The Food Medic - S9 Ask Dr Hazel: Re-establishing healthy habits in the postpartum period

Episode Date: February 10, 2023

Welcome back to Ask Dr Hazel. Our listener question this week is “As a first time mum with a 7 week old, it is time to re-establish healthy habits. I am struggling to re-establish healthy habits around a busy and not so flexible schedule.”To find out more, check out The Female Factor book, available online and from all good book stores. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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If you would like to submit a question of your own to the podcast, please send your audio recorded questions to info at thefoodmedic.co.uk. So let's jump into this week's question. Hi Hazel, so as a first-time mum to announce seven-week-old, I'm trying to re-establish healthy habits around movement and sort of food and nutrition, which have dropped off substantially since giving birth. I'm really struggling to build healthy habits back in basically due to sort of a lack of routine and time because baby schedule is very different to mine. So my question is how to reintroduce healthy habits around a busy and not so flexible schedule. Okay, so re-establishing healthy habits in the postpartum period. Slight disclaimer before

we begin that I am not a mum and I've never had a baby, so I do not have the experience that you're going through, but I can offer you some advice and I'll do my best to keep your situation in my mind. So when it comes to healthy habits, often the biggest thing when it comes to new mums is nutrition and movement. And let's take physical activity does not need to be a structured form of exercise to count and all movement counts and what I mean by that is oftentimes we can get bogged down by we have to go to the gym or we have to go for a run or it has to be 30 minutes or 60 minutes to count but based on the recommendations that we provide physical activity can include all forms of movement be that structured or not so it could be taking the baby for a walk it could be playing

with your kids it could be cycling the bike it could be doing gardening it could be dancing any form of movement that you enjoy and you can stick to and you can include in your schedule is perfect. Now, the recommendations for women in the postpartum period is the same for all adults. And that's 150 minutes per week. So that roughly can be about 20 to 30 minutes per day. If that seems like unachievable for you right now, try break it up. It could be 10 minutes in the morning 10 minutes at lunchtime 10 minutes in the afternoon there's nothing to say that that has to

be all together and like I said just because it's not a 60 minute session does not mean that it doesn't count so that would be my top tip when it comes to nutrition again it's really important that you're thinking about you in addition to thinking about baby, because you need to think about your recovery. You've just gone through nine months of pregnancy and your body also needs to heal. So it's really important that you're fueling appropriately, making sure you're getting in all of your main macronutrients, your carbohydrates, your protein and your healthy, and all the micronutrients from your fruits and veg, and all your plant based foods. So that's key. But again, I realized that you're battling with looking after baby feeds, sleep times, that kind of thing. So it might be

that you're having smaller meals across the day, it might be that you're batch cooking, and freezing some of those meals so that you can reach to them when you're extremely busy if you have friends or family who are reaching out and asking how they can help maybe ask them to cook a meal for you or batch cook a chili or a stew or lasagna something that will last a couple of days and it's one less thing for you to think about the other thing that's really important during this time again of course is sleep and while this advice may be not super practical right now sleeping when you can is is really important if you're not getting enough sleep napping when you can and if that's not possible doing things like yoga nidra which you can find lots

of youtube videos for is basically like a restorative type of meditation and can be as effective as a nap so if you could even do 10 minutes of that that might be helpful in making you feel a bit more rejuvenated if you're really tired during this time. Again, the last thing I would say is to approach this from a place with compassion, self-compassion. It's not an easy time if you are a new mum and you're juggling lots of things. So focus on doing one thing at a time. Focus on really small steps

and remember that these little things all add up in the end so yes that would be my best advice and I'm wishing you lots of luck and lots of love and happiness with your new baby.