my pre-eclampsia symptoms were gone! I spent the next three months following the "Brewer Diet" which basically was a very clean way of eating that I should have been doing anyway. Between his call, his prescription and following his diet, I can honestly say that Dr. Tom Brewer saved both of our lives.
The Brewer Diet is well known in my generation of women. Thankfully, you can still find it online and it will cover every question you may have. Here is the link to the site:
http://drbrewerpregnancydiet.com/
Pregnancy is the time where you really have to be careful about what you eat because not only are you growing a baby, but your body has to deal with all this excess work. You should have the best nutrition of your life at this time.
The Brewer diet is simply a great whole foods diet that contains every kind of food you need - vegetables, grains, beans, fruits, proteins -- just no processed / packaged foods or fast food.
It's true that habits wreak havoc. You have to be strong to keep yourself away from Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts and Mcdonalds... all processed and unreal foods. Check this out.... these are the ingredients for the EGG used in Dunkin sandwiches. Are you ready?
"Egg whites, water, egg yolks, modified corn starch, natural sautéed flavor (soybean oil, medium chain triglycerides, natural flavor), salt, artificial butter flavor (propylene glycol, artificial flavor), xanthan gum, citric acid, coarse ground black pepper."
Propylene Glycol --- sounds delicious for a fetus. That's the antifreeze that you put in your car! That's what's in the thing in your sandwich that looks somewhat like an egg.
How do you convert a cheeseburger, french fries and soda to a Brewer meal? Start with a grass-fed burger cooked in your air fryer or on the stove, a real whole grain bun with lettuce, tomato, avocado and anything else you want on it. The french fries would convert into an organic potato that's baked until nice and crispy. Your soda could be some seltzer water that has some fruit juice added for some flavor. What's for dessert? How about a hot baked apple that has some cinnamon on top, topped with a one spoon (tablespoon, not scoop) of a good vanilla ice cream. How about a banana sliced in half with some nuts of your choice as the sandwich filling. How about a few squares of incredible dark chocolate - let it melt in your mouth. See how possible this is? See how amazing your meals are about to be?
Stay away from fake or processed sweeteners - stick to a good maple syrup IF you have to have a little sweet every now and then. Absolutely stay away from High Fructose Corn Syrup. Stay away from the middle of the store where everything is boxed. Also, this is not a good time for pregnancy women to eat fish, or to eat too much rice as well. The fish is loaded with mercury and other toxins and the rice has arsenic. I have read that the safest rice is from Lundberg's in California but still, you cannot eat a lot of it. When it comes to tea or coffee, please only drink ORGANIC. Both items are highly doused in chemicals.
Organic or not organic? If you believe that you can't afford to buy organic fruits and veggies, just make sure that you get the dirty 12 fruits and veggies as organic only. These are the fruits and veggies that don't have a thick skin covering to protect it. So a banana would be ok, an avocado would be ok, but a strawberry needs to be organic. Blueberries needs to be organic.
If you don't have access to storing a lot of fresh veg, then go with organic frozen veg. Frozen is way better than canned because they used vegetables that are perfectly ripe and freeze them before they go bad.
IF ALL OF THIS SOUNDS TOO HARD AND YOU JUST CAN'T CHANGE YOUR DIET FOR YOURSELF.... CHANGE IT FOR YOUR BABY. THIS IS YOUR FIRST STEP AT BEING THE BEST MOTHER YOU CAN BE.
Diabetes - Gestational & Type 2
If your lab blood test finds that you have gestational diabetes, you need to immediately stop eating sweets, baked good, drinking soda, drinking juice and eating fast foods. Yes! Stop eating those non-nutritional processed carbs immediately.
Following the Brewer Diet will help your blood sugars get reduced. However, there is a little bit more than meets the eye to reducing your blood sugar. It's not something you would normally hear when talking about blood sugar but here it is.... The one item that is so in charge of your blood sugar is ...
