WHAT TO DO (AND NOT DO)

DURING PREGNANCY AND BEFORE BY: KELLIE EDWARDS

H

ow many times have you read books or blogs that give you this advice?

It's huge. Information overload! And hard to sort out the fact from the fiction: food you can and can’t eat, safe exercise, preparing for the “perfect” birth, how to get better sleep during pregnancy, enjoying your pregnancy (including how to avoid unwanted advice haha!) how to get pregnant in the first place….. the list goes on…..and on.

You are a mother who wants the best for your growing child It took me a long time to get pregnant. I get it. You are hungry for information. You want to do all that you can to have a healthy body and mind and you also want to make sure that you don’t do anything to harm your baby. I did too. I cared deeply about becoming a mother. Thank goodness! This is no small matter, starting a family – and the more research that is done, the more we find out that what you do way before you get pregnant does have an impact on your child. Now, some of that we can’t control. There are genetic influences and choices that your own grandmother and mother made that will have some influence on the start your child has in live (epigenetics is the place to find out more about this).

Our culture constantly invites us to do more, be more, achieve more, try harder, push through the limits and buy the next thing. It’s not our fault if we get caught up in all of that. And it’s no easy task to see it for what it is and make a different choice for yourself and your baby. But this go-go-go doesn’t lend itself to the nurturing, soothing environment for life to grow.

Are you willing to make a change? A therapist once said that he has seen many anxious children without anxious parents, but not many anxious parents who don’t have anxious children. Unfortunately not only are emotions contagious (how often have you been upset and all of a sudden so are the people around you?) but so is stress. Born and unborn babies are like sponges for the good and the bad and not surprisingly, stress can make it harder to conceive in the first place (with or without IVF), with a recent study finding that women who reported feeling more stressed during their ovulatory window were approximately 40-percent less likely to conceive during that month than other less stressful months.

But there is an awful lot we can do to nourish and calm ourselves and create the optimum environment for our babies to flourish.

The good news of course is that if you take steps to reduce stress, you may increase your chances of falling pregnant and once you do, maintaining those good practices throughout your pregnancy will continue to support both you and your baby.

If there is one thing everyone agrees on, it is that reducing stress before conception and throughout your pregnancy is a top priority

How can I reduce stress? Mindfulness works a treat

It’s a crazy busy world we live in. We often seem to be rushing from one goal to the next, one commitment to the next. Is this the best environment for a baby to grow? 80

Peninsula Kids – Autumn 2017

There are some obvious things you can do like rushing less, introducing moderate exercise (preferably in nature which boosts both mood and health) and eating more whole, unprocessed, fresh foods.