Michael Roizen - You - Having a Baby - The Owner’s Manual to a Happy and Healthy Pregnancy

Nope, there’s nothing quite like this internal conflict that is pregnancy. One moment, you’re thrilled, elated, and impatient for your baby’s first smile, babble, and soothe-your-soul hug. The next, you feel anxious about a million unknowns—about what’s going on inside your belly, about whether your little one is growing properly, about how you’re going to function on zippo sleep. Since this happens to just about everyone, it must, in fact, be strangely ideal. The truth is that vigilance has great benefits. You’re supposed to pay close attention. Our goal is to ensure that you focus on the right clues.

As you struggle to maintain your equilibrium, we want you to relax and take time to enjoy the beauty of the process. The most important thing to keep in mind is that most pregnancies turn out absolutely fine. Absolutely fine . Women’s bodies are designed to carry children safely and efficiently. That doesn’t mean everything will be smooth sailing on this journey, but it does mean that the odds are greatly in your favor. If you can learn how to maximize your chances that nature runs the course it’s supposed to, you will increase those odds even further. This book will help show you how.

So let’s start by rethinking our perception about conception (and beyond). Back in sex-ed class, most of us were taught a pretty simple recipe for how pregnancy works:

Ingredients

1 egg, mature

100 million sperm, very, very excited

Instructions

Preheat oven. Mix ingredients romantically. Cook bun for forty weeks.

Sprinkle with love and serve to the world.

The bun-in-the-oven image has served us well over the years, underscoring the belief that mom is protector and baby is protected, that mom is cook and baby is concoction, that mom is in control and baby is not. But there’s a fundamental problem with this analogy when it comes to the true biology of pregnancy (besides the fact that nobody bakes buns anymore): Baby has a heck of a lot more say about the whole process than a cinnamon raisin roll does.

In fact, pregnancy is more like dancing than cooking. You and your baby have a dynamic, choreographed relationship—one in which you lead and the baby follows. Your subtle movements and directions help show your baby how to grow and develop. After all, it takes two to tango, or in pregnancy terms, it’s uter- us , not uter- I .

But your baby isn’t always the most cooperative partner. Sometimes he’ll want to take the lead, sometimes he’ll send you signals about which way he wants you to move, sometimes he’ll improvise, sometimes he’ll do flips, and sometimes he’ll step on your feet and get everything all tangled up. Part of the reason he’ll act this way is that your body has a certain amount of biological ambivalence about this little cellular critter; after all, only half his genes are yours. Your relationship with him isn’t exactly hostile, but it’s not always warm and fuzzy either. Even at this young age, he’s going to try to assert himself, and your body may try to resist. There are evolutionary reasons for this, which we’ll discuss in the pages to come, but you can also think of these initial rebellious acts as practice for the years ahead.

Pregnancy can be as elegant as a waltz, as high-energy as a salsa, and as scattered as a twist (with a whole lot of shouting). Our main goal in YOU: Having a Baby is to teach you about this ingenious biological dance—a dance in which you have the ability and the artistry to guide your baby not only to a healthy delivery, but to a lifetime of good health as well.

While many pregnancy books tell you what to do, we aim to add a deeper level of meaning in true YOU style and explain why . After all, when you truly understand the why , the what is much easier to adopt. Instead of giving you a week-by-week or hiccup-by-hiccup guide to pregnancy, we’re going to take a more holistic approach, focusing on how your mental and physical health affect your baby, and how—at the same time—pregnancy affects your mind and body. Of course, we’ll provide plenty of our signature YOU Tips and YOU Tools to help you make the best choices for a safe and healthy pregnancy, but we’re going to take you there a little bit differently than other pregnancy guides may. Here’s what you can expect * from us:

We want you to understand at the base level how epigenetics works and why it’s important. Starting with the moment you go from making love to making a baby, † we’re going to explain how you can influence your child’s development through this field—perhaps the most important developed in the last decade. Many of us believe that the genetics of our children are predetermined the moment that the sperm radar locks on its desired egg. But the truth is that research from various sources is suggesting that during pregnancy, you may actually be able to turn your future baby’s genes on and off. Epigenetics is not just how the musical notes of our genes are played but also how loud the volume is turned up. Since the acoustics in the womb and the real world might be different, we want these as aligned as possible. And that’s where all the magic takes place, no matter where you are in pregnancy or in parenthood. You have the ability to control genes anytime.

You’re also going to learn quite a bit about the key player that mediates between you and your baby, transmitting all the signals that create those epigenetic changes. That player, which gets about as much attention as a dollar bill on a blackjack table, is the placenta. This beautifully functioning organ is the place where mom and child interact, where nutrients are exchanged, and where growth and development patterns are determined.

After explaining the workings of the placenta, we’ll focus more closely on nutrition (both yours and baby’s), explaining how too much, too little, or the wrong nutrients all play roles in the health of both you and your child. Here you’ll discover why the thought of food makes you green on some days, while other days you long for an artichoke-heart milk shake. We’ll also talk about such things as fetal brain development, how to manage (and prevent) postpartum depression, and important pregnancy-related medical conditions like gestational diabetes.

In the second half of the book, we’ll help you manage the wide range of side effects you may be feeling—everything from heartburn and insomnia to medical complications like preeclampsia. Finally, we’re going to present a bunch of great features you can use, including:

Broadway to Birth: Our cool, interactive board game will take you through the amazing adventure that is labor and delivery to help you understand which elements you can control and which elements you need to leave to the pros (whom we’ll help you choose, based on your own labor and delivery goals).

A Top Eight List of Postpartum Issues: And after you deliver your baby, you’ll appreciate our chapter on everything you need to know to take care of yourself and your newborn in the first month of life. This is where the second adventure begins.

The Ultimate Pregnancy Flight Plan: Step by step, we provide the instructional dials, controls, and levers that will allow you to pilot your way to a safe landing. After all, you’re carrying a very precious passenger. This plan is the shorthand version of all the best tips and strategies we give throughout the book.