<wait for it... wait for it.... wait for it>
YOUR GUT BIOME!! (what I lovingly call, my "gut garden")
Yes! all those buddies running around in your lower intestine playing and living in the waste product of whatever you've eaten. This is where the REAL brain of every system is! This is your immune system. This is the powerhouse for every system in your body.
But there's more....
....how much sleep are you getting? what's the quality of that sleep?
....how are you handling daily stressors and the bigger stressors of your life?
....how much movement / exercise are you getting?
And finally, the item that is basically the most important item to consider:
....how much FAT are you eating in your diet? not only how much fat is in the food you are eating but most importantly, how much fat are you ADDING to the food you are eating. THAT is the biggest culprit!!
Let's make change immediately: STOP ADDING FATS TO YOUR FOOD. I'm talking about ALL ADDED FATS. No fat is better than another fat. Fat is fat.
Guess what? You can saute an onion in a pan without any fat! Who would have guessed that? If the onion sticks, just put a tiny bit of water or broth in the pan so it won't stick. Your onion is going to brown just like it would have with the oil in the pan.
Eating a baked potato? No butter, no sour cream please! How about making a wonderful mushroom gravy - fat free and flour free - and just pour it on by the ladle. How about trying your baked potato with some Salsa - that is really yummy. There are ways to make your food VERY VERY tasty without the added fats.
You can still eat some nuts or guacamole as a topping but no more cakes made from almond flour or finishing off the whole bowl of guacamole and chips yourself.
It is THIS FAT that CAUSES INSULIN RESISTANCE!
Here's how that happens:
"If insulin is the key that unlocks the doors to your cells, saturated fat is what appears to gum up the locks. With glucose denied entry into your muscles, the primary consumer of such fuel, sugar levels can rise to damaging levels in your blood." - Mastering Diabetes
Please get this book. It will explain it all to you.
"Even among healthy individuals, a high-fat diet can impair the body's ability to handle sugar. But, you can lower your insulin resistance by lowering your fat intake." - Dr. Michael Gregor in How Not To Die
WHAT DO I DO NEXT?
(1) Get yourself a diabetes test kit. I recommend the CONTOUR NEXT because it's simple, it has good memory/storage and it comes with an app that's mind blowing and will help you keep track of so many items and can transfer to your doctor easily.
(2) Get the PIP LANCETS - the least painful lancets I've ever used - get them online - the BLUE kind which is a normal/neutral depth. So easy to use, no need to touch any lancet, no need to load it into a pen - just simple.
(3) Get the book, MASTERING DIABETES and go directly to the chapter on Insulin Resistance before you read anything else. If your blood sugar is way too high (and not just on the cusp), I recommend you get a Mastering Diabetes personal coach for a month or two to get you on track. This is not a time to mess around with your blood sugar - do it right.
(4) Read about RESISTANT STARCH from numerous sources - because numerous sources have numerous facts and I haven't found one site that has them all.
NOT ALL CARBS ARE BAD!! WHOLE CARBS ARE WHAT YOU NEED!
I was told: "You will not change your blood sugar until you add whole grains and beans to your diet and eat them as resistant starch."
Here's what that means: When you cook rice or beans, you don't eat them fresh out of the pot while they are hot/warm. Let them cool on the counter and then refrigerate. Come back the next day and you can re-warm them and eat them then but please don't re-cook them.
For example, one day a week, I cook my rice, beans and lentils - my choices for that week. I refrigerate them. If a dinner for one night is soup, I will ladle the soup into my bowl and then add the cold rice to it. The soup will warm it up. I never put the rice directly in the soup pot and let it cook again.
As you will see from your reading about resistant starch, if you eat hot grains and beans, they will be digested in the small intestine and become sugar very fast. But if you let it all cool down and then reheat them, a good portion of it becomes non-digestable, goes directly to your large intestine and happily feeds your gut garden.
