2nd Trimester: Ayurvedic Care for Pregnancy 3 of 6

This is about at 12 weeks and this is the point when women and men may start telling more people about the pregnancy. The first trimester is a tenuous time in fetal development. It's actually embryological development moving towards fetal development. More miscarriages occur in the first trimester than at any other time during pregnancy. Many times women don't even know they're pregnant. The egg just doesn't implant and they have a normal period. So they were pregnant for a very short time. Other times women do get to the point of missing a period and having some symptoms. But the the pregnancy is really tenuous. The fetus is just beginning to develop and if there's any problem in the genes, if there's any problem in the egg or the sperm, it's possible it becomes non-viable during that time. So many people breathe a sigh of relief when the second trimester starts because they've moved away from the high risk time of pregnancy. There's still some risk. There's always risk but it is lessened greatly. In the second trimester, metabolism is ramping up. By the time you get into this phase, you have what's called a fetus. Before that you had more of an embryo. Fetus in Latin means little one and what it looks like is a little human. It looks like a little tiny human who has little feet, little toes, little fingers on the hands and now everything is going to start metabolizing. The organs forming and the tissues growing. This is a hot and sharp time. The acne is strong. The blood volume is going to double during this time. Now it takes time. It's taken it four weeks before it doubles. It's not like it doubled overnight. We're going to talk about the pregnancy lifestyle but this is why exercise in early pregnancy is so important because we have to teach the body how to use this new volume of blood. We want to strengthen those blood vessels and get that blood circulating as it's increasing. Then we're not kind of sluggish once we have this blood volume fully doubled. They may crave sour foods to build the blood. The digestion is strong during this period and typically people take advantage of this. They enjoy your cravings. They get their nest set up. The thing with the acne here is this is the time when someone really may feel a stronger appetite because there is more demand for nutrition to the fetus at this point. Before it was very tiny so the nutritional demand was small. There was tremendous growth during this time. As far as getting your nest set up, the other thing that happens in the second trimester is that fatigue that the women experienced in the first one lightens up a lot and they feel this renewed energy. For many this is when the maternal nesting instinct comes on. They're creating a nursery or trying to figure out what kind of sleeping arrangements they'll have. They're looking at all the accoutrements that they might want to have with the baby. A challenge though is acid reflex. Now progesterone again that has prevented uterine contraction is also kind of slowing down peristaltic action and it's weakening muscular contraction. We get a little bit less muscular contraction at that esophageal sphincter and that can lead to acid reflex when we get digestion happening. The important thing is to eat but not to overeat. A pregnant woman may crave sour. Sour taste builds rocta and so there's the old you know the old stereotype of women craving dill pickles. Now that would have in the olden days the dill pickles would have had probiotics in addition to the sour taste. Natalie ate whole limes during her first pregnancy and craved mangoes. John says his mom craved cherries when she was pregnant. Different women crave different things and there may be you know giving into those cravings can be important if they're getting vitamins and minerals that are in that food that would be beneficial for both the mother and the child. And it's okay. It's good to gain weight. Typically the weight gains about a half a pound a week after week 20. And heavy carb intake makes big babies although we have nine pounder after a protein-rich diet. The big baby thing, we'll talk about that for a second. Usually a heavy carb intake causes the body to be slightly a little bit higher glycemic meaning a little bit higher blood sugar. The higher the blood sugar in the mother the higher the blood sugar delivered to the fetus. Kind of the more production of fats and tissue because there's going to fuel metabolism. On a protein-rich diet you can still build a lot of tissue. You've got a lot of raw material for it. You don't tend to overbuild babies. A nine pounder though is pretty big. So what do they take for blood building foods? Lots of great pitta pacifying foods. Things that are strongly antioxidant. These are things that are also supporting the gut lining. As I mentioned blueberries, beets, suzuki beans, prunes, nettles. And the nettles could be raw. They could be taken and cooked. You know take them raw because they're prickly. But they can be taken in that form or they can be taken in teas. They have a high calcium content. So keeping the mineral content high is really beneficial. Now we regulate the agni. And how do we regulate the agni? We observe our appetite, our digestion, our weight, and elimination, and presence of ama. That's how we gauge the health of the agni. We regulate the agni with our food choices, our food habits, and our culinary spicing. So I'm paying attention during this time if the person has more appetite, there's more volume of food. The food you want it to be sophistic and abundant, heavy, moist, dense, nutrient rich. And then maybe