Making Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you To Know About Your Body
Making Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you To Know About Your Body
Podcast Description
Have you been surprised by what we do and don't know about pregnancy and birth today? If you are pregnant, or have been in the past, this show helps you understand what's happening (or has happened) to our bodies--both the short term and long term effects of this transformation. We explore the boundaries of our scientific grasp on the wildly complex processes of pregnancy and birth. After my complicated pregnancies, I went looking for answers and have interviewed hundreds of experts about women's health in this transition. Every Tuesday you'll hear:Scientists at the cutting edge who are trying to uncover how pregnancy and birth work and what happens when they don't workInformation you could use to better understand your own body in pregnancy.A better sense of the limits of your responsibility for what's happening inside your bodyListen to hear what you won't find on a blogpost or a book off the shelf.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast focuses on a wide range of topics such as the complexities of the endometrium's role in fertility, immune system interactions during pregnancy, the efficacy of aspirin in preventing preterm birth, and the significance of placental examination in maternal health. Specific episodes discuss groundbreaking research on uterine contractions, maternal health data, and the psychological impacts of childbirth like PTSD, aiming to demystify the pregnancy process while providing listeners actionable insights.
Have you been surprised by what we do and don’t know about pregnancy and birth today? If you are pregnant, or have been in the past, this show helps you understand what’s happening (or has happened) to our bodies–both the short term and long term effects of this transformation. We explore the boundaries of our scientific grasp on the wildly complex processes of pregnancy and birth.
After my complicated pregnancies, I went looking for answers and have interviewed hundreds of experts about women’s health in this transition.
Every Tuesday you’ll hear:
- Scientists at the cutting edge who are trying to uncover how pregnancy and birth work and what happens when they don’t work
- Information you could use to better understand your own body in pregnancy
- .A better sense of the limits of your responsibility for what’s happening inside your body
- Listen to hear what you won’t find on a blogpost or a book off the shelf.
Many of us arrive at pregnancy already carrying a complicated relationship with the idea of gaining weight. At just about every prenatal appointment, your weight, or the change in your weight, is one of the first parts of your body that gets assessed. For some of us, a change in weight is what makes the big set of invisible changes of the first trimester real. For others, it can be fraught.
Regardless of the feelings you may bring to this ritual, you may wonder, why are we so closely recording weight change?
What does a change in weight mean in pregnancy?
What does it predict about how your pregnancy will progress?
How can we think about weight gain in pregnancy in a way that's different from weight gain outside of pregnancy?
Whether you feel it or not, pregnancy changes every system in your body, and that includes your metabolism, which helps determine how your body uses nutrients, builds tissue, and stores or releases fuel. The way your body's metabolism adapts to pregnancy influences both weight gain and potentially the health of your pregnancy, both for you and the baby.
So today, we will look at weight gain in pregnancy through the lens of metabolic adaptation. Metabolic change in pregnancy is an enormous topic, and there are numerous drivers of weight change, including obviously what you eat, how well you absorb food, how you move and retain fluid. But we'll focus on one important aspect; changes in insulin sensitivity as a way to highlight how complicated weight gain in pregnancy can be. This week is a solo episode focused on better understanding what that number on the scale does and does not mean.
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