The wonderful part of this is that the whole food, plant based world has expanded so much and there are so many videos to watch online and learn different combinations, different cooking methods, different ingredients. Not only will you bring yourself to good health, you will bring a whole different energy into your life. You will start recognizing the goodness that all these foods bring to you. It brings about a calmness. And the food is CHEAP! and it's so easy to create fast meals. Here's an example:
LAST NIGHTS MEAL: I prepared a sheet pan with some parchment paper. I sliced good size chunks of sweet potato, zucchini, and then two whole portabella mushrooms. Sprinkled a tiny bit of sea salt and some chopped garlic. I sprinkled some cinnamon on the sweet potato. This prep literally took two minutes. That's it! I roasted it all in the oven 20 minutes @ 400 and then 20 minutes at 250. If you are only cooking for you, using your air fryer will cut down the time drastically. Next I took a glass baking dish and scooped out a cup of cold brown rice, scooped out 1/2 cup of cooked cold black beans, poured a swig of already-made veg broth that I keep in my fridge at all times. The dish went into the oven for the last 15 minutes of roasting time. I took the glass dish out and mixed it up and then topped it with all the veg I roasted. I sprinkled some spicy roasted pumpkin seeds on top and Voila!!
It's that pre-cooking the starches in advance, the thing that increases resistant starch, that makes your meal creating the easiest its probably ever been.
READ ABOUT BETA GLUCANS (hint: more fertilizer for your gut garden) -- have some of this daily: the foods highest in beta glucans is barley, oats and mushrooms. Now we're talking!
HOW TO MAKE YOUR BEANS LESS GASSY? it's easy! soak your beans overnight in fresh cool water. The next day drain and rinse very well. Pressure cook them in an Instant Pot with a pinch of baking soda added and a 2" piece of dried kombu (dried kelp). Voila!! PS - if you use the baking soda, your beans will need less time to cook. Search for the exact timing changes online.
MY DAILY RESISTANT STARCH / SMOOTH MOVING SHAKE: frozen banana and / or frozen berries, 1-2 heaping tbl. of organic green banana flour (resistant starch of the best kind!), 1 heaping tbl. of organic ground flax meal (I grind mine fresh in my coffee grinder), 16 oz of plant based milk or water. Handful of ice cubes. A little vanilla. A little cinnamon. And as an addition and to make it into a meal, some plain greek yogurt or some low fat cottage cheese. Blendy Blendy Blendy. If you need to sweeten it, use a pitted date or two but usually my frozen banana is sweet enough that I don't need any dates.
Here's my recipe for my fat free and flour free CRAZY MUSHROOM GRAVY:
1 chopped onion, 2 garlic cloves smashed and chopped, 4-6 cups of sliced mushrooms (I use Bellas or Portobellas), 1 box of organic (fat free) veg broth, a couple of pinches of good sea salt, some fresh or dried sage. Drop all the veg into a pan and saute on a medium heat (add a little water if it sticks). Sprinkle with the sea salt and sage. Pour in the broth, bring to a boil, then simmer for 30 minutes. Use a stick blender or a regular blender to blend it all down into a nice gravy. If the gravy is not thick enough to your liking, put it back in the pan and cook it a little more until it condenses. That's it. This is such a rich gravy, it's incredible. I pour it on my rice, on a baked potato. It's delicious.
Here are some links to peruse for great recipes. You will be so surprised at the creativity!!
https://www.masteringdiabetes.org/recipe/
https://plantbasedcookingshow.com/
this woman has GREAT videos on YouTube!
https://www.youtube.com/c/WellYourWorld
Dillon & Reebs are the greatest at whole food plant based SOS (salt, oil, and sugar free)
https://www.christinacooks.com/recipes
any site that includes whole food, plant based, low fat, oil free is what you are looking for
also look for reverse heart disease recipe sites
I KNOW YOU CAN BRING YOUR BLOOD SUGAR DOWN!
IF I CAN DO IT, I KNOW FOR CERTAIN THAT YOU CAN, TOO!
AND I WILL SAY IT AGAIN.... IF YOU CAN'T DO IT FOR YOURSELF DO IT FOR YOUR BABY.
And if you are reading this and you are not pregnant, if you can't do it for yourself, do it for your SIGHT, do it to keep your LEGS and FEET, do it so you can HEAL, do it for a good and healthy FUTURE!
