How eating well can help during pregnancy.

            There are a number of aches and pains that come with pregnancy.  While back in the day many doctors just brushed them aside and said that is part of pregnancy, now a days more and more doctors are recommending a well balanced diet to help.  Here are just a few pregnancy aliments that a good diet can help.

            A common complaint during pregnancy is tooth and gum problems.  To help keep your teeth healthy and your baby’s teeth healthy, make sure you get enough calcium and vitamin C.   Always keep some sugarless gum near you or chew on some nuts and cheese. 

            It is also not uncommon for many women to feel dizzy or lightheaded during pregnancy especially if they have gone to long without eating. This is why it is so important to eat through out the day and snack also.  Keep your snacks as healthy as you can and stay away from junk food whenever you can.  These foods will give you a quick rush of energy but ultimately leave you feeling worse than you did before you ate them.  Keep yourself hydrated also.  Snacking and drinking will help boost your blood sugar and keep you hydrated which can help you fight dizziness.

            Sometime during your second trimester, you may find yourself awakening in the middle of the night to leg cramps.   Leg cramps can come from not getting enough calcium.  Some say that the leg cramps implicate a shortage of magnesium while some say that dehydration can be the cause.  Either way makes sure you are getting enough calcium and magnesium.   If you suffer from leg cramps you might find it helpful to drink a glass of milk, or have a piece of cheese before you go to turn in to bed at night.   Make sure you drink at least 8 glasses of water throughout the day to keep yourself hydrated also.

            Swelling is another pain in pregnancy.  While severe swelling could be a sign of preeclampsia, there is a certain amount of swelling that is normal and healthy during pregnancy.   In fact more than seventy five percent of all pregnant women experience some sort of swelling.   The most common cause is too much water retention.  Staying away from salty foods and drinking extra water will help you keep the swelling to a bare minimum. 

            Pregnancy is also a time where you skin might taken on the appearance of a teenager getting ready to hit puberty.    Some women suffer from dry skin, which can be cured by making sure you drink plenty of fluids to increase moisture.  If you have flakey skin, eat more omega-3 rich foods or seeds and nuts.   There are some people who suffer from some skin discoloration and too much blotchiness could be a folic-acid deficiency.  This is another reason why it is so important to make sure you are taking your prenatal vitamin.

            Lastly, we have all heard about the great head of hair some women are blessed with during pregnancy since hormones prevent hair from falling out at its normal rate.  There are some women though who find that their hair is less than stellar during pregnancy.  This could be due to the lack of vitamins that you might be getting.  Through out pregnancy it is important that you get enough vitamin A, B and C.   Vitamin A will keep your hair and scalp healthy.  Vitamin B will help with your hair growth and vitamin C is needed for strength.   Make sure you are getting enough of this in your diet. 

            Eating healthy throughout pregnancy does not only ensure your chances of a healthy pregnancy but it will also help you avoid some of the more uncomfortable aspects of pregnancy too.

Perspectives on Mental Health Recovery

If you have a chronic disease like heart attack or diabetes, you will have to live life with it. You will learn to adjust after each attack and would know the signs that there is an acute attack budding. The same is true with recovery from a mental illness. You cannot expect that during treatment, you will be a renewed man. Symptoms would still be apparent and you would experience things that are sometimes hopeless and debilitating but still you have to adjust through them. And with each adjustment, you would feel that you are starting to move forward, leaving your mental illness behind.

Mental health recovery is all about improvement from a bad case to something better. It is a continuous process and definitely not a linear one. You would move from square one to square two but you should always be ready to move one step back. You would learn newer ways to control the symptoms of your mental illness and would have insights on how to cope with them. There would be a lot of disappointments and errors the results from these errors are oftentimes rewarding.

Mental health recovery is a lifelong process as much as mental illness took years to develop sometimes even decades. A person could struggle through years of being controlled solely by a mental disorder and will have to face a lifelong effort to get out of it. You may achieve a life beyond the chains of your previous mental illness symptoms but you would still have to bout with intermittent attacks of symptoms.

One crucial factor to all kinds of illnesses is early intervention. Someone who presents symptoms of schizophrenia during earlier stages have a better chance of easier recovery with early intervention than someone who has aggravated case. Likewise, any signs of relapse that are recognized and treated early could define the barrier between going through the same disorder again or completely shutting all doors towards total recovery.

However, recovery from a mental disorder is just one of the many parts of the process. A person suffering from mental illness should also work to restore his mental health or sense of well-being.

Many individuals who have histories of mental illness often resort to a life that is withdrawn from the public due to social stigma and discrimination associated with the mental disorder. This leads to impaired sense of self-worth thus invaliding the whole idea of recovery.

For most people, the hardest stage of the recovery process is not the beginning but the end. In this stage, a person has to reclaim everything that he has lost during the entire period he had the mental illness plus every lost opportunity that he would have taken prior to the onset of symptoms.

Sadly, reclaiming these bits of life is far harder than all the aspects of recovery combined. Going back to "what could have been" takes a very long time as well as mending the damages caused by the mental illness due to very limited opportunities opened to people who have suffered a mental disorder. 

But this shouldn't be. You may not be able to go back to your previous job or do the things that you used to do but you could redirect your life to something different but equally rewarding. This has happened before to other people, it will happen to you.

Always, Plus size and pregnant

            A majority of plus sized women who are pregnant will experience a healthy pregnancy, but they are at a risk of having a more bumpy ride than someone who is not overweight.

