Eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia affect a large majority of women and tend to peak during the child bearing years when women are most conscious about their appearance.
Eating disorders can have several harmful effects on the woman’s body, noticeably on the woman’s fertility by affecting her menstrual cycles and creating hormonal disturbances. While anorexia involves extreme starvation, bulimia is characterized by excessive eating and purging with the use of laxatives.
The ability to ovulate gets affected with eating disorders and a vast majority of anorexics suffer from irregular periods. If you are planning to get pregnant after recovering from an eating disorder, here are some of the things to keep in mind.
The Effect Of Eating Disorders On Pregnancy
Women should be mindful of certain effects that eating disorders have on pregnant women. Women who struggle with bulimia often gain weight and lose weight rapidly. This puts them at a risk of developing hypertension, preeclampsia and gestational diabetes.They are more likely to have postpartum depression and problems in breast-feeding due to the malnutrition in the body.
The eating disorders harm the health of the foetus by causing birth defects, congenital deformities, low birth weight, cleft palate and a host of pregnancy complications like pre-term labour and miscarriage. Severe malnourishment can deplete the foetus of vital nutrients and lead to severe physical and mental retardation. Keeping all these factors in mind, it is important that women nourish themselves and come back to their normal weight before conceiving.
Achieving A Healthy Weight Gain
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Make sure you achieve a healthy weight gain. This will require plenty of effort from your side. You will need to go in for intense counselling and therapy sessions to help you achieve the ideal weight. Once the ideal weight has been achieved, you will need to see a doctor who can tell you the best way to conceive.
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Prenatal Vitamins
You will need to boost your immunity and get back your energy in order to conceive. This involves taking the vital prenatal vitamins, which are needed to conceive. This will also prevent the chances of birth defects occurring in the foetus.
Well-Balanced Meals
Since anorexics have a problem in eating meals, taking small meals very 2-3 hours will help them cope better with their disorder especially when they get pregnant. This will also ensure that the foetus has all the vital nutrients needed to grow and flourish.
A Team Of Specialists
At all times in the pregnancy you will need a team of doctors, counsellors and specialists who can help to monitor your condition and encourage you so that you don’t go back to the starvation diets. You will also need a lactation consultant who can help you with breast feeding so that the baby gets all the vital nutrients in the first six months of his/her life.
All these steps are necessary and crucial in order to have an uneventful pregnancy and a healthy full term baby as you are recuperating and recovering from an eating disorder like anorexia.
