Do you struggle to find time for yourself as a mother? Does the idea of self-care fill you with despair at ever fitting it in? Read on for my top tips on finding a small window of opportunity for a bit of you-time.
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Despite its name, vitamin D is not actually very easily found in food. We primarily make vitamin D from sun exposure - if we’re not supplementing, 90% of our vitamin D is supplied from the sun. All cells in our body have vitamin D receptors on them; this means that vitamin D is important for all aspects of health.
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It takes nine months to grow a baby. Yet women often start thinking about ‘snapping back’ into shape within a few months or even a few weeks after birth. It drives me mad - the pressure and judgement and pure expectation that a woman can ‘get back’ to what she looked like before. Your body has likely changed beyond recognition, and may not return. It has done something amazing. Once you’ve had a chance to heal and recover, rebuild and restore, then, and only then, can you start thinking about losing excess fat. Here’s what every new mother needs to know about losing weight postpartum.
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What’s the single, most powerful thing you can do every single day? Choose to eat well. You eat three, or more, times a day. Every time you put something in your mouth you make a choice about your health. Sometimes you make that choice consciously. More often you don’t. In the fourth and final instalment in the series, I’m covering the impact of nutrition and diet on mental health.
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Being in self-isolation has made me realise how vital and integral basic human communication is. Those short, meaningless chats with the cashier, the ‘good morning’ to the bus driver, the encouraging ‘I know how you feel' smile from a fellow mum with a crying baby are tiny moments of human connection that we take so much for granted.
In practicing social distancing, the whole world is experiencing how new mums feel in the early days of motherhood.
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Breastfeeding challenges can take new mums by surprise; they are simply not prepared for how difficult breastfeeding can be. For many women who do stop breastfeeding early, much of the time the problem doesn’t lie in their beautiful body’s ability to produce breastmilk, but rather in lack of support and lack of knowledge of where to access good quality information, advice and support.
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In many traditional cultures around the world, after a baby is born, a mother is nourished and nurtured by her female relatives for at least a month after giving birth. We’ve lost this culture in the western world; it’s no wonder we have one of the highest rates of postnatal depression when the expectations to bounce back is so realistic.
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Getting into the habit of eating a variety of colourful food before baby arrives makes it less of an effort in those tired, busy days of being a mother. And the better you are able to feed yourself, the better you are able to feed your children as they grow, setting an example and paving a way for a whole future generation that eats well.
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One of the most common questions pregnant and new mums ask me is what to eat to boost breastmilk supply. Although a seemingly innocuous question, what underlies it is doubt in their body’s ability to know how and how much milk to produce.
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