Lasting on an average of 40 weeks, pregnancy is a crucial phase in a woman’s life. It occurs when the sperm fuses with the egg released from the ovary during ovulation. Then, the fertilized egg travels down to get implanted in the uterus where successful pregnancy occurs.
Once pregnancy occurs, there are a plethora of factors that could affect it. However, you can truncate the adverse impact of several factors during your pregnancy through prenatal care and early pregnancy diagnosis.
So here’s an insight into all you need to know when you’re pregnant!
Contents
- 1 11 Things You Need To Know About Pregnancy!
- 1.1 Things To Avoid During Pregnancy
- 1.2 Essential Nutrients And Essential Vitamins
- 1.3 What Food To Eat?
- 1.4 What Your Husband Should Do When You Are Pregnant?
- 1.5 Best Fruits To Eat
- 1.6 How To Reduce Pregnancy Stress?
- 1.7 Exercise To Do When You Are Pregnant
- 1.8 High Blood Pressure In Pregnancy
- 1.9 Know And Choose A Type Of Child Delivery
- 1.10 Choose A Midwife
- 1.11 Start Reading And Learning About Newborn Baby Food And Nutrition
- 2 Final Words On All You Need To Know When You Are Pregnant
11 Things You Need To Know About Pregnancy!
Things To Avoid During Pregnancy
The nine months of pregnancy require you to take care of your baby’s health and yourself to the best extent. So it might become crucial for you to evade certain things that could harm your baby and your health. So you should avoid smoking and consuming liquor.
Smoking during pregnancy could lead to different abnormalities in the pregnant mother. Additionally, it might even augment the chances of heart disease and lung cancer. Secondly, the liquor may pass from the placenta to your child. It might lead to alcohol spectrum disorders and even fetal alcohol syndrome.
Besides this, you may even evade overheating your bodies for longer durations. This is because abnormally high body temperature might lead to congenital abnormalities and hyperthermia. In the end, you may evade certain medications that could feign harmful effects to your unborn child.
These medications may include cold medications during the first trimester, acne medications, herbal remedies, and non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs.
Hence, these were some of the most important things to avoid during pregnancy.
Essential Nutrients And Essential Vitamins
With a plethora of emotional as well as physical changes, the expectant mother might require different nutrients during pregnancy.
The vitamins given to expectant mothers during pregnancy are known as prenatal vitamins. These vitamins are different from regular vitamins because they provide the mother with the additional nutrients required.
So you could get the necessary nutrients and vitamins through prenatal vitamins even when you are trying to conceive. Let’s have a look at the essential nutrients and vitamins.
- Folate and folic acid. Being a type of B vitamin, folic acid could help in the development of your body cells. It might even reduce the risk of premature birth.
- Iron. Iron could help your body to make hemoglobin that can, in turn, carry oxygen from your lungs to the different parts.
- Vitamin D Vitamin D has different benefits, like helping your body absorb calcium and even improving your immune system.
Besides this, you could consume iodine, calcium, vitamin A, vitamin B, and omega 3 fatty acids to amplify your health during pregnancy.
Here is a detailed discussion on essential nutrients and vitamins during pregnancy.
What Food To Eat?
It is really essential that you are aware of the foods to eat during pregnancy.
This is because maintaining a healthy and balanced diet during pregnancy is crucial. Especially, if you look to make up for the additional nutrition required by your body.
This is because, during this phase, the mother’s body provides minerals and nutrients to the child through the placenta. So you require additional food to make up for all these additional nutrients.
These additional foods that you might need during pregnancy include eggs, legumes, sweet potatoes, Orange juice, leafy vegetables, yogurt, nuts, salmon, oatmeal, algae oil, avocados lean meat, berries, and chia seeds.
Including all these foods in your diet during pregnancy could improve your chances of a healthy pregnancy.
This is because all these food items, when aggregated into your diet might provide you with different vitamins and minerals like vitamin C, omega-3 fatty acids, folate, magnesium, potassium, iron, vitamin C, iodine, and whatnot.
What Your Husband Should Do When You Are Pregnant?
As mentioned earlier, pregnancy comes with a myriad of emotional and physical changes. Since your partner or husband cannot carry a baby for you, he may support you by truncating your discomforts.
As a result, you should really be aware of the things a husband should do for his pregnant wife.
Once your husband divides the errands and provides you mental support, emotional issues related to pregnancy might be distributed.
So first of all, he could educate himself related to the different aspects of pregnancy using different blogs and books.
Secondly, he should be able to converse with you and listen to your talks. And most importantly, he should have flexible schedules to help you when you need him the most.
Other duties of your husband while you are pregnant include understanding your moodiness, helping you with your morning sickness, satisfying your unique cravings, and even visiting the doctor with you during your appointments.
On top of that, you must also be aware of the pregnancy rights that you have.
Best Fruits To Eat
Since your body requires double the number of minerals and nutrients during pregnancy, you may make sure to include the required fruits in your balanced diet.
These fruits could provide you with all the required nutrients that could help in the healthy development of your unborn child.
Hence, you should be aware of some of the best fruits to eat during pregnancy.
Having said that, you need to make sure that you do not overeat during this period. As it could lead to an adverse impact on your health.
Once you include the required fruits in your diet during pregnancy, you will receive the necessary nutrients and minerals like potassium, beta carotene, iron, folic acid, Vitamin K, vitamin C, are flavonoids, and polyphenols.
Hence, some of the fruits that you could include in your diet include kiwi, orange, apples, lemons, avocados, mango, banana, watermelons, and custard apples.
