Your Perfectly Pampered Pregnancy

The moment a pregnancy is announced, all eyes are on baby. But what about Mom? Not only is her body changing, everything about her lifestyle is turning upside down.

A revolutionary new kind of self-help guide, Your Perfectly Pampered Pregnancy puts Mom at center stage, with hundreds of tips on how to have the healthiest, most vibrant pregnancy possible.

Culling advice from top medical, beauty, and style sources worldwide, award-winning health reporter Colette Bouchez delivers sound medical advice as well as beauty and lifestyle tips to keep Mom happy and healthy, ensuring baby will be healthier and happier as well.

Highlights include:

• The five most common pregnancy complaints—and how to beat them
• The beauty, hair, and skin care products that are safe to use—and what to avoid
• How to choose maternity clothes without losing your sense of style
• Natural and relaxing ways to beat stress, overcome sleep problems, and handle pregnancy fears
• How to treat painful—and often embarrassing—pregnancy problems naturally and easily, and how to know when it’s time to seek a doctor’s help
• Advice on how to blend your career obligations with impending motherhood—and look and feel great while doing it!
• How to make pregnant sex the best sex of your life

Written in the caring, one-on-one tone of a best friend, Your Perfectly Pampered Pregnancy is a unique (and long overdue) addition to the booming baby category.Colette Bouchez is an award winning medical journalist with more than twenty years experience. She is the former medical writer for the New York Daily News, and the top selling author of The V Zone and co-author of Getting Pregnant. Currently a daily medical correspondent for HealthDay News Service/The New York Times Syndicate, and WebMD, her popular consumer health articles appear daily online, as well as in newspapers nationwide and in Europe and Japan. She is a regular contributor to USA Today online, ABC News online, MSNBC online and more than two dozen radio and television news stations nationwide. She lives in New York City.1

Oh! My Aching Pregnancy

Solutions for Your Most Common Health Problems

Whether you've just discovered you're pregnant, or you've known for a while that baby is on the way, chances are you have already begun to notice changes in your body. The most obvious, of course, will be in your breasts and particularly your tummy, both of which will take on a totally new shape and feel. As your uterus stretches to make room for your growing baby, and your breasts begin developing the milk ducts that will nourish and feed your newborn, your pregnancy clearly begins to "show." The closer you get to your delivery date, the more your "state of grace" will become obvious, not only to you but to the world around you.

But long before that happens, there are a series of other changes that will take place as well. Most, if not all, will stem from the sudden increase in estrogen and progesterone—the hormones of pregnancy that began coursing through your body from almost the moment you conceived.

For most of you, these sometimes dramatic and definitely abrupt changes will affect the way you feel, both physically and emotionally, often right from the start of your pregnancy. Morning sickness, fatigue, mood swings—these are just some of the problems that may seem to rob you of at least some of the joy you initially felt when you learned you were pregnant.

As you go forward with your pregnancy, you may be focusing your attention on even more significant concerns, such as the risk of high blood pressure, preeclampsia, or high blood sugar—all real and frightening conditions that threaten not only your pregnancy but your personal health as well.

The important thing to remember, however, is that for the most part, nearly everything you will experience is a normal and natural part of your pregnancy. What's more, most of these problems will gently pass as you move from one trimester to the next. And while each one may get you down for a little while, with a little bit of knowledge and some generous self-care, you can not only quickly resolve many of the problems you will experience, but in some instances, even learn how to prevent some from occurring at all.

As a result, your journey into motherhood will begin with a new confidence—a state of mind that will not only help you to weather all the bumps in the road but to do so with infinitely more style and grace.

Before you begin to explore the various problems that might occur—and the solutions that can help—it's important to remember that no two pregnancies run on the exact same timetable. So, while many of the conditions mentioned in this chapter are rooted in specific trimesters, don't be alarmed if what you experience occurs earlier or later, lasts longer or stops sooner, or doesn't occur at all!

It's also important that you always check any new symptoms with your doctor, even if you're certain you know what's wrong. Chances are, whatever you experience will be a normal and predictable part of pregnancy. But only your doctor can know for certain—so don't skip getting his or her expert opinion on whatever problems come your way.