they need some help digesting it. You know maybe their digestion slows down with that sweet potato. So I might put culinary spices on it. And then the food habits. Eating without distraction, kind of being present with your food and conscious becomes really important. So you can be aware of when are you full? When should you stop? Because for sometimes during the second trimester, a person does better eating smaller portions multiple times during the day than sitting and eating a large portion of something three times a day. When we pay attention to the state of agni, we have less need to pay attention to the state of ama. But if there is a weakened agni, if it's low or variable, we may have ama form. And it's really ideal during this time to ensure the body remains ama free because any ama in the mother's body is going to transfer into the fetal body as well. So by looking at our food choices, our food habits, our culinary spicing, we can support the body in having healthy agni and diminished ama. Promoting regular bowel movements can be a little bit trickier because the presence of progesterone tends to slow down peristaltic action and makes elimination more problematic. So making sure there's plenty of good healthy fiber in the diet, oils, so the stool, so the entire GI tract stays moist, and lots of water. That will give a softness to the stool and make it easier to pass with that weakened peristalsis. Let's look at our tissues and stratum c. At this time, the prana is high, the levels are strong, the woman feels she could do anything, but it's important for her to conserve that energy. Her body is utilizing that energy as well internally as she is externally, so she wants to contain the energy. The blood volume increases, and this is a time when gestational diabetes may settle in. Gestational diabetes is elevated blood sugar. Typically, it occurs during pregnancy. It can be related to diet, a diet too heavy in carbohydrates and processed foods, but it can also be due to that progesterone, this slowing down of absorption that's going to happen all throughout the body. So if we slow down that absorption of sugars, the blood sugar levels are going to go higher. Typically, gestational diabetes is identified through urine test or blood test. I remember having the gestational diabetes test when I was pregnant, and it was a glucose tolerance test. So they have you drink like an eight ounce glass of pure glucose syrup, and then they test your blood sugar level in an hour, and then they test your blood sugar level in another hour, and another hour over four hours, and they're watching for how quickly does your body metabolize that sugar. If the body is not metabolizing the sugar quickly or appropriately, then there's too much sugar that's going to be getting to the baby, and that can be problematic. So then they would adjust the diet. In some cases, they do go to insulin. In most cases, they work with exercise and diet to reduce that. In the Rasa, the Stania, the Rasa Datu, one of the Upadatus of the Rasa Datu is breast milk, and so the breast milk begins to develop. However, the woman is not lactating at this time. The lactation ducts are preparing for their eventual lactation. The breast may become larger as the lactation ducts enlarge and begin to go through their cycles. The skin may develop stretch marks, and as it mentions here, it's a good time to begin moisturizing the skin with shea or coconut butter. Unfortunately, stretch marks are largely genetic, so if your mother or your aunts show up with a lot of stretch marks, it's likely you'll have more stretch marks. Knowing this, you can advise your clients who do have that predisposition in their genetics towards stretch marks. You can advise them to start this moisturizing with shea and coconut butter, doing that daily Abhyanga. They can be doing that as they're preparing for pregnancy. Keep the tissue moist, keep the tissue supple, and then you will have less of the stretch marks prevalent. With the Rakta, with the blood volume, we know that the blood volume doubles. By the end of the second trimester, you'll have 50% more blood that you had at the onset of pregnancy. Why? Rakta is built on demand. When we need more oxygenation in the cells, we increase the volume of Rakta.2. When we have a secondary body, the fetal body that's drawing our Rakta, then we notice that drop in invigoration, and we want to make sure we have enough blood, so the body raises the blood levels to make sure it can supply enough oxygen to both mother and child. With that increased Rakta, there may be more rashes. You might see skin rashes on the face or skin rashes on the body or other heat-related condition. When it's balanced, we have that healthy pregnancy glow that is so desirable. It's typically, that lets you know that all the body systems are functioning well. It's reflective of the state of the liver. It's possible at this time the person can become anemic. Anemia is when we have low iron in the cells. Why? We've increased the number of red blood cells in a very short period of time, and if we haven't had adequate iron intake, then these new red blood cells will not have adequate iron to do their work. So it's another good reason to start that iron intake during the first trimester. As soon as one knows they're pregnant, increase their iron levels so that the new red blood cells are formed with plenty of iron. The iron is the part of the red blood cell that binds with the oxygen, and so this is going to carry good oxygenation to the cells. So iron-rich foods become important. Iron supplements such as fluoridics. I can't say enough good things