Following an active and healthy lifestyle before, during and after childbirth is not only important for moms but also offers significant benefits for their children.
Women who follow a healthy lifestyle and manage their stress, with a nutritious and calorie-controlled diet, sufficient sleep, and regular exercise, are not only more likely to fall pregnant but also typically enjoy lower-risk pregnancies and generally have better experiences during childbirth.
Developing a comprehensive regular exercise routine before falling pregnant also makes it easier to maintain your activity levels throughout the pregnancy and into the postpartum recovery phase, offering additional physical and emotional benefits to new moms and their bundles of joy.
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Improved conception rates
Estimates from the WHO suggest that approximately one in every six people of reproductive age worldwide experience infertility in their lifetime.
A healthy lifestyle plays a crucial role in supporting fertility and conception rates in women by impacting various hormonal and physiological factors.
For instance, consuming a balanced diet that is rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean protein provides essential vitamins and minerals, including folic acid, iron, and omega-3 fatty acids, which the body needs for optimal egg health, ovulation, and creating a healthy uterine lining to support conception.
Our bodies also require fats and proteins to produce the important hormones that impact ovulation and fertility.
And keeping your calorie intake in check helps maintain a healthy weight, which reduces the risk of hormonal imbalances that can disrupt ovulation, as obese2 women are more likely to experience fertility issues.
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Support your growing baby
Once you fall pregnant, following an active and healthy lifestyle during a normal pregnancy is also wonderfully advantageous, helping moms prevent or reduce back pain and excess weight gain while preparing the body for labour and childbirth.
Importantly for baby, the choices you make during pregnancy directly impact your developing baby.
For instance, exercising while pregnant can benefit your child’s lifelong health and fitness. Healthy moms lower their risk of gestational diabetes and pregnancy-induced high blood pressure, which can cause a condition known as preeclampsia that can place the unborn child at greater risk.
Research3 shows that maintaining a healthy weight during pregnancy is linked to a reduced risk of childhood obesity.
Women who are overweight before falling pregnant and those who gain too much weight during their pregnancy may put their babies at risk of childhood obesity.
A study that tracked nearly 2,000 women through their pregnancy until their children were six years old found that the children of mothers who gained excessive weight during their pregnancy “showed a significant difference in birth weight and child BMI at 6 years”.
Moreover, obesity increases the risk that pregnancy will continue beyond the expected due date and is associated with labour problems, with labour induction more common in overweight women.
Pregnant women only need about 300 extra calories per day to provide for their growing baby and avoid excessive weight gain.
In another study4, researchers confirmed that exercise during pregnancy has an epigenetic effect, offering distinct molecular consequences on the unborn child that essentially improve gene expression in children related to their fitness potential.
As such, creating a healthy environment for your child to develop in the womb lays the foundation for better health and fitness for your child in later life.
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A sound nutritional foundation
Supporting the development of your baby during pregnancy demands immense nutritional resources from a woman’s body and breastfeeding demands more still.
Therefore, optimal nutrition before, during and after pregnancy is vital for everyone. Start by reducing or removing all processed and packaged foods from your diet and focus on eating nutrient-dense natural whole foods.
A prenatal vitamin, like Biogen Pregnancy Pack Omega+, contains the vitamins and minerals women need before, during and after conception.
Available in a 30-day pack, each serving consists of three components – 1 multivitamin and mineral tablet, 1 calcium tablet and 1 omega 3 soft gelatine capsule – that deliver the nutrients important for the optimal development of your baby, including omega 3 fish oil, choline, folic acid, iron and Inositol.
You can take the daily dosage all at once, or incrementally throughout the day. and the dosage remains the same for multiple (twins, triplets) pregnancies.
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Setting a good example
After your child is born, maintaining your healthy and active lifestyle is important for numerous reasons.
Regular exercise and a healthy diet can reduce the risk of postpartum depression, and can also speed up the recovery process from natural birth or a C-section, once your doctor has given you the green light to start.
Importantly, engaging in regular exercise sets a good example and helps instil healthful habits in your child.
An analysis5 that looked at the physical activity levels of more than 500 mothers and pre-schoolers in the UK found close correlations between that the amount of activity a mother did each day and how active her child was.
The study – the first to show a direct association in a large sample of mothers and children – shows that young children are not ‘naturally active’ and that parents have an important role to play in the development of healthy activity habits early on in life. According to the research findings, children were more active the more activity a mother did.
Similar findings emerged from a study6 that examined the associations of physical activity levels between parents and their pre-school children based on gender and weekday/weekend.
The research team concluded that the sedentary behaviour and physical activity levels of parents strongly influenced those of their preschool children, with “maternal influence stronger during the weekdays and paternal influence stronger on the weekends. Parents’ activity levels influence girls’ levels more strongly than they influence boys’ levels.”
References:
- Dağ ZÖ, Dilbaz B. Impact of obesity on infertility in women. J Turk Ger Gynecol Assoc. 2015 Jun 1;16(2):111-7. doi: 10.5152/jtgga.2015.15232. PMID: 26097395; PMCID: PMC4456969
- Silvestris E, de Pergola G, Rosania R, Loverro G. Obesity as disruptor of the female fertility. Reprod Biol Endocrinol. 2018 Mar 9;16(1):22. doi: 10.1186/s12958-018-0336-z. PMID: 29523133; PMCID: PMC5845358.
- Haby K, Gyllensten H, Hanas R, Berg M, Premberg Å. A Lifestyle Intervention During Pregnancy and Its Effects on Child Weight 2.5 Years Later. Matern Child Health J. 2022 Sep;26(9):1881-1890. doi: 10.1007/s10995-022-03395-5. Epub 2022 Mar 6. PMID: 35253077; PMCID: PMC9374787.
- Ferrari N, Bae-Gartz I, Bauer C, Janoschek R, Koxholt I, Mahabir E, Appel S, Alejandre Alcazar MA, Grossmann N, Vohlen C, Brockmeier K, Dötsch J, Hucklenbruch-Rother E, Graf C. Exercise during pregnancy and its impact on mothers and offspring in humans and mice. J Dev Orig Health Dis. 2018 Feb;9(1):63-76. doi: 10.1017/S2040174417000617. Epub 2017 Aug 7. PMID: 28780912.
- Kathryn R. Hesketh, Laura Goodfellow, Ulf Ekelund, Alison M. McMinn, Keith M. Godfrey, Hazel M. Inskip, Cyrus Cooper, Nicholas C. Harvey, Esther M.F. van Sluijs; Activity Levels in Mothers and Their Preschool Children. Pediatrics April 2014; 133 (4): e973–e980. 10.1542/peds.2013-3153.
- Xu C, Quan M, Zhang H, Zhou C, Chen P. Impact of parents’ physical activity on preschool children’s physical activity: a cross-sectional study. PeerJ. 2018 Feb 27;6:e4405. doi: 10.7717/peerj.4405. PMID: 29503768; PMCID: PMC5833469.
