Читать книгу You: Having a Baby: The Owner’s Manual to a Happy and Healthy Pregnancy - Michael Roizen F. - Страница 9

Before you get to most of the features at the end of the book, we think it’s helpful to really understand the way the pregnant body works—and remember, it’s your whole body that’s pregnant, not just your belly. Woven throughout the book, you’ll see several major themes that reflect our overall view of pregnancy:

• Your body is an amazingly resilient and adaptive piece of biological machinery. The size of your belly and the stretching of your skin aren’t the only changes that occur during pregnancy:Your insides are metamorphosing too. Your heart beats faster to make sure nutrients are pumped to the fetus. Your hormone levels fluctuate to prepare your uterus for growth. Your musculoskeletal system relaxes, giving you more flexible joints and more curvature in the back to prepare for carrying and delivering a baby. All these transformations mean that you may experience some unpleasant side effects (like constipation, for example). What’s interesting is that there’s an adaptive value to many of the symptoms of pregnancy, so that the nausea, breathlessness, and aching back you might feel, evolutionarily speaking, serve some value in protecting the growth of your child.

• The goal of pregnancy isn’t just to deliver a healthy baby but to lay the foundation for lifelong good health for your child—not to mention that of his children and grandchildren. That’s the amazing thing about epigenetics. Once you see some of the long-term effects you can have on the health of your child while you’re pregnant, you’ll realize that it’s important to start this process with the end goal in mind. We like to call it reverse engineering.

One of the ways that you can increase your chances for a successful pregnancy is to learn as much as you can about what’s happening, so you won’t be anxious. Simply educating yourself about what’s going on in your body is one of the smartest things you can do, because it allows you to roll with the punches rather than get KO’d by every little symptom or complication. In fact, staying calm during pregnancy has repeatedly been shown to have a positive influence on your child’s health.

So we want you to take the pressure off of yourself and not to try to do it alone. The key is to have some support, regardless of whether you’re married (about 40 percent of children are born out of wedlock), in a relationship, or flying solo. Your mother, sisters, friends, or even the internet buddies you meet on pregnancy websites can all become part of your support system. One of the features that has always distinguished human beings is that pregnant women have relied on other women in their communities to support them. Today, social support has been linked to improved fetal growth. (Those cavewomen knew what was good for them.)

In a way, managing your pregnancy really comes down to one overarching goal: managing stress. We’re not just talking about stress management in the traditional bubble-bath kind of way, but in the big-picture kind of way. How does your body cope with the stress of housing and growing what’s essentially a biological hitch-hiker? How does your baby adapt to potentially stressful situations that he’ll face in utero? (“Jalapeño attack, nine o’clock!”) How do you calm your mind in the face of the normal and natural anxieties that often arise during these nine months? How do you tell your mother-in-law that, no offense, but you prefer not to name your child Horatio Horace Humphrey?^*

That’s exactly why we developed the ultimate pregnancy quality-of-life and stress quizzes. You can take them now (in this book or online at www.realage.com), as well as at various points throughout the next nine months, to see how you’re coping with all of the outside influences on your pregnancy.

Although neither of us has actually experienced pregnancy (obviously), between the two of us, we’ve fathered six children, and if you include our entire authorship team (half of whom are women, including an ob/gyn), we’ve had fifteen kids and delivered or participated in the delivery of more than eight thousand little tykes. So we have a pretty good idea of what it feels like to walk in your soon-to-be-too-tight shoes.

If you’re pregnant right now, we want to offer both congratulations and thanks. Thank you for letting us join you on this journey, and thank you for having the curiosity and passion for learning about what’s going on under the surface, under the skin, under the elastic-waistband pants you’ll soon be needing. As we step out into our exploration of this miraculous mambo, we would be impolite if we didn’t ask one final question: Would you like to dance?