Diet and Exercise

From the moment you conceive, your body provides all your baby’s nutrients. From now until the birth, everything you eat will be broken down into molecules that pass from your own bloodstream into your baby’s via the placenta. Until after the birth, you will breathe and eat for your baby so it is important that you try to maintain a healthy well balanced diet.

Being pregnant also raises a host of new questions about fitness. Whether you have an established exercise regime or whether you are not quite as committed to going to the gym or walking to work as you hoped that you might be, you are likely to be wondering what sort of physical activity you should be doing now and to what level.

As with the diet question, all sorts of myths suddenly crawl out of the woodwork; “Don’t get too hot, it harms the baby”; “Don’t jump around, you’ll miscarry”; “Don’t do sit-ups, you’ll cramp your baby’s growth”.

Ideas such as these based on a mixture of anecdote and misconception, used to be passed down through the generations without much questioning or the wisdom behind them. However, we are fortunate that our knowledge and thinking on the subject of exercise in the first trimester has evolved considerably in recent decades.

So while in your mother’s day, the idea of playing a game of tennis during early pregnancy would have raised eyebrows, nowadays, doctors advise the majority of pregnant women that moderate exercise throughout the nine months is of positive benefit.