Information from our book "A Natural Guide to Pregnancy and Postpartum Health "

How Nutrient Depletion Sets the Stage for Postpartum Ailments:

Functional nutrition is about staying healthy by conscientiously supporting your body with the nutrients it needs to stay in tip-top working condition. This approach is similar to the periodic preventive maintenance you do on your car. By regularly changing the oil and checking all of the fluids, you help to prevent your car from breaking down. By identifying levels of nutrients that are getting low in your body and supplementing them, you do preventive maintenance against ill health.

A woman who has recently had a baby is like a car that has been driven from Vermont to San Francisco. That car is really going to need some maintenance by the time it rumbles across the Golden Gate Bridge. You wouldn't expect that car to run well for long if you simply kept putting gas in the gas tank and neglected the systems that combust that fuel, would you? You owe it to yourself (and your baby) to care for yourself at least as well as you would care for that car!

Making Informed Choices about Your Health

The miraculous array of interior workings that keep your body going might appear to be complex at first glance, but beneath that complexity lies a beautiful simplicity. An understanding of the ways in which these body systems work paves the way for you to make the right choices in your quest to support them.

Let's go back to the car analogy for a moment more. Suppose that when you take your car to a repair shop, a mechanic you don't know well tells you that your car needs a lot of expensive work. Unless you are knowledgeable about the workings of cars, and of your own car in particular, you have to take the mechanic's word for it. You could easily end up paying big bucks for repairs you don't need. Possessing a basic under-standing of how your body works-and developing a familiarity with your very own make and model-will help you create your own routine maintenance program and allow you to troubleshoot when something goes wrong. If you do need the aid of a health-care provider, you can make informed choices about the treatments he or she recommends.

For simplicity's sake, we have broken down the everyday workings of your body into four categories: metabolism, detoxification, fat balance, and nervous-system balance. These categories do not present a complete picture of everything that happens in your body, but in our experience, seeing patients day in and day out, these are the systems most powerfully affected by the nutrient depletion so often seen in new moms. The endocrine, or hormonal, system is also important - so important that we devote an entire chapter (Chapter 9) to the hormonal changes that occur during and after pregnancy. There is considerable overlap between all five of these systems; if any of them is not working up to par, the other four are strongly affected.

Healing Postpartum Ailments at the Functional Level

A nutrient deficiency of some sort is likely to occur in a woman who has just given up many of her reserves to make a baby's body. This nutrient lack can be compounded by not having as much rest and recovery time as her body requires after giving birth, and by not having the time or energy to take good care of herself because of the demands of her new baby.

Nutrient depletion does not always have obvious repercussions right away. If you are sick enough to go see a doctor, you can bet that your body started falling out of balance long before you made that appointment. Once you learn about how nutrients affect the most basic operations of your body, you will be better prepared to take steps to replenish them.
 

Back to top »