The Better Baby Book (26 page)

If you don't feel rested during daylight hours without the use of artificial stimulants like caffeine, try getting more regular sleep. A good gauge of this is to see how you feel right after you wake up, not after you've been up for a while. If you still feel groggy, go back to sleep. If you can't because you have to get up for work, that means your body needs you to go to bed a little earlier the next night.

It's important to sleep in a room that is pitch-black (no light at all from any source). This not only means no TV, computer, or smartphone screens, it also means no hall light shining through a slightly open door, no street light shining through a window, no digital clock—nothing. The light receptors in your eyes are very sensitive, and seeing even the smallest amount of light can keep your pineal gland on a wakefulness program, which inevitably affects sex-hormone levels. You may not even notice a light level that can affect this.

Women sleeping in lighted quarters have more patchy mucus, short luteal phases (the days after ovulation and before menstruation), and other menstrual irregularities. These irregularities often cause infertility. Irregular, infertile women have become regular in one to three cycles and pregnant in about five cycles simply by removing all light from their sleeping quarters. Light in sleeping quarters has also been associated with early-term miscarriage. Going to bed at exactly the same time isn't nearly as important as providing your body with sufficient time for sleep in total darkness.

Here are a few tips for getting healthy sleep:

• Don't eat snacks right before bed, especially if they're high in sugar or carbohydrates. High blood sugar inhibits healthy sleep. Small amounts of raw honey are okay.
  
• Within an hour before going to sleep, stop looking at screens, including cell phones, computers, and televisions. These units provide a great deal of stimulation to the brain and can keep you awake longer than you want. If it's necessary to use a computer, there is software that can modify your operating system to decrease screen brightness and optimize hues to decrease eyestrain.
  
• Try to get to bed by 11:00 p.m. Your body tries to do most of its regeneration between 11:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m., and this regeneration won't really happen if you're awake—at least not as much.
  
• Don't keep your room too hot.
  
• Don't sleep on a bed with metal in it. For a detailed explanation of this, see chapter 10.
  
• If you really can't get your room pitch-black, wear a black eye mask.
  
• If giving your body eight to nine hours of darkness doesn't keep you alert, wakeful, and clear-minded throughout the next day, there's a deeper issue at hand. Possible culprits include caffeine addiction, chronic fatigue, toxicity, nutritional deficiency, or poor sleep quality from a condition like sleep apnea. If getting more sleep in total darkness doesn't help, we recommend seeing a holistic physician. Remember how harmful high levels of stress hormones are for your baby? Stress-hormone levels rise especially when you're short on proper sleep. If you aren't sleeping well, correcting this before pregnancy will be a big help to your baby.
  

Exercise

Getting in shape during the six months before pregnancy is helpful because most beneficial types of exercise become difficult as pregnancy progresses. Being in shape before you get pregnant gives you a huge advantage during the pregnancy and especially during the recovery period after giving birth.

By “in shape,” we certainly don't mean preparing for a marathon. Like most things, exercise is best done moderately. Two to three times a week of vigorous exercise (in which you reach the point of not being able to continue) is usually about right. Although a sedentary lifestyle isn't healthy, four hours of hard exercise every day isn't healthy, either.

Exercise burns energy, but it actually keeps your energy level high.

Exercise strengthens the heart, lungs, and muscles. Muscles are meant to be used. Inactivity deprives the muscles of the nutrients they need to stay healthy and inhibits their ability to respond to insulin and absorb blood sugar for energy use. That leads to too much insulin in the bloodstream, which promotes obesity and endangers ovulation, conception, and pregnancy. Aside from not eating sugar, physical activity is the best way to keep blood sugar and insulin in check. Exercise helps people to lose weight not because it burns energy but primarily because it increases insulin sensitivity and lowers the insulin level. A high insulin level signals the body to store fat for later use. Exercise is essential for women who are having trouble getting pregnant because of an insulin issue.

