Winter babies are born with lower vitamin D because their moms can't make as much of it from the sun. Baby's stores at birth mirror mom's.
If you're planning to be pregnant in the winter, test often. Target 50-80 ng/mL. Most prenatals contain a fraction of what you need.
Postpartum is not the time to fear carbs.
Your thyroid runs on glucose. Your milk supply runs on glucose. Your progesterone production runs on glucose. White rice, potatoes, and fruit are easier to digest than whole grains when your gut is recovering.
There is a window immediately postpartum where I usually feel mom rage creep in. I get more easily irritated. I sometimes snap at my kids and then feel guilty for doing it. And then it lifts as my hormones settle.
Some postpartum rage is normal. When you consider how depleted you are immediately after birth, it makes sense. You are in survival mode. Anger lives in your sympathetic nervous system. Patience requires you to be in your parasympathetic state.
After you give birth, progesterone crashes hard. When your progesterone is low, your nervous system stays wide open and reactive. Add in sleep deprivation, low blood sugar, depleted iron, and a thyroid that nobody has tested, and you have a body that has nothing left to spare for patience.
What helps:
- Eat more.
- Focus on replenishing minerals and nutrients.
- Get your iron and thyroid checked. Fix any deficiencies.
- Keep your blood sugar stable with protein and salt at every meal.
- Take things off your plate.
- Say no more often so that you can rest and regulate.
- Give it time. Sometimes you can be doing everything right and your body just needs time to get back to baseline.
For me, my patience usually comes back by the 3 month mark. Give yourself some grace until then.
If you are 9 months postpartum or more and still in mom rage, your body is telling you something is off. Audit your diet, your sleep, and what is draining you.
You're not a bad mom. You're just depleted.
Breastfeeding lowers your bone density. It can drop anywhere between 3-7% during the first six months of exclusive nursing.
Your baby's skeleton is being built out of yours. Calcium is pulled from your bones into your blood and then into your milk. Roughly 200 to 300mg of calcium leaves your body in breast milk every day.
This is also why so many women crave milk, cheese, and yogurt during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Your body knows what it needs and asks for it.
The good news is that bone density rebuilds after weaning, usually within 6 to 12 months, and often returns to or slightly above where it started. The catch is that you have to give your body the inputs to rebuild.
Eat enough calcium-rich food while you nurse. Whole milk, yogurt, cheese, sardines, and leafy greens are great. Strength train. Lifting weights helps your body hold onto muscle and bone, and postpartum is exactly when both are most vulnerable.
If you nursed for years, especially across multiple babies close together, ask for a DEXA scan once you've weaned.
With my first two postpartums, I didn't feel mentally sharp until 9+ months in. The sleep deprivation made it worse. Brain fog was just my baseline for almost a year.
This time, I've been taking creatine. I haven't had that brain fog. Even on bad sleep nights, I can pull through and have a normal day.
I credit creatine.
Link in bio for the purest creatine (which matters for pregnancy and breastfeeding).
Cravings during pregnancy and breastfeeding aren't random. Your body is asking for what it needs.
Steak craving = iron
Dairy craving = calcium
Salt and salty foods = electrolytes
Citrus = vitamin C
Watermelon or juicy fruit craving = hydration and electrolytes
Starchy food = more carbs (your thyroid and breast milk both run on glucose)
Ice craving = often iron deficiency
Your body is always telling you something. Tune in and listen.
Coffee on an empty stomach first thing in the morning is harder on women than most realize.
Your cortisol is already at its peak in the hour after you wake up. Coffee on top of nothing in your stomach pushes it higher. If you're postpartum, breastfeeding, depleted, or already prone to anxiety, you really should not be doing coffee on an empty stomach.
Eat something first. Coffee after.
Your brain has a sensor that decides whether you're eating enough to ovulate. It's called kisspeptin.
Kisspeptin sits in your hypothalamus and watches signals from leptin and insulin to figure out if there's enough energy coming in. If those signals stay low for too long, kisspeptin stops telling your ovaries to ovulate, and your period stops. Your body assumes you're in a famine and protects you from getting pregnant during one.
This is why women lose their periods from undereating, overtraining, or excess stress.
If you're already lean, depleted, or trying to get a healthy period back, intermittent fasting is not your friend.
@MrsBystander Check for nutrient deficiencies. It shouldn't feel THAT bad. Some tiredness is normal but not extreme.
Also, creatine helps
https://t.co/NgGxO2Zjwf
My 2 year old has started looking me in the eye and saying "can you put away your phone, mommy?"
Even when I pick it up for a quick text or task, she notices.
Kids want nothing more than your presence.
You'd need about 2.5 pounds of beef every day to match 5g of supplemental creatine from food.
Most women don't eat that much red meat. Plenty don't eat any.
The gap between what your body uses and what comes in increases during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Supplementation closes that gap. 5-10g daily.
We offer one of the purest creatines on the market. Link in bio.