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If you couldn’t guess from the title of this post, I am excited to announce that we are expecting our fourth little bundle of joy this fall! After eating a largely animal-based diet for the last year and a half, it was a no-brainer that I would continue this lifestyle with my fourth pregnancy. In this post I am diving into how I am maintaining my animal-based way of eating, an overview of my first trimester and my full list of mostly real-food based supplements. If you are pregnant or looking to become pregnant while on an animal-based diet, I hope this post and my future pregnancy posts are helpful.

Animal-Based Eating & Pregnancy

In short, an animal-based lifestyle is one that focuses on eating and moving like our ancestors once did. That means eating nutrient dense foods, moving daily, and getting fresh air and sunlight everyday. As the sole cook in the family, I prioritize real, nutrient dense foods for my family that help them to thrive and feel their best. One of the things I love most about animal-based eating is how flexible it is. While there are what some would consider “rules” to this lifestyle, they aren’t strict; if anything, they are more like a list of parameters. Below is the animal-based food pyramid, courtesy of Heart & Soil (one of my absolute favorite companies).

As you can see, the foundation of an animal-based diet is just that – animal-based food – high quality, regeneratively raised and grass-fed & finished ruminant meats, organs, and pasture-raised organic eggs. The next level of the pyramid is animal based fat like tallow, ghee, and grass-fed butter, along with grass-fed and organic dairy products like cheese, yogurt, and raw milk. At the top, you will find low toxicity plant foods and fruits like organic berries, fruit, avocado, squash, and raw unpasteurized honey or maple syrup, just to name a few.

Good quality organic rice, potatoes, and even freshly made sourdough can all be a part of an animal-based lifestyle, if your body tolerates those foods well. The animal-based lifestyle is all about consuming nutrient dense foods that help your body thrive. If you don’t feel good after potatoes, then don’t eat them. But if you feel great with your homemade sourdough bread, then by all means, continue to enjoy it!

If you are new to the animal-based diet or want to learn more, check out my post, Animal-Based Eating As a Family of 5, for a more in-depth review of what my family eats in a day and some of my kids’ favorite animal based foods.

First Trimester Overview & My Go-To Foods

Despite having three young kids to chase around while also being pregnant, this pregnancy has been my best one yet! I have been lucky enough to have pretty smooth pregnancies with minimal morning sickness or symptoms, even in my first trimester. This pregnancy – by the grace of God – has been even better and I wholeheartedly believe it’s because of the supplements I am taking and the foods I am eating.

My Go-To Foods

For my family, we still consume organic white potatoes, organic sweet potatoes, and fresh sourdough bread – which I have recently switched to freshly milling my own flour for, and it has been amazing, so definitely stay tuned for my review of that soon! Below are a list of staples in my diet both before I was pregnant and now.

• Grass-fed organic A^₂ Raw Milk from CT Ranch ~ I typically have between 16 and 32 ounces of raw milk a day.
  • If you live in the DFW area and are looking for a good local farmer that offers incredible grass-fed & finished beef that is free from harmful antibiotics or vaccines, and farm fresh eggs free from soy and corn, and amazing raw milk, you cannot beat this farm!
• Grass-Fed & Finished Beef from CT Ranch ~ I typically have anywhere between 0.5 lb to 1.25 lbs of meat in a day depending on what cuts we have.
• Pasture Raised, corn & soy free farm fresh eggs and a lot of them! Also from CT Ranch! ~ I typically eat between 4 and 6 eggs a day. Eggs are powerhouses whether you are pregnant or not!
• Organic Avocados ~ I usually eat an entire avocado each day.
• Organic Cold Pressed Unrefined Coconut Oil ~ I typically use coconut oil to cook my eggs.
• Grass-Fed A² Raw Butter from CT Ranch or Organic Grass-fed Butter from Rumiano, which I get from my local Sprouts
• Organic Fresh Fruit ~ I typically enjoy fresh fruit with breakfast or as a snack with my favorite Norr Organics Skyr.
• Electrolyte water ~ I either salt my water with a good quality sea salt, or I have recently been enjoying Ath Sport’s Lytes. The strawberry kiwi flavor is my current favorite!

