I finally got pregnant on raw!

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Posted by: musicbebe ()

Date: April 12, 2008 05:43PM

Hi all, I wanted to write a little something on how I believe raw foods helped my husband and I to conceive.

First some background. I started raw foods in the fall of last year and lost about 10 pounds, being 30 pounds overweight to start with. My husband is constantly moving around and even with his poor diet before we married, is very lean. He watched with amusement as through the first few years of our marriage I tried every diet imaginable with no success. Then I attended a raw food lecture by Victoria Boutenko and learned all about green smoothies. I started making them right away and soon had my husband drinking them in the morning. At that point in our lives, we were eating all organically, but still eating meat and dairy. After the lecture I ate mostly to all raw with no meat or dairy and lost that weight and was feeling goooood. My husband still wanted his cooked meals though and his meat and cheese. At first I tried to convince him how eating meat was bad, both for animals and us. But since the only meat he wanted to eat was free range, he didn't feel so bad about it and his taste buds didn't either. I read in one of Victoria's books how the best approach to help change someone's diet was to lead by example and continue to prepare foods that they liked and let them not feel any pressure from you to change. Boy did that approach work for my husband! It took awhile, but after he saw my weight loss success, he wanted me to succeed. Once I went to a different raw food lecture and the person said some things that my husband thought were foolish and my husband then said discouraging things to me about the diet. That really hurt my drive to continue..."Maybe this is just another un-sound diet after all," I thought. So I stopped for awhile. Soon, my emotions were unbalanced again and my husband noticed. "Why don't you try it again," he said. "You did so well on it" winking smiley

So I started and he became supportive and was careful not to be unneccessarily critical. I bought the book "The China Study" which EVERYONE SHOULD READ, no matter how long you've been a vegan, and especially if you are not 100 percent convinced that diary and meat are totally unhealthy. The book is thouroughly documented and the quality and diversity of the research used is staggering (in a good way). But I digress. I read chapters of the book aloud to him and after that, he requested cooked vegan meals. He said he didn't want to go out to eat anymore at work and wanted me to pack him salads for lunch! Yippee! He was still having his green smoothies in the morning, had a raw salad for lunch, raw snacks (like dried bananas) throughout the day and a cooked vegan meal for dinner. Previously, he'd been drinking the smoothies everyday, but eating SAD (albeit organically) the rest of the day. So this was a huge improvement!! This was all about a month and a half ago. Hoewever healthier the cooked vegan meals were for him, they still weren't doing me as much good as the raw diet. My husband again noticed and started encouraging me to try raw meals on him. So for the last two weeks, I've been eating all raw and yestrday I found out I was two weeks pregnant! My husband and I are convinced that it was the dietary change that helped us conceive (God gets the first credit, though I believe he still allows the rule of "you reap what you sow" and since we were sowing unhealthy foods into our bodies, they weren't working the way he designed them too).

I am 26 now and have a son from when I was a teenager (in my very rebellious years). We can't rule out that I didn't develop some problems with fertility since then, but it seemed less likely to be me who had the problem. We never went through fertility testing, though a diagnosis of having fertility problems is given after not being able to conceive in a years time. For us, we tried for a year and a half. 6 months before THAT we'd used physical barrier protection and briefly before THAT I'd been on birth control for a month or so (I hated how I felt on that!!!). Sometimes if a woman has been on birth control for a long while, she has difficulty conceiving for awhile. But I had been off it for 6 months before we ever started trying and had only used it very briefly. So I don't think that was a factor at all. Rather, we believe my husband may have had low sperm count or something like that, resulting from poorer diet. We may never know exaclty what it was, but all I can say is, as soon as we BOTH implented much more raw food in our diet (and limited to no meat and dairy) I got pregnant.

I am DEFINITELY going to have a raw pregnancy. I had a cesarean with my first son, so I want my body to be in the BEST POSSIBLE SHAPE for a natural birth, if at all possible (I believe it will be). For those of you out there that are wondering or worrying if you can have a healthy pregnancy on raw I'd really recommend "Raw pregnancy, Ecstatic birth" by Jinjee and Storm Talifero. She recounts the difference a raw diet vs. a cooked diet makes in all of her pregnacy (information for this ebook can be found at www.thegardendiet.com). If I suddenly got pregnant eating this way, it MUST be good for me and my baby!

I hope this information helps some of you out there who have problems with fertility or questions about raw pregnancy. Has anyone else had success getting pregnant on raw foods, when before they had trouble?

Musicbebe

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/12/2008 05:45PM by musicbebe.

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