about liquid iron supplementation. If the supplementation worsens the bowel movement though, because it can be constipating and binding, what I have people do is divide the dose throughout the day. So say for example their dose was a teaspoon of fluoridics, and then they got some kind of binding, which doesn't usually happen with fluoridics, but if it did then what I'd want them to do is to break it down, take a quarter teaspoon and a little bit of water four times a day. If you can spread the iron out, you won't get that binding all in one at one time, and it doesn't seem to have that same effect. It's possible a woman during second trimester may show up with nose bleeds, because of increased blood pressure, because of the increased blood volume. She may expect experience larger veins on her legs, even going towards varicosities. These would all be indications of what's happening with the Rakta Datu and the Rakta Vahashrotas. With the Asti, the hair gets a lot thicker. The hair shedding, we're dropping between 75 and 150 hairs a day normally. During pregnancy, the body stops that. Progesterone causes everything to kind of slow down, so the hair shedding slows down. Rebecca mentions her friends and her sisters talk about missing that thick and shiny pregnancy hair. Oh my god, I should put up pictures, which is huge hair. Then after pregnancy, as the estrogen levels drop and the progesterone levels drop, hair just starts coming out in clumps. It's very frightening, because you think you're going to have bald patches, but really you're just losing all that hair that you didn't lose. Say if we were supposed to lose 75 hairs a day, all of a sudden you're going to be losing 500 hairs a day to make up for lost time, for the hairs that should have fallen out. Then coming up right behind them will be little tiny hairs to replace them. It does balance itself out, but it is scary when women are watching their hair in the bathroom, as they're in the shower and just watching it fall out. That happens after pregnancy. During pregnancy, it just gets thicker and thicker, because of all the great hormones that are running through the body. In the mind, this is a really a time of excitement. Usually now the pregnancy during second trimester is when it starts to show, and during the second trimester is also when the mother may feel the fetus moving. There's a lot of really exciting pregnancy experiences during the second trimester. We know their chances of miscarriage drop significantly. They go from week 12 to week 13, and there's a lot of excitement. She has energy now. Her sex drive may be back as her body's responding to the levels of estrogen and progesterone. Some women have high sex drive all throughout their pregnancy. Some women have no sex drive all throughout their pregnancy. Again, it's just so important, in my opinion, to listen to the mom's body and meet its needs. The parents start letting others know they are expecting. We live in a culture now where people are letting others know at week one and two. That's a really tenuous time, so many people will wait until after week 12, especially those people who've experienced miscarriage before, that they want to be as private as possible until they're beyond the time of greatest risk. As I said, they begin to show, so the baby bump shows up, and of course mom feels the baby move, and that's magical. For me, the first time was kind of like, was that it? Was that it? Because at this time, this fetus is still tiny, so it kind of feels like a goldfish swimming around in your belly. In the Mano Vajashrotas, the practicalities, this is the time when a woman may be looking for finding birthing classes, seeking out a doula, deciding on her birthing plan. I would say it starts in first trimester, a woman gathering the books, you know, what to expect when you're expecting, or the spiritual midwifery, or any of the books that she wants to read, but then it's during the second trimester where she sits down and reads them. You know, it's like I'm gathering storm during the first trimester, but it really starts to matter during the second trimester, as I want to look at, oh what am I experiencing during this month, and to see do I match the timelines. Planning a baby shower, or celebration, or a blessing way of some kind, it's really interesting, and this gets a little unsettling for moms sometimes, is moms get so much attention when they're pregnant. So there's, they become the focus of attention, they walk into a room, if you want to know how they're doing, and have them sit down, let me get you something, and after the birth of the baby, that rapidly shifts to, all the attention goes to the baby, and the moms are going, oh I'm still on my intention. So these are really beneficial things to do, is to honor the mom, and her new and adapting role as mother. They do a lot of researching, baby supplies, like cribs, etc. We also said this was a time when that nesting instinct really was flourishing, so they're looking at amassing what they're going to need to take care of this baby. This is primarily a pitta dosha time, there's a lot of metabolism, and growth, and transformation that's happening. So a pitta pacifying diet can mitigate heated conditions, and support increasing rakta datu. So we think of it, we always know that we go from kapha at the beginning of cycles, to pitta in the middle, to vata at the end. So we went from kapha in that beginning first trimester, was time period of great growth, building of tissue in the mother's body. In second trimester, it's time period of more metabolism. There's more heat, there's more drive, there's more activity.