Our bodies weaken and waste away if we don't use them. In 1966, a study was conducted in which five healthy men spent three weeks of their summer vacations in bed. Before their time in bed, the men weren't lazy, depressed, or fatigued, and they had no major health issues. When the men got out of bed three weeks later, they had a higher heart rate, a weaker heart, higher blood pressure, more body fat, and less lean muscle than before.

After that the men started on an eight-week exercise program designed to reverse the deterioration caused by the excessive bed rest. By the end of the eight weeks, some of the men were in better shape than they had been before the study. Thirty years later, the researchers found the same five men and discovered that they had gained an average of fifty pounds and had lower heart strength. They started a six-month walking, jogging, and cycling program, after which their heart rates, blood pressure, and maximum heart-pumping power returned to the same values they had been before the initial study began thirty years earlier.

Researchers conducted a similar bed-rest study of older men and women of average age sixty-seven. The older people lost more muscle in ten days than the young men in the earlier study had lost in a month. The older you get, the more important it is to use your body. Getting good exercise is one of the best ways to prevent common diseases.

Yet even though it's critical to get good exercise, too much causes excess cortisol release and puts the body under stress. It's also important not to be too lean—you definitely want to have some fat reserves. In the 1970s, Rose E. Frisch, an associate professor of population sciences at Harvard, observed women who worked diligently to keep their weight low, like gymnasts, swimmers, and marathon runners. She noticed that these women often stopped having monthly periods during intense exercise. A day or two of rest each week was enough to boost their fat levels enough to jump-start regular menstruation. A small amount of fat storage is healthy and even necessary for normal bodily function. Women who had regular menstrual cycles were then asked to engage in intense exercise for several weeks to see if the reverse effect occurred, and indeed it did. The intense exercise caused irregular menstruation in women who had been regular before the exercise.

The combination of heavy exercise and decreased fat reserves interferes with the hypothalamus's ability to generate gonadotropin-releasing hormone. Without this hormone, the pituitary gland isn't signaled to produce enough luteinizing hormone, which is required to cause eggs to mature and be released from the ovaries. This disrupts ovulation and shuts down the menstrual cycle. From the standpoint of survival, this makes perfect sense: the woman's body knows that it doesn't have enough stored energy to conduct a successful pregnancy. So even though some exercise is important to keep the insulin level low enough to become pregnant, exercising too much will actually shut down the female reproductive cycle. If you are exercising daily, you may want to reduce the frequency of your workouts, or at least increase the amount of sweet potatoes or rice you eat for dinner on workout days.

Types of Exercise

Exercise falls into two main categories: aerobic and resistance. Aerobic exercise is any continuous activity that uses up oxygen in the blood by working most of the body, causing the breathing and heart rates to increase. Swimming, running, walking, and cycling are examples of aerobic exercise. Resistance exercise usually works specific muscle groups. Your heart rate will go up during resistance exercise, but not as much as during aerobic exercise. Weight lifting, push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and the like are all resistance exercises. They strengthen the muscles and promote a lean body mass. Both types of exercise increase insulin sensitivity.

Aerobic exercise requires more oxygen. It increases heart strength, basal metabolic rate, and pulse pressure and decreases resting heart rate, blood pressure, and body fat percentage. Oxygen delivery to the tissues is improved dramatically with regular aerobic exercise, which makes the body function better at every task. Resistance exercise similarly increases basal metabolic rate. Resistance exercise causes faster excess weight loss and improves the body's fat profile. Although aerobic and resistance exercise offer different benefits, one isn't better than the other. A good exercise program includes both.

Why Exercise Is So Important for Fertility

The most important thing about exercise for fertility and pregnancy is that it increases insulin sensitivity. A study of twenty-six thousand women found that fertility was directly correlated with exercise. This is true because too much insulin promotes infertility. Insulin regulates the blood sugar level by escorting excess sugar into the body tissues, primarily the fat cells. Insulin is chemically similar to ovarian hormones that regulate the female reproductive cycle and help eggs to mature.

