Following the basic guidelines is a great way to go about weaning yourself from unhealthy foods and getting your dietary habits back on track for a lifetime of healthy eating. It essentially puts you through a 10 day “Boot Camp” that takes away your sugars, fats and high calorie foods while still ensuring that you eat enough of the nutrients you need to be both healthy and, believe it or not, full. Although you’ll be cutting your portion sizes you’ll be eating foods that fill you up faster and keep you filled up longer, so it’s one diet you actually won’t have to suffer on!

The first 10 days of the diet requires you to abstain from eating or drinking anything that doesn’t fall into one of the following categories:

• Water
• Unsweetened tea with lemon (hot or cold)
• Black coffee
• Fresh green vegetables, such as celery, spinach (which is exceptionally good raw) or broccoli, which you can eat as much of as you want
• Whole grain breads (3 servings/day)
• Low fat protein sources (lean meats, legumes, eggs) (3 servings/day)
• Dairy (in small portions) 1 serving/day

At the end of the ten days you’ll be able to see a noticeable difference in your weight and you’ll find that the cravings you had for soda, potato chips and sweet stuff has begun to wane. After that you’ll be permitted to slip different types of vegetables into your diet, such as carrots and peas, as well as an increased number of dairy servings and two to three servings a day of healthy fruits.

This diet is simply a quick way to jump start your weight loss and gets you started on a healthy course of eating. It isn’t by any means the only way to go, so if you don’t want to spend the money on the program, don’t worry about it! Following the guidelines mentioned above for after the first ten days, attempting to cut sugary sweets and drinks out of your diet and not allowing yourself to overeat (eating even though you aren’t really hungry because everyone else is or because you do not want to allow it to go to waste) will go a long way toward helping you lose that pregnancy belly.

If you are nursing you are going to want to be a little more careful with what you eat. Some foods can enter your breast milk and affect your baby, so you are going to want to choose wisely. Listed below are some common foods that cause problems in breast fed babies, so it would be wise to steer clear of them for a while longer.

• Caffeine. You wouldn’t let your baby drink coffee from a bottle, which is exactly what it’s going to do when you drink a cup and then breastfeed. While the occasional cup of Joe is unlikely to hurt anything, regularly giving your baby caffeine could result in a budding young insomniac-the last thing you need when they’re not sleeping through the night anyway.
• Spicy foods often bleed through into your breast milk and cause gassiness and fussiness in your baby, particularly if you did not eat them regularly during pregnancy.
• Alcohol. An occasional drink of alcohol is okay (after all, you managed to wait for nine months) but more than one drink can bleed through into breast milk. If you have had more than one drink, or plan to have more than one drink, wait two hours after you finish your last before nursing again. Moderate to heavy drinking that would result in alcohol remaining in your blood stream for several hours is strongly discouraged when you’re nursing.
• Dairy products. This is going to be a trial and error determination, as you certainly need to still get your RDA of calcium while you’re nursing. If your baby appears to be fussy or gassy after nursing when you have been consuming high quantities of dairy products, or if they display allergy or intolerance symptoms such as hives, diarrhea, vomiting or eczema, try cutting back to see what happens.

Aside from alcohol and caffeine your diet isn’t going to be all that limited while you’re nursing. If you notice that your baby is particularly unhappy after a feeding or more colicky than normal at the end of the night take the time to go back through and think about what you ate that day. Was it anything you ate that they may have reacted to before?

Finding out whether a breastfed baby has a food allergy or intolerance is much more difficult than with a bottle-fed baby, and it is going to require a great deal of sleuthing on your part. For example, say that you had the Kung Pao chicken for dinner. It’s now two in the morning and your little angel is still screaming. You remember that this happened the last time that someone brought Chinese home as well. Eliminating Chinese food from your diet may alleviate the symptoms, or you may have to try something else. With a little trial and error you should be able to get a fairly accurate determination of the problem long before it becomes a major issue.