More on it here.
How To Reduce Pregnancy Stress?
Different researches show how you may experience stress during pregnancy. However, this stress could become a concerning issue if it bothers you constantly. It might even lead to impaired cognitive development and ADHD in the fetus.
As a result, it is really important to understand how to manage your stress levels. For this very reason, knowing about the best ways to reduce stress during pregnancy is really essential.
Generally, in normal circumstances, when we stress our body releases hormones like adrenaline and cortisol that could truncate the stress.
However, during pregnancy, this stress does not get reduced. So, it becomes crucial for you to reduce pregnancy stress using other methods.
So first of all, you can manage your stress using healthy breathing habits. Secondly, another great method is to engage in regular exercising.
When you exercise, your body could release endorphins that might in turn reduce your stress.
Additionally, it is also crucial to focus on healthy eating habits that could ameliorate your mood and hence reduce your stress. Besides eating, you may even focus on drinking enough liquids to evade dehydration.
Other methods to reduce stress entail discussing your mental health with your near and dear ones and engaging in positive self-talk.
The detailed discussion is here.
Exercise To Do When You Are Pregnant
You might be confused about whether to exercise or not during pregnancy. However, the different experts’ opinions show that exercising during pregnancy could ameliorate the health of your unborn child and yourself.
Additionally, it might even prepare your body for delivery. Besides this, when you exercise, your blood flow increases and hence it releases the muscle tension in your body.
Hence, because of all the positive reasons, you need to be aware of some of the best exercises during pregnancy.
Exercise could even reduce your post-Natal injuries and help you to manage gestational diabetes. So you may engage in several exercises like swimming, yoga, jogging, stair climbing, walking, and stretching.
However, you might make sure not to overdo these exercises and stop once your body says no. This is because excess of anything is bad and it could prove to be fatal for your health instead of being beneficial for it.
More info here.
High Blood Pressure In Pregnancy
High blood pressure or hypertension during pregnancy is quite normal and could occur at any phase during this period.
But ignoring the high blood pressure issues could be really risky. Hence, you need to update yourself and learn how to manage blood pressure in pregnancy.
However, it is crucial to address this issue before it poses any complications for your health, as well as the health of your unborn child.
Hypertension is when your blood pressure is equal to or more than 140 by 90MM of mercury. There are different kinds of high blood pressure or hypertension like chronic hypertension, gestational hypertension, and pre-eclampsia.
All the different types of hypertension might prove to be adverse to both your body and your infant’s body. They could lead to smaller babies, preterm birth, and in rare situations even infant death.
However, you could reduce the risk of high blood pressure during pregnancy by evading high sodium foods, practicing controlled breathing, managing your weight, taking brisk walks, and including potassium-rich foods in your body.
Know And Choose A Type Of Child Delivery
There is a myriad of methods that could help you to give childbirth during delivery. However, out of all the types of child deliveries, the most common method is normal vaginal delivery.
But choosing the right methods depends upon different factors. You may choose a child delivery method that aligns with your personal choices as well as medical conditions.
So you could opt for natural unassisted birth like vaginal method, Lamaze method, Bradley method, or water birth. Or, you might even choose assistant birthing options like a cesarean section or vacuum method.
Using the child delivery method primarily depends upon the doctor’s recommendations as well. So you might always choose a method that helps you to reduce the intensity of pain with the help of techniques and therapies.
Choose A Midwife
A midwife is a healthcare provider who could help in the delivery of your child at either your home or in the hospital.
However, selecting a midwife is a really important task. You may be extremely cautious while selecting your midwife because, in the absence of any doctor, the midwife could perform the necessary functions required during delivery.
Moreover, the right midwife will help to strengthen your mental health during delivery. So before choosing the midwife, you could ask several questions from the lady. These questions entail-
- How many years of experience do you have as a midwife?
- How many cases can you handle in a single month?
- What is your sole reason for becoming a midwife?
- What are your qualifications as a midwife?
- Do you work as a midwife in a team or alone?
Start Reading And Learning About Newborn Baby Food And Nutrition
In the end, you must get an insight into the infant diet, nutrition, and requirements. This is because the babies tend to triple their body weight during the initial first year.
They require a good amount of nutrients and vitamins. Generally, the best source of all this nutrition is breast milk in the first six months. However, the formula could even serve as a great alternative.
The different nutrients and minerals which the babies may require to grow without any issues include calcium, zinc, iron, fat, protein carbohydrates, folate, vitamin A, B, C, D, and K.
Final Words On All You Need To Know When You Are Pregnant
Thus, if you know what to expect during the pregnancy, then you could take care of your health in a better way and assess the requirements for your unborn child. Hopefully, this article will help you to get a detailed insight into the several aspects related to pregnancy.
- https://www.fda.gov/consumers/free-publications-women/medicine-and-pregnancy
- https://medlineplus.gov/healthproblemsinpregnancy.html
- https://opa.hhs.gov/reproductive-health?pregnancy-prevention/birth-control-methods/natural-family-planning-and-fertility-awareness/index.html
- https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternalinfanthealth/pregnancy-complications.html
- https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/pregnant-breastfeeding-better-drug-information-coming
You made a good point that liquor should be avoided when pregnant.
Thanks for the reminder that it’s important to also be mindful of the qualifications to look for when planning to get pregnancy care services. I’m interested in looking for a good doctor to talk to someday because my husband and I have been talking about having kids soon. I want to make sure that I will be prepared for that sooner or later.