*These are my initial observations on morning sickness. I’d love to add to it with further insight!
I’m not going to say that I understand the pains of pregnancy, primarily because I’d be assassinated by a cohort of angry women before sundown. However, I’ve had the wonderful opportunity of having massive bloating, organ failure, and complete balance disruption which, together with some targeted research, has led me to a few observations I hope will be helpful.
In a certain sense, it was more helpful for me as a male to have said experiences, because I couldn’t attribute these difficulties to the unknown – the “X” factor – just passing things off as “well, I’m pregnant, and so there’s nothing I do about this.” From a distance, I can imagine that as a pregnant woman undergoing morning sickness, it would be very difficult to buckle down and do research and start diagnosing to problem solve – which is why I think this article will hopefully be helpful.
The first step is to identify the cause of morning sickness: why some women get it, and others don’t, and what makes it happen. Thus far, my observation has been that there are several factors, which can be compensated for – not completely, but to some extent.
1. Keto flu: eat more (real) salt
The first is ketosis. If you’re familiar with keto diet, you’ll be familiar with the keto flu. In short, when your body goes into ketosis, If you aren’t eating enough electrolytes (and have insufficient storage), for about 2 weeks or so you’ll undergo feelings of nausea and flu-like symptoms. If you read studies of women who have Hyperemesis gravidarum (in other words, morning sickness so bad that the woman has to go to the ER), you may notice a trend: most of the women admitted to the ER are massively in ketosis. If you read the blogs on the forums, one bit of “wisdom” advice that consistently pops up is to try eating saltine crackers if you’re morning sick. To me, this both (a) makes sense – the salt will help alleviate the keto flu, and the carbs from the crackers will kick you out of ketosis, but (b) eating Saltine crackers is actually a very undesirable solution, because it’s highly likely that a pregnant mom should be in ketosis – there’s a reason that Mom is being driven into ketosis so aggressively.
In other words, the reason you may feel icky because you may be launching into aggressive ketosis: If you’re feeling morning sick, the very first thing you should try is to eat more salt. Lots of salt, more than you think. And not Morton processed salt – Celtic salt or Redmond Real salt, for some kind of salt that hasn’t been completely stripped of all the other elements (or electrolyte mix).
If you notice that you have morning sickness for a week or two and then it starts to gets better, it’s a very high likelihood that this is in part due to aggressive ketosis – keto flu.
The other indicator here is that your morning sickness is actually happening in the morning (e.g. as opposed to some women who report feeling icky, say, in the afternoon or whatever). Ketones are highest in the morning – if you’re experiencing ickiness in the literal morning, this is another indicator it could be linked to keto flu (not to be too simplistic – cortisol is also highest in the morning! Spikes to wake you up, yay!).
2. The Squeeze: help!
But of course keto flu isn’t the only thing that causes morning sickness. That would be too easy.
This is where my own personal experience of organ failure and GI tract paralyzation comes into play. One of the things I realized is that your GI attract is in fact a crazy system – from start to finish, it’s quite a bizarre proposition. You take a piece of material from the outside world that is completely unpredictable and bacteria-ridden, shove it into your face, douse it with acid, pull it apart with your own native bacteria, ferment or assimilate it, and kick the remainder out. Amazing. It’s something we take for granted, but we should. I certainly did.
At various points, I had all sorts of organ failure or bizarre issues, including stomach paralyzation and pancreas insufficiency. I realized that even though the process of getting food from start to finish is quite bizarre, your body is designed for that process. If at any point that process is hampered, you’ll feel incredibly icky.
Stomach acid too low? Bleah.l. Food not moving quickly enough? Bleah. Pancreas not sending enough enzymes to process the food? Bleah. And so on. If at any point, something is holding up the show, you’ll feel icky. Very icky.
In my case, it wasn’t expanding tissue that was squeezing my innards. But the end result was the same: when the time came and my GI tract needed stomach acid, pancreatic enzymes, bicarbonate, etc, things were blocked up, paralyzed, or inert for whatever reason. I couldn’t summon up they required payload: headaches, pukiness, etc. Chaos.
