I’ve just decided to give up booze. I’m trying to get pregnant, and apparently drinking ANY alcohol makes a surprising difference to your fertility (and my clock is tick-tocking away, so I think I’ve gotta do whatever I can).
I think artificial sweetners are not a great idea, at least not after I actually get pregnant (knock wood).
Pregnant women I know often have nice “mocktails” as a treat when out for dinner… am I just screwed? Am I going to be stuck pretending that seltzer and lime is a treat? Ideas?
There is sadly little available in bars and clubs for the “driver” of a group. When I go out, I stick to diet drinks (or lite, depending on where you are - I caused a lot of confusion in Latvia asking for diet coke!) or fruit juices - 1/3 juice topped up with water or diet lemonade, vegetable juices with a good kick of pepper sauce and a dash of worcestershire sauce.
If lite is not available, ask for a dash of the real thing and have it topped up with lite lemonade or something.
It’s going to be really hard, because either the drink has alcohol, or it has sugar in it. It’s either or. Most mocktails are pretty sugary. Sure you can substitute the soda for diet soda but it’s gonna be hard to get low-carb versions of popular mocktail ingredients like grenadine syrup, fruit and fruit juices. Yeah they do exist at specialist retailers but your average cocktail bar is not going to stock them. And they’d be made with artificial sweeteners anyway…
I honestly do not think that small amounts of alcohol harm you in any way. For the record, my definition of small is one unit of alcohol every two to three weeks. That was what I was on before I got pregnant.
For what it’s worth, I think all the conditions have to be right before baby decides to make an appearance. We’d been trying for almost four years and were on the verge of giving up. But looking back I realize that there were several important impediments to the arrival of a baby, each of which we gradually solved over the years. At first we were living in a house that was too small and baby would have had to sleep in a chest of drawers. We moved to a bigger place. Then there was my diabetes - dx June 2010 with A1C of 20%, so I’d been walking around with crazy blood sugars for some time. Definitely not a good time for baby. I worked like mad to normalize my blood sugars and by Sept 2010 they were OK. But there was one last remaining impediment - the Novorapid (Novolog) I was on took 2 hours to work for me. But in pregnancy, you have a one hour post-meal target, which means that I was never going to get sufficiently good control on Novorapid and would never have hit any of the pregnancy targets. On April 11th I switched to Apidra which takes 10 minutes to start working. One week later, baby was conceived. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
Crystal light has drink mixes, Margarita, Mojito, and Appletini. I have also found the crystal light lime (but not in the US) which makes a quite reasonable tasting Margarita. Just skip the alcohol.
If I don’t want alcohol, I just ask for water with lime or lemon. The garnish makes it look like a drink and nobody is the wiser. Besides, water is usually free (and I am cheap).
Bravo bsc, but you can only get away with the water in some countries.In the UK and many European countries, if you ask for water, most of the time the reply will be ‘still or sparkling?’ You have to be really thick-skinned and specify, ‘no, tap’.
OK, the first bar night has come and gone, and I made friends with seltzer and lime. Not bad, really, especially if I save it to ONLY drink at bars – maybe I’ll start associating it with being out, and it will feel like treat after all.
