The message from parenting guides sometimes comes across as mothers needing to take on an ascetic lifestyle with no room for error, but life, especially during pregnancy, rarely goes as planned. Making an effort to form better habits now can be enough to cause real benefit in you and your child’s future. This brief guide will help you understand how healthy habits affect your pregnancy through the nine months and after!
Through the Pregnancy
Luckily for people who experience cravings while pregnant, keeping to a strictly healthy diet isn’t the end-all-be-all for having a healthy baby. Trying to eat nutritious foods and stick to a well-balanced, thought-out diet does contribute to better health outcomes for you and your baby; however, just limiting unhealthy eating is beneficial.
Staying active and practicing emotional wellness techniques both help to lower stress during pregnancy as well. A study from the Association of Psychological Science found that even a healthy mental state plays a role in the fetus’s well-being as the chemical signals produced in your brain travel to your baby, along with everything else a baby receives from its mother.
In the Delivery Room
Staying fit continues to play a role as you enter the delivery room. Alongside giving parenting tips and making family resources available, prenatal courses often offer prenatal yoga or other exercise training classes that help you prepare to give birth.
While these exercises can help you learn how to approach delivery, they can’t quite prepare you for the real experience. Instead, focusing on these exercises builds your body’s stamina and makes labor, which can take multiple hours, a more tolerable experience for new moms.
After Giving Birth
One of the most significant ways healthy habits affect your pregnancy happens after you give birth. Mothers who adopt and stick to healthy eating, staying active, and practicing self-care feel better prepared to continue these habits through the very stressful first months with a newborn.
Children also learn by imitating their parents, and by practicing healthy habits yourself, you can instill these values into your children’s lives without fighting them about it. Convincing your kids to exercise every day or eat nutritious foods is much easier when they already see you doing it!
How you eat, how active you are, and how you treat your mental health all play a role in ensuring a healthy pregnancy. It can be difficult to form these new habits, so choosing to seek support from your loved ones and your healthcare team is the perfect place to start!
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