All that is to say, think about it: your core, which is literally at the crossroads of your entire system, is being squeezed by rapidly expanding growth. Great, but fluids of all kinds are going to have problems flowing – whether that’s blood, enzymes, stomach acid, bicarbonate, etc. things are just going to be scrunched and blocked up, a little more than usual. And unless you’re in tip top shape and your body’s flow is peak, you’re going to feel icky when you’re not getting enough whatever-it-is that you need to digest the food you just ate.
So what can you do? Well, you could do two things: you can help the flow, and you can also supplement to compensate for lack of flow.
The first is easy: it’s walking. Before you eat, take a walk, and get things nice and loose, limber, and flowing. Physically, this will just help veins, arteries, ducts, etc, settle and untangle to where they need to be, so that they can flow more effect as needed.
The second is a little more in the vein of throwing darts at the wall, insofar as not entirely sure what’s holding up the show, what’s insufficient. In order of likelihood, here’s what I would guess:
Pregnant women very often tend to have low stomach acid: High stomach acid is a sign of vitality and optimal health. If you’re stressed, overloaded (e.g. building a new body), etc, it’s not surprising that you might have low stomach acid. Ergo, the first thing you might want to try is to take a shot of ACV before eating, or bitters (wormwood, gentian, dandelion, etc). This well help jumpstart your acid production.
*a sure sign of low stomach acid is if you have trouble with any kind of meat – if you have trouble with certain kinds of meats, it’s very very likely that you have low stomach acid. Especially if the meat type isn’t particularly palatable to you, your favorite – food that you enjoy tends to stimulate more stomach acid.
If you try this, and nothing happens, it may not be stomach acid. It may be bile, or pancreatic enzymes. These enzymes are created by the liver and pancreas respectively. You can easily supplement them with capsule supplements (search “bile” or “porcine pancreatic enzymes”). Trust me when I say that if you are low on these things, or these things are not flowing as they should, you will feel icky.
3. Hormones: …
The last category is somewhat of a black box – the unknown factor. It may just be that your hormones are swinging so wildly that you feel icky.
Counter this, I would recommend what I would recommend for every single pregnant woman on the face of the Earth ever: eat liver, and LOTS of protein (and of course, take some ACV with those if they don’t sit well). I can’t stress enough just how important liver is: liver is the magic food. Liver heals, liver builds, liver is magic. If you can’t find it in yourself to deliver, then I would just say eat anything animal – anything that comes from the body of an animal, and eat lots.
Especially animal fats – lard, butter, tallow, etc. (The exception is dairy that’s been sterilized [pasteurized] – depending on your jeans and gut bacteria, that might harm more than it helps). Fat has been demonized – but there’s nothing more that your baby needs than fat. 80% of the brain is cholesterol – yes, the same cholesterol that you hear demonized. Baby needs fat, LOTS; animal fats are king, plant fats (with the exception of I took olive oil, coconut oil, and avocado oil) are detrimental. There’s a reason breast milk is primarily fat.
But baby will also need protein – again, animal protein. Plant proteins are incredibly difficult to digest, inefficiently absorbed, and what’s absorbed, inefficiently utilized – a good rule of thumb is that you’ll only be able to ultimately use 1% of nutrients from plants, whereas you’ll use about 99% of nutrients from meat. In other words, if you eat 10 g protein for meat, you’ll get 10 g – If you eat 10 g of protein from plants, you’ll ultimately be able to use 1% of 10 g; 0.01 g. (This is a whole other article, so I won’t get into it deeper here; suffive to say that plants nowadays are a negligible source of nutrients, despite what you read – read the research, and you’ll see that the above holds true when you account for absorption, conversion, and utilization – you absorb 10-20% of plants, and are only able to use 10-20% of the absorbed material, because it’s plant not animal form – TMI, but this is why most animals will eat human poop, because 90% of plant-based nutrients are leftover. Yuck.).
Concluding, I would say, that if you come across anything that seems to help you, or NOT help, I would love to know – I would love to crack the code of morning sickness.
