Once you become pregnant, you suddenly become the recipient of so much advice. Of course, it’s well intended, and (for me) well received. But sometimes the advice you get sucks. Often times, the sucky advice I received was from various blogs and people on the internet, and usually the words that irritated me the most were about eating. So, let’s talk about that.

I was one of the fortunate women that had “morning” sickness, which was really all-dang-day sickness. Shortly after the nausea turned to sickness, I was put on Diclegis, which is essentially a mix of an antihistamine and Vitamin B6. Unfortunately, this only helped sometimes, and at around 6-8 weeks I was battling a cold with congestion and this just made the nausea/vomiting even worse. For those 2 weeks I had a hard time keeping most meals down, which absolutely sucked. When I did eat, it certainly wasn’t healthy. So, imagine how great I felt about myself when I read blogs, emails, tweets, Instagram posts, etc all about eating for baby and how important nutrition was during pregnancy. I felt like a failure. I couldn’t keep much down and what I was keeping down was macaroni and cheese, frozen chicken nuggets, fast food, etc. You know, the good stuff. Luckily, this phase passed, and here I am about a month later and I’m feeling infinitely better than I was. Thank you, God.

What led to this blog post was my desire to be the voice of reality and compassion to any woman going through their first trimester (or second or third) and feeling guilty because they aren’t able to meet some standard that other women are setting for them. If you can only eat Kraft mac and cheese, then so be it. Do what you gotta do. Eat what you gotta eat. Beating yourself up over some false expectation that another woman set is just going to make this miraculous time in your life less special. For most people, you’ll reach the second trimester and you can start making those healthier choices. Notice that I said healthier. I did eat banana pudding for breakfast and I’ve accepted it. Let’s not get crazy and say that every single bite you eat while being pregnant has to be a vegetable.

Nutrition is vital during pregnancy, of course, but I feel that your mental state is even more important than what you eat. Speak kind words to yourself, you’re growing a human being inside you, and that’s pretty dang awesome.