When the insulin level is elevated for an extended period, insulin blocks the receptors on the ovaries that are intended to receive ovarian hormones. Insulin does not promote egg maturity when attached to these receptors, so egg maturity will be delayed as long as insulin is occupying the receptors. The ovaries confuse the attached insulin with their own growth factors and actually decrease the production of their own hormones.

When excess insulin is attached to the receptors, it also stimulates the ovaries to produce excess androgen, disrupting the hormonal balance. Harmful consequences of excess androgen include cosmetic issues like acne, excess body hair, and changes in the blood lipid profile associated with heart disease. Insulin also blocks the enzymes that rupture the follicle wall at the time of ovulation. The overall effect of eating lots of sugar is progression toward infertility and illness.

Exercise (and eating a low-sugar diet) keeps the insulin level low by burning glucose instead of sending it back to the bloodstream. Regular use of muscle tissue improves the functioning of the mitochondria, the power plants inside cells that convert nutrients into energy. When you don't exercise, the mitochondria slow down. This is important in insulin sensitivity, because glucose isn't able to get into skeletal muscle tissue on its own—it requires a special protein called GLUT4.

GLUT4 picks up glucose from the blood and carries it through the cell membranes and into the muscle cells, where the glucose is used as fuel. If mitochondrial function is poor, free fatty acids running through the blood build up around the muscle cells and make it difficult or impossible for GLUT4 to get into them. Properly functioning mitochondria are able to clear away the free fatty acids and allow GLUT4 to do its job. When GLUT4 is refused, glucose remains in the blood and the insulin level rises.

If this situation is ongoing, insulin resistance will develop as more and more insulin is needed to regulate the blood sugar. People who have developed insulin resistance have up to 30 percent less mitochondria than people who don't have insulin resistance. This is usually the direct result of a lack of exercise. Physical inactivity results in a fast decline in oxygen uptake and mitochondrial activity. Aerobic exercise is the best way to oxygenate the body. It increases the overall mitochondrial surface area, which boosts mitochondrial function and increases insulin sensitivity. As your body gains a better ability to use oxygen, it becomes stronger and endurance increases. Short bursts of intense aerobic and resistance exercise together increase insulin sensitivity the most.

Exercise also causes the body to use energy. The body's storage unit for excess energy is adipose tissue, commonly called body fat. Adipose tissue is not a passive storage location; it's live tissue that sends signals to the rest of the body by producing hormones that influence appetite, the desire for physical activity, weight, and the reproductive cycle. Adiponectin is a common protein made by adipose tissue that triggers the fat-burning processes, making the cells more sensitive to insulin and enhancing ovulation.

The more weight a person gains, however, the less adiponectin the adipose tissue is able to make. A lower level of adiponectin promotes insulin resistance. Extra body fat also boosts interleukin-6, which interferes with the ability of a fertilized egg to implant itself in the uterine lining. If a woman is ten pounds overweight, it's not an issue, but if she's obese, there's a chance it's interfering with her hormone levels and contributing to infertility.

Yoga: Aerobic and Resistance Exercise All in One

Originating in India several thousand years ago, yoga is a system of postures and movements that combines aerobic and resistance exercises. The purpose of yoga is to heal the body while rejuvenating and sharpening the mind and the spirit, helping you to reach a stress-free state of contentment.

Yoga postures and movements strengthen the physical body and increase flexibility, both of which help throughout pregnancy, especially the third trimester. These postures and movements are often far outside our normal range of motion. Many people who practice yoga for the first time say that they feel muscles in their bodies that they didn't know existed. Through these postures and movements, yoga increases the blood flow and carries healing, detoxifying oxygen to deeper places in the body. It also corrects imbalances in muscle tightness that can promote stress. When these imbalances are removed, people feel more in tune with their bodies.

Imbalances can come from physical activity (or lack thereof) or negative emotions. Negative emotions like anger, fear, and resentment have noticeably damaging effects on health, and they're dangerous for a fetus. Yoga heals the body from the effects of these emotions and promotes clean energy flow throughout the body.