            Women who are overweight, or have a body mass index (BMI) of 25 or more are at a greater risk of certain pregnancy complications like gestational diabetes and preeclampsia.   No knows for sure why weight matters so much, as far as most doctors are concerned it is just one piece of the puzzle.  The truth is most plus size women go on to have completely uneventful pregnancies and deliver perfect healthy babies as long as they eat well, exercise and watch their weight throughout pregnancy.   The biggest problem with being plus sized and pregnant is that you are at a greater for some of the following.

            Studies have shown that overweight women have a higher rate of neural tube defects which are problems with how your baby’s brain and spinal cord develop.    These studies are unable to pin point exactly why overweight women are at a higher risk and have a higher rate.  Some studies have shown that overweight women have lower blood folate levels than a woman who is of normal weight.  Folate is needed especially in the early stages of pregnancy to help avoid neaural tube defects.     Because of this, if you are overweight your doctor may prescribe you a prenatal vitamin with 1000 micrograms of folic acid.  In fact, if you are overweight and planning on becoming pregnant, you may want to start taking folic acid before you even conceive.  

            Gestational diabetes is another complication that overweight women are at a greater risk of developing.  Gestational diabetes is elevated blood-sugar level during pregnancy.   The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development estimate that women with normal BMI which is between 19 and 24 have a 2% chance of developing gestational diabetes.   Overweight women have a 6% chance of developing this condition and obese women or women who have a BMI of 30 or more have a 9% chance of being diagnosed with gestational diabetes.    Remember though that if you are diagnosed with this, you can still go on and have a healthy pregnancy with a modified eating plan. 

            Almost 10% of obese and overweight women develop a condition called gestational hypertension.  This is when your blood pressure becomes high with a reading of 140 over 90 or higher after your 20^th week of pregnancy but you do not have any protein in your urine.   Gestational hypertension is usually a small concern but can put you at a higher risk for preeclampsia (which is indicated by high blood pressure AND protein in your urine), intrauterine growth restriction, preterm birth, placental abruption and still birth.  If you do go on to develop preeclampsia, your weight is probably not that big of a factor.  In fact if you are under 35 and overweight you have LESS of a chance of developing preeclampsia that a woman over 35 and a healthy weight. 

            Perhaps the most common complication for overweight women is longer labors and the possible risk of a cesarean section.  Nearly 26-35% of deliveries are cesarean delivery.    You are at a bigger risk if you have been diagnosed with preeclampsia or gestational hypertension or have a large baby. 

            Eating healthy throughout your pregnancy and working with your doctor to manage your weight will help reduce these risks and increase your already high chances of having a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby.

How To Planning While You Pregnant

              Planning ahead when it comes to food could mean the difference between making wise choices and making irrational choices.   It helps us learn how to undo our bad habits and being pregnant is a great time to try and change any bad habits you may have.  The best way to break bad habits and to form new ones is to constantly plan ahead.  

            You want to plan for snack attacks especially if you are not going to be home.  You want to make sure you take some healthy food with you, so that you can resist the temptation of going to the vending machine and taking out that candy bar.   Throw some nuts into your pocketbook or some cheese sticks in case of any hunger that might hit you through out the day. 

            Plan your food shopping list.  Some people find that when they go to the supermarket with just a rough idea of what they need they usually wind up forgetting something important or they wind up buying half of the food store.   Take a few minutes to plan your meals for the week and buy what you need to go with it. 

            Speaking of planning meals, that is a excellent idea.  Plan for meals you can realistically prepare.  Do not plan for meals that you do not have the time to prepare.  You are only going to stress yourself out.  Look for recipes that are easy and quick to make.   Do not try to make something where you can’t pronounce half of the ingredients and need to shop at a gourmet cooking store.  Chances are you are still working and the last thing you want to do is come home after a long day and then slave over a complicated recipe.   Also, planning your meals out for the week tends to help you be a little more organized for the week.  It is no secret that pregnant women tend to forget things and this is due to their changing hormone level. By taking out the time to sit and plan your meals for the week will help you stay a little organized and save you a lot of time.  If you already know what you are making for dinner, you do not have to worry about coming home after a long day and standing in front of the fridge trying to decide what to make.   

            You also want to make sure that get yourself in the habit of using vegetables are your main dish.  Instead of doing chicken breast with a side salad, make your salad your main dish and the chicken breast a side one.   You also want to buy your vegetables as fresh as possible, even if that means making two trips to the grocery store through out the week.  The fresher the vegetable, the better they are for you and your baby.   The same holds true for fruit also.   Keep plenty of fruit on hand, especially if you tend to crave sweet stuff through out your pregnancy.  Instead of reaching for a candy bar, you can reach for a piece of fruit dipped in cool whip

            By planning ahead for the week or even month to come will help you stay on track with your eating and decrease the risk of you making the wrong choice if a craving should hit you.

Pathogenic Parent-Child Relationship

The traumatic interpersonal relationship between a parent or a parent-figure and a child is viewed as a negative environment for the child's growth and development. This relationship only means that their relationship is structured in the manner that it damages a child's psychological well-being. These give stress to certain beliefs that are psychologically unfavorable to the child such as irrational beliefs on self-blame, irrational explanations on traumatic experiences, maladaptive behaviors, unconscious guilt, shame and doubt about oneself. These beliefs are very powerful and could lead the child to over generalize negative incidents.  

Children experience all sorts of negative environments including war and violence, daily stress, economic problems and accelerating negative effects of technological changes. But among these, the most aggravated is the disabling relationship he has with his immediate environment- his parents, his family and his direct interaction to his society. Above everything else, there is a need to modify these negative environments in order to develop children with better mental health and in the future, adults who can readily adapt to the stressors from their environments.