Eat a healthy well-balanced diet rich in fruits, vegetables and complex carbohydrates.
If you start the pregnancy at a normal body weight, you need only ~300 extra calories/day.
Eat regular meals each day. Try 5-6 smaller meals throughout the day as your growing baby needs a continuous infusion of calories.
Eat a variety of feeds to help get all appropriate vitamins and minerals.
Eat plenty of calcium-rich foods such as dairy products, leafy green vegetables, oranges, nuts and legumes.
Drink plenty of fluids. Your body needs at least 8-10 glasses of water each day. Low fat milk and low-sodium vegetable juice are good sources of fluids as well.
Take a prenatal vitamin every day. Make sure you are getting at least 800-1,000 micrograms of folic acid in your vitamins.
Do not eat raw (including sushi), undercooked or unpasteurized foods. There have been concerns about deli lunch meats and canned tuna fish so avoid or limit these.
Avoid swordfish, shark, king mackerel and tilefish as these can have very high
levels of mercury. Smoked or cured fish is not cooked and should not be eaten.
Limit recreationally caught fish to 6 ounes per week. Check with the environmental protection agency (EPA) at http://epa.gov/ost/fish and click on “National Listing of Advisories” to determine if the body of water the fish was caught in is safe.