Pregnancy & Baby
Hey preggo Mamas! I'd love to chat about pregnancy swelling (also called edema) and how you can try to avoid it. I"m currently 8 months pregnant (after 3 rounds of IVF) and a nurse, so I have a fair amount of personal experience in this area. I've been following Dr. Brewer's Diet for Pregnancy and truly believe that increasing my protein intake had GREATLY helped! I'm still wearing my wedding ring and my feet look pretty normal. I aim for 80-100 grams of protein a day, which honestly isn't too hard for me since I love cheese, meat, and yogurt. In addition to protein, I do NOT limit my salt intake, which is pretty opposite of what people think. To break it down in as simple as a way that I can, if you limit salt, there won't be as much salt circulating around in your veins, which means the cells that are touching your veins will want to "suck up" the fluid in your veins to balance the salt out. This leads to swelling. However, if you have adequate salt in your diet, your cells will want to give up fluid to balance it out/dilute the "saltiness" in your veins. Then, your veins carry this extra salt/fluid to your kidneys and you pee it out. Voila! No swelling! Protein helps big time, too, since it sort of converts to albumin and that's also good for you to pee out. A cheat way I LOVE to get an easy 18g of protein is Vital Proteins Collagen powder . It's a powder you can put in almost anything, but I like to put it in my decaf lattes (if you look into Dr. Brewer's diet, it encourages a lot of milk intake, which I didn't normally drink before pregnancy- but milk in lattes is yummy!)/ It is tasteless and odorless and NOT girth at all! I've also put this in orange juice, cranberry juice, and tea (red raspberry tea, hello!). Anyway. I hope this helps someone out there! I know the salt thing blew my mind. Just do your own research and don't just blindly limit your salt intake if you're experiencing swelling. Good luck and baby dust (should I be saying labor dust now?) to you all! -Kelsey
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