Preparing for Baby: What Really Matters
Beyond Nutrition -Towards Function
It’s common to think fertility preparation is mostly about nutrition. However, we are more nourished now than ever before — and less fertile now than ever before. There are a few dietary must haves while you’re pregnant, but in general — eat mainly at home and don’t obsess.
Food and supplements can only take you so far if your body isn’t functioning well. As a species we’ve conceived through starvation and animals still reproduce in the wild in very lean years.
The real foundation for fertility is having a healthy physiology.
Fertility and Physiology
To be fertile your body needs to spend most of its time in the parasympathetic state — the rest and digest mode. That means slow breathing at rest, enough CO2 to maintain proper blood pH.
CO2 is a weak acid which facilitates oxygen delivery to tissues (the Bohr effect) and steady blood flow and oxygenation of the core organs.
It also means a good muscle-to-load ratio. We’re a bit like a car: the engine (muscle) has to match the weight it carries (load). Insufficient engine to load mean you ‘rev’ (heart rate/breath rate) faster & losee more CO2.
Default breath rate (rev rate at rest) is actually set in utero. We share our mother’s blood & blood pH. Prolonged preiods of stress can bump it up so in general it’s a good idea to have some sort of breath guided practice built in to you schedule — see below for suggestions.
When CO2 is lost through habituated fast breathing — chronic hyperventilion, very common and usually unconscious — the body shifts into survival mode. Blood is redirected to skeletal muscles, ready for fight or fight, while core organs are left undersupplied. The reproductive system sits at the bottom of this priority list.
To be fertile, the body has to be in surplus. And surplus doesn’t mean food or supplements here. Surplus means blood flow and oxygen. CO2 acts as a natural smooth muscle relaxant, allowing our large central blood vessels to open so blood can return to core, life sustaining organs. Breathing slowly helps retain appropriate levels of CO2. And having sufficient muscles for your body weight load is what makes slow breathing possible.
Once you conceive you might need to learn how to rest.
The truth is that having your first child puts you on an unrelentingly steep learning curve. Everything is new. There is delight. There is elation. There is exhaustion. You’re asked to keep learning, adapting, and responding. Often without a break.
Until that child goes to school, you are essentially living on amber to red the whole time. It’s hard — harder than most people admit.
We have stopped talking about the three stages of womanhood — the Maid the Mother and the Crone — but this is a change of the most epic proportion. It is a physiological transition, a psychological transition and a cultural one. And like every major transition, it demands both strength and rest.
Prepare for the pregnancy for a couple of years if you can
If you want to give your child the best start: start by getting strong. Gently with determination become closer to the best version of yourself you can be.
That doesn’t mean becoming obsessive, or weird about it, or letting fear take over. Fear is real — every first-time mother feels that psychological scaredness — but preparation is the antidote.
Iron is the single most important thing
Men, and by extension the patriachy and by extension Western medicine still fail to grasp the importance of iron. Women lose blood and iron every month. Men do not. They have no idea what this means on a physical level, and medicine has carried that blind spot forward for generations.
Low iron stores reduce the production of haemoglobin — the body’s oxygen taxicabs. Oxygen in the blood is less about breathing and more about having this vital carrier. Haemogobin picks up oxygen in the lungs and delivers it through the blood to the cells. With fewer of these cabs available, your blood simply can’t carry as much oxygen. Your heart rate rises to compensate, your breathing speeds up, and with it you lose carbon dioxide — your body’s natural muscle relaxant. Exactly what we want to avoid.
The parasympathetic rhythm is set by the breath. It is in this state that growth and healing happen. If your iron is low, your body tips into strain, your breath speeds up and you are pushed out of the very state where your baby develops best — the parasympathetic state.
Red blood cells — the general term for the mature form, hemaglobin, — live for 120 days. When red cells die, iron is recycled and stored in the spleen. Men, who don’t lose iron monthly, rarely suffer deficiency. Women, because they throw it down the toilet every month, often hover at the lower end, leaving them tired and depleted. Being iron deficient often makes you feel cold. While feeling cold is also partly muscle-related and partly hormone-related, if a woman is always cold, I suspect low iron and I am rarely wrong.
