Lifestyle Medicine for Optimal Prenatal Health
By Kim Deschamps
MPT, BKin, PYT, BDN | June 26, 2023
A friend once told me her secret for a healthy pregnancy: walk every day, prenatal yoga once a week, and a prenatal massage once a month. I asked if she wanted to come and work at Holistic Physiotherapy & Wellness with me!
That friend understood the impact that a healthy lifestyle could have on her changing body and the life growing inside it. For so many of us, healthy habits fall by the wayside – we’re too busy to prepare nutritious meals from scratch, we work too late to get in any exercise, we stay up too late swiping through social media.
Those unhealthy habits can have a cumulative effect – causing all kinds of troublesome symptoms and chronic ailments. Lifestyle medicine focuses on sustainable and achievable tweaks to your life to reverse course towards a healthier, pain-free you. And when you’re pregnant, it’s even more important - because your lifestyle doesn’t just affect you. It affects your baby too.
If you weren’t ready before to take an up-close look at your habits, I hope you are ready now that you’re pregnant. Because pregnant-you deserves so much self-love and self-care, and because pregnancy experiences can really run the gamut!
You’ve probably seen the women who sail through their pregnancy (like my friend who walked every day), glowing as they serenely rest their hands on their swollen bellies. Probably you’ve also seen the women who look green or gray in pallor with swollen ankles and stooped posture. Sure, some factors are out of our control and are simply due to nature and genetics. But you have so much more control over your body than you might imagine.
Lifestyle medicine for your prenatal journey begins with a consultation, when we discuss everything from your personal and family medical history to your sleep habits and primary sources of stress. Then, together, we make a plan to modify your lifestyle for improved health overall and a far superior pregnancy experience.
It’s critical to adopt healthy habits now, before the baby comes, so that they become routines you can use to ground you in the postnatal phase, when you’ll need routine more than ever before. Walk every day with the baby. Mommy and me yoga classes. Leave the baby with your partner or a trusted friend while you get a massage.
Parenthood, especially first-time parenthood, comes with a lot of unknowns, a lot of new stressors, and – of course – a lot of love. If you can love yourself enough now, while you’re pregnant, to tweak your lifestyle for holistically improved well-being in body, mind, and spirit, you’ll have more love – and more energy – to devote to changing diapers, washing bottles, and pacing up and down the hall to soothe an overtired infant.
To do a little DIY lifestyle medicine, consider the following factors in your current habits and routines and whether there’s room for a little (or a lot) of improvement:
Nutrition: Do you maintain a healthy diet?
Physical Activity: Do you get enough? Is it a daily priority?
Stress: Are you good at recognizing stress? Do you have techniques to manage it?
Sleep: Do you get enough, and do you wake up in the morning feeling refreshed?
Social Connections: Do you make time for loved ones? Do you receive enough support from family and friends?
A lifestyle medicine specialist can work through all of these with you to ensure that the life you’re living is the best one possible – especially when you’re about to bring a new human into it. I am here to help you live your best life! You deserve to thrive in your pregnancy, postpartum and beyond. Book in for a Lifestyle Medicine + PhysioYoga assessment today, you won’t regret it!
This service is claimable under physiotherapy benefits… now that is an added bonus!
Kim Deschamps
MPT, BKin, PYT, BDN