When you become pregnant, your body isn’t just
yours anymore. You have this tiny growing baby who depends
on you for every single thing, for its comfort, for
its safety and for its nutrition.
This means whatever you eat, your baby eats too. Whatever
you drink, your baby drinks. Hopefully, the second you
find out your pregnant one of your first thoughts is
‘how can I keep my baby safe?’ There isn’t
a single better thing you can do for your baby than
to keep yourself healthy in anticipation of his conception.
It’s a fact that your weight will affect whether
conception will be easy, difficult or happen for you
at all. How does that work exactly? How does losing
or gaining too much weight affect whether you can conceive.
What is the optimal weight you should be so that your
dream of becoming a mother can best become reality?
Your body works in a very organized, sustained way.
Your heart pumps blood through your veins. Your brain
fires off impulses that help your muscles move and every
month, you ovulate and if conception doesn’t take
place, you get your period.
Being overweight or underweight can cause your system
to stop working properly, severely compromising your
ability to conceive. Using a car as an example, if one
thing is out of whack the whole car’s performance
is strained and conception is a complicated enough business
without throwing in a body that isn’t working
in peak physical condition.
Obesity has increased over the last twenty years, that’s
no surprise to anyone. But what you may not know is
that as obesity rates have increased, fertility rates
have dropped just as dramatically.
You may have heard of the term ‘your BMI’.
BMI stands for Body Mass Index and it’s a number
based on a person’s weight as well as they’re
height to calculate whether they are healthy or not.
The higher your BMI, the closer you are to being classified
as obese. For example, a weight of 150 pounds at a height
of 5’8 is in the healthy range. While the same
weight at a height of 5’4 puts you in the overweight
range. A healthy BMI is listed at a number on the index
between 18 and 25. Anything higher and you’re
leaving yourself open to health problems, one of which
could be the inability to get pregnant when you decide
you want to.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, anyone under a
BMI of 18 is also more than likely going to encounter
difficulties conceiving.
This happens because being both over and underweight
can compromise ovulation. Estrogen is the female reproductive
hormone produced in a woman’s fat cells. If there
are too many fat cells, too much estrogen is produced
and your body becomes confused and thinks it’s
on birth control (what birth control pills are partially
composed of) hampering conception. Alternately, too
little fat and not enough estrogen is produced, causing
your reproductive system to stop working properly…or
in the worst cases stop working period.
Women suffering from the eating disorder anorexia commonly
find that their menstrual cycles either become irregular
or even stop altogether.
If you fall on either ends of the weight game, you
may think fertility drugs will be the cure all or the
easy fix on your road to conception, but because the
drugs work in sync with your body’s reproductive
system if it’s not working properly, neither will
the drugs or any IVF treatments.
Even if by chance you do manage to conceive while being
over or underweight, your risk for miscarrying more
than doubles compared to those of a woman at a healthy
weight.
So while fat is not the enemy because your body needs
fat to function, too much fat stored in your body can
hamper you just as much as not enough fat. However,
it has to be the good kind of fat, gained from eating
right and stored in a body with freshly oxygenated blood
that only comes from regular exercise.
Depriving yourself is never a good idea and can be
especially dangerous when you’re already under
weight. The trick is that old standby, ‘everything
in moderation’. You may be craving that donut
and every once in a while it’s okay to have one…but
do you really need to eat the second or third one?
And if you skip breakfast and lunch thinking you can
gorge on dinner and not be any worse for wear, think
again. This is because depriving your body makes it
work over time to store any fat it can get, so when
that dinner comes, you’ll actually be gaining
more weight than if you had three balanced meals. Your
body doesn’t know when it’s going to be
fed again so it latches on to that fat and stores it
for as long as it can, making the numbers on the scale
go higher and higher. Eating regularly helps your body
burn fat better cause it knows via your healthy eating
habits that it will be getting more good fat soon. This
will make it easier to share the fat throughout your
body so it can be used by your various organs for things
like energy and estrogen production.
Studies show that for an obese woman, a weight loss
of even just 10% dramatically increases her chances
of getting pregnant.
So starting today, get healthy. Eat right and get active
and not only will you be preparing yourself to give
your baby the best possible home for the next nine months,
you’ll be giving yourself the best head start
for making your dream of becoming a mother a reality.
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