Staying Active & Enjoying the Sunshine

For each of my pregnancies, I have always done my best to stay as active as possible. During all three of my past pregnancies I have made it a focus to walk daily, aiming for 10,000 steps a day and workout from home 3-4 times a week. With three toddlers currently, it is pretty easy to hit 10,000 steps a day, especially with our daily walk of 3-5 miles. For my strength training workouts, I am currently using Studio Bloom’s App and following Mom Strong 1.0. These are 45-minute lower, upper, and full body workouts that also incorporate a focus on your deep breathing, pelvic floor strength, and mobility all in one program. StudioBloom’s Rehab Code is also the program that I use during my postpartum recoveries and it is excellent!

To track my steps I don’t wear an Apple Watch – I used to, but I stopped wearing it after I had my daughter. Now I just use a regular old pedometer to get a rough estimate of my daily steps. No WiFi and no bluetooth or radiation pulsing into my arm, which is just how I want it. And finally, despite the intense summer heat of Texas, I try to get outside with the kids daily whether just for our morning walk or even for some playtime in the backyard. I love using the DMinder App to get a rough estimate of the amount of Vitamin D my body produces each day when we are out.

My Whole-Food Based Supplements

In my past three pregnancies, I opted for some of the best recommended prenatal supplements on the market. And while I did just fine on those, and everything turned out great, my supplement routine for this pregnancy has revealed a huge difference. In the past, I have used Fullwell Fertility’s Prenatal, Needed Prenatal, or Seeking Health Optimal Prenatal. All three of these use methylfolate instead of folic acid, and they each contain 4,000 IUs of Vitamin D, two things that registered dietitian Lily Nichols recommends in her book, Real Food for Pregnancy.

Side note – I love Lily Nichols and all of her content. Her books Real Food for Pregnancy and Real Food for Fertility are fantastic resources, especially if you are wanting to become pregnant but feel like your diet could use a bit of work. And if you are struggling with gestational diabetes, she is an expert!

Why I Switched My Prenatals?

Why fix what isn’t broken, right? To be honest, I definitely thought that a few times. All three of my kids are healthy and my pregnancies were smooth and uncomplicated; I even experienced a lot less morning sickness than many stories I have heard. But, just because you are doing well, doesn’t meant you are thriving, and wouldn’t it be great to be thriving in pregnancy instead of just surviving? I don’t think God designed pregnancy or even birth to be as miserable, difficult, and painful as we have been taught – but that is for another day.

Shortly after having my third baby, I came across Heart & Soil Supplements as a natural fertility supplement. You can read more on Heart & Soil in my post, here. In January 2024, I started using their supplements and I felt amazing. Even better, I could take them on an empty stomach without feeling nauseous! When I became pregnant with baby number 4, I knew I wanted to give Heart & Soil’s prenatal stack a try. That said, this decision was not without some doubts. I did a lot of research and looked for other people who had used this prenatal stack for their pregnancy, but there really wasn’t much information out there. Despite that, I knew that I felt better eating an animal-based diet, I knew that the foods I ate were very nutrient-rich, and I knew that our ancestors never had curated prenatal supplements, so surely there was something to that.

Additionally, I had seen a lot of information about how many supplements do not contain the proper forms of these synthetic vitamins, making it much harder for your body to utilize them, if it can at all. Shouldn’t we get our nutrients from real foods? Especially when pregnant, we should want to make it as easy as possible for our bodies to be able to utilize the vitamins and minerals we are giving them!

So I did a lot of research and found some recommendations from some other moms like me, and put together my own regimen of supplements that are almost all real-food based.

