Have you experienced a crash in your health after having kids? Do you think your current health symptoms are due to a postpartum hormome imbalance? If this sounds like you my friends, are you are in the right place.
I am a certified integrative nutrition and holistic health consultant who specializes in women’s health, especially preconception, pregnancy and postpartum. I support clients through hormone imbalances and have noticed a rise in conditions that begin shortly after a mother has a baby.
Not only this, but I am first hand experiencing my own postpartum hormone imbalance challenge. I would like to think of this as the universe and god throwing this in my life’s path as a way for my to grow and evolve with how I serve others. Now it’s actually time for me to do with myself, what I have done for other women with postpartum hormone imbalances.
Since I will be embarking on this journey, I will be sharing a lot more content on Balanced Babe regarding women’s health conditions, hormones, and postpartum health challenges. So I only see it fit that you can pull the curtain up to see the reasoning behind this topic.
I got pregnant with our second baby a few weeks before the pandemic began, and swiftly went into lockdown as a newly pregnant mama. It was in that instant that my lifestyle started to suffer, as so many other people’s did as well.
I no longer could move my body in workout classes, was dealing with first trimester fatigue and morning sickness, and trying to navigate the stress of the pandemic and being in lockdown while pregnant (and with an energized two year old).
Fast forward to when I gave birth: we moved out of the city when I was just two weeks postpartum, I experienced postpartum anxiety and insomnia, and was extra paranoid about having a newborn during the pandemic. This second baby was not a good sleeper. At all. He would wake every hour on the hour, sometimes every 30 minutes, from the moment he went down to sleep until 7am the next morning.
Ontop of this, my placenta pills got lost in the mail (yes, I took placenta pills after my first pregnancy and noticed a HUGE difference in my health), so I couldn’t rebuild the nutrients that were lost when I gave birth. Because we just moved and I was severely sleep deprived, we ordered takeout more than we ever have before, and I still was not moving my body like I once was with regular activity.
The combination of severe sleep deprivation, postpartum anxiety, insomnia, a huge shift in postpartum hormones, bad ongoing stress from the pandemic and our move, lack of adequate exercise, and a big shift in how I usually eat – all blended together to create a whole host of postpartum hormone imbalance conditions.
After getting extensive testing done (and mind you, I had to wait almost a year and a half later since I was breastfeeding to get an adequate read on my baseline hormone levels), it turns out I have a few different conditions that were triggered by this not so lovely postpartum experience.
I am experiencing:
- Phase three adrenal fatigue (meaning that my adrenals are so overworked that they are no longer producing adequate amounts of cortisol). Because I am abit far along in experiencing adrenal fatigue, my adrenals are starting to pull resources from my reproductive hormones, resulting in being low in estrogen and especially testosterone. This also means I am very low in cortisol as well.
- Hashimotos this one was a shock! Before having this second baby, I was the epitome of health. I ate well, moved well, managed my stress well, and lived an extremely healthy lifestyle. If you are unaware of what hashimotos is, it is an autoimmune condition that affects the thyroid. I will be writing many articles to come on hashimotos so that if you know someone, or are someone who recently got this diagnosis, you can learn from my journey. It shouldn’t come to much surprise though, because thyroid conditions can also be triggered postpartum. Autoimmune conditions can also appear postpartum as your baby’s cells circulate in your body well after you give birth, triggering an autoimmune response.
This is really the first time in my life that I am dealing with a health condition, but I am positive that I am going to naturally health BOTH by working with my team of functional doctors and through my own protocols that I’ve used on clients who were experiencing and healed the same conditions. It is also important to note that hashimotos and adrenal fatigue are closely related, as your endocrine system is very intertwined and when one area of your system is off, it can throw off the others.
I am also positive that the huge downward spiral that was my lifestyle postpartum, is what triggered these conditions. Both hashimotos and adrenal fatigue can have root causes related to stress, poor lifestyle practices and of course going through extreme postpartum challenges.
So this also really shows that even if you view yourself as an extremely healthy person, there can be phases of life that challenge you and push you to the point where you really struggle to maintain your health practices. One of these phases is hands down having a baby, and this is why it’s extremely common to have health conditions arise after having children.
So now I am making it my mission to share how I am going to heal myself, and most importantly share how you can heal yourself too if you are experiencing postpartum hormone imbalances or health conditions.
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