Strong iron stores matter before pregnancy begins. The challenge is that iron is notoriously hard to absorb. Tablet and liquid forms don’t all work the same— many cause constipation. If you can’t find one that works, you may need to push your doctor to prescribe an IV iron infusion or two. And don’t stop at a hemoglobin check: have your iron studies done too. Scutinise: ferritin, transferrin and transferritin saturation against normal range. Your baby gets all their iron from you while in utero and then when you are breastfeeding — so that’s a couple of years. If you’re already running low, you’ll both be affected.
Folate
This is the othet essential nutrient. Bcause your baby’s neural tube — the brain and spinal cord — forms so early, often before you even know you’re pregnant, many governments now add folic acid — the synthetic form of folate — to white bread and cereal. However 400 ugm /day is still recommended prior to becomming pregnant and for the first trimester.
Conception
Free yourself from any ‘biological clock’ nonsense. Your capacity to have a child is not measured in years —it’s measured in your general state of health. Eggs are not young or old; they are either viable or not. Don’t rush to become pregnant or box yourself into a strict timeframe.
Build Functional Muscle Mass
Pregnancy and early motherhood require strength. Building functional muscle — through gym work, yoga, or regular movement — gives you reserves for the years ahead. Start gradually, once or twice a week, and build toward three times if you can.
This isn’t about just about carrying a pregnancy. It’s about carrying yourself through years of lifting, holding, bending, and sleepless nights, once that baby is out.
A note on diet
Overexposure in pregancy can prime a baby’s immune system to treat certain ‘allergenic’ foods as invaders. The main culprits are always proteins: especially egg, dairy and nuts. Don’t drink regular milkshakes, avoid peanut butter and nuts. If you eat eggs, cooking them hardboiled reduces allergenicity — it’s the white that has all the protein. You need exposure to the protein via the blood to develop the allergy.
Foods that are rich, spicy or heavily processed contain natural food chemicals, which we like because that’s essentially what ‘flavour’ is. These include: salicylates, amines and glutamates. Processing concentrates there chemicals to preserve shelf-life and any taste. Manufacturers also add preservatives like phosphate, nitrites and sulphur. So processed foods can be a pretty intense cocktail. The old adage still holds true: eat the way your great-grandparents ate. A simpler — even blander — diet will usually mean a smoother pregnancy and a happier baby.
Improve Sleep and Breath
Breathing less in the day will help you sleep better. Slow breathing puts your body into the parasympathetic state — the state of repair and growth. This improves circulation, digestion, nervous system balance and most importantly sleep.
When your breath rate slows, your airway stays clearer and more open — which for sleeping means less snoring and fewer arousals. A clear upper airway allows for deeper, less fractured sleep. Here, brain activity slows and signals the endocrine system to release growth hormone — essential for repair and development. Deep sleep is when your body heals and your baby grows. Slow breathing helps make that possible.
Changing your breathing pattern but be approached gently and consistently. Do not obsesss about it all day long. Give your body time to adjust, gon’t demand it does it now - you way we breathe is so central to us: it cannot and shpuld not be changed in a matter of weeks.
Buteyko recommends practicing a controlled pause, several times over the course of the day. The rest of the day: forget about it: gentle and consistent.
"Just as lions, elephants, and tigers are gradually brought under control, so the breath must be gently and consistently trained."
— Hatha Yoga Pradipika, II.15
Yoga meditation, tai chi, qigong all teach this skill. Breathwalk is a meditation you can learn and practice. It combines breath, mantra and mudra (hand posture) with walking. Walking and internally repeating the mudra can help. It’s a good practice to have for anytime you feel under pressure.
SCENAR can also help by guiding your body into a slower breathing pattern before sleep. Better sleep means more resilience in the day.
The Value of Motherhood
Motherhood has always been the greatest transition. As women, it is our exclusive business: the power to create the population. Yet we still underestimate its importance.
More than building personal virtues, the work and lessons of motherhood are the foundation of society itself. Patience, vigilance and rebuilding attune us to the cyclic nature of life.
Motherhood prepares us for our final transition into the wise woman (or crone) - the cornerstone and blueprint of civilisation. The Indus Valley Seal
Tips on slowing the breath:
About the Author:
Catherine Broué is a systems physiologist. After two decades in ICU and dialysis, she turned to the deeper question of real health, guided by mentors and the insights of Bohr and Buteyko. Her work centres on the body’s true regulators — breath and the central nervous system — and the return to parasympathetic dominance.