My Current Supplements:

• Heart & Soil Prenatal Stack: Pure American Liver, Mood Memory & Brain, Life Blood & Fire Starter. Dosage: 3 capsules of each in the morning and 3 capsules in the evening.
  • The link above will give you 20% off your first order.
• Green Pastures Fermented Cod Liver Oil . Dosage: 2 tsps (Cod Liver Oil is best consumed in addition to fat because Vitamin A is a fat soluble vitamin, so definitely check out Green Pastures’ Butter Oil Capsules as well.)
• Green Pastures Butter Oil Capsules: 2 capsules daily taken with the Fermented Cod Liver Oil.
• Seeking Health Optimal Magnesium. Dosage: 3 capsules, 1 in the morning and two at night
  • Use the link above for $10 off your first purchase
• Seeking Health Vitamin D₃+K₂ with 5,000 IUs of Vitamin D. Dosage: 1 a day
  • Use the link above for $10 off your first purchase
• Seeking Health L-Methylfolate. Dosage: 1 a day
  • Use the link above for $10 off your first purchase
• Ancestral Supplements Wild Caught Fish Eggs. Dosage: 6 capsules, 3 in the morning and 3 in the evening.
  • Use the link above for $15 off your first purchase of $50 or more.
• OysterMax by Marine HealthFoods: 4 Capsules, 2 capsules in the morning and 2 in the evening.
• This Is Needed Pre/Probiotic: 2 capsules taken daily on an empty stomach

One thing that I will mention about the Fermented Cod Liver Oil is that it is high in Vitamin A and a lot of your standard practitioners will tell you that there is a risk of Vitamin A toxicity. However, the study that this claim is based on never differentiated between Synthetic vitamin A and real Vitamin A, which does in fact matter. For more information on Vitamin A in pregnancy and the benefits of Cod Liver Oil, check out the Weston A. Price Foundation here, or these podcast episodes here and here.

I do plan on cutting back or removing Fermented Cod Liver from my regimen once I hit 36 weeks. Even your standard fish oil supplement can lead to thinning of the blood and that is why many OB/GYNs and midwives recommend discontinuing the consumption of fish oil past 36 weeks in preparation for birth.

Additional Supplements

In all of my pregnancies I have had a low blood platelet count – even when I am not pregnant my blood platelet count comes back on the lower end of normal, so I think I just have a lower count in general. I have not started taking all of these supplements for this pregnancy yet, but these are supplements I have taken in the past to support low platelet levels:

• Standard Process Sesame Seed Oil: Initially I start with 1 capsule three times a day, but towards the end of my pregnancies, especially around the 28 week mark when your platelets naturally drop, I take 3 capsules, 3 times a day.
• Herbal Goodness Papaya Leaf Extract: Take according to package directions
• Heart & Soil Life Blood: This one I have been taking as part of my prenatal regimen since becoming pregnant.

I have not started taking all of these supplements for this pregnancy yet, because for the first time, I have been drinking between 16 – 32 ounces of raw milk per day, and my platelets were over 170 with my first blood draw. In comparison, even post pregnancy, my platelets have never been above 154. I think this could be related to my consumption of raw milk and I am interested to see what my platelets will be at my next blood draw. For more information on the benefits of raw milk, check out my post here, and for the history of raw milk and why it is perfectly safe for you, see here.

Varicose Veins

Starting with my second pregnancy, I started getting pretty bad varicose veins. One of the most commonly recommended supplement I have seen and that was recommended to me is Vari-Gone by Nature’s Sunshine. For me, this one never did much – at least not that I noticed. When I was pregnant with my third, my new midwife recommended a three supplement regimen for varicose veins and it worked like magic! The three supplements include:

• Standard Process Cyruta Plus, 1 tablet 3 times a day
• Standard Process Livaplex, 1 capsule 3 times a day
• Standard Process Collinsonia Root, 1 capsule 3 times a day

The three of these together can be pricey on top of your prenatal regimen, but I cannot recommend them enough. They not only helped to ease any discomfort from my varicose veins, but they also helped them to fade. And honestly, if I had kept taking them following pregnancy, I wouldn’t be surprised if they totally disappeared altogether.

Stay Tuned

If you are pregnant or looking to become pregnant and don’t think that the standard recommendations for pregnant women seem like they are actually beneficial for you or your baby, then I hope you found this post helpful! Please note that I’m just a mom like you, and am not giving medical advice. I just wanted to share what is working for me and to give food for thought on natural alternatives to popular prenatal options out there. Always consult your midwife or medical practitioner before starting a new supplement or changing supplements while pregnant. If you have any additional questions, please feel free to drop me a message here or on Instagram! Stay tuned for more as I recap each trimester and my future birth story if you are looking for more!