TRANSCRIPT: The Best Postpartum Advice: A 100th Episode Celebration: EP100
Welcome to the Postpartum University podcast, where we support you and your provider in understanding the science, the art, and the sacredness of healing after birth. I’m Maranda Bower, your host, your Postpartum Nutrition Specialist, and homesteading mom with four wild kids. It’s time to get you the holistic, whole-body healing that works.
Hello, everyone, welcome to the 100th episode. I seriously cannot believe we are here. We have achieved this milestone and let me tell you, I am blown away. The fact that we are here today doing this. I know you have a very special episode for you. The culmination of all episodes over the last year plus, some of our very, very best advice gathered here for you in one exciting space. But before we do that, I want to take a minute to humbly brag if that is such a thing. Can I do that real quick? I want to tell you that our podcast has grown so much more than I had ever anticipated. We are on Spotify, the top 15 most followed podcasts on Apple, the top 25%. Our podcast is in the top 15% most shared podcast globally around the world. This is significant. We’re talking about postpartum healing. We’re talking about breaking stigmas and mental health care related to women. We’re talking about women empowerment. This is so, so big. And we would never, ever be in this space without God, without you, listening in, sharing your episodes, letting us know in the reviews how much you appreciate our show, and just connecting in within our group. I mean, just so many things. This is how the word spreads. It spreads because you are so incredibly gracious and sharing this information. You relate to it and you share it and spread the word and that’s how we have come to be where we are today. So thank you so so much and we are looking forward to another hundred episodes of sharing our wisdom and our stories and the latest and greatest that is going to be there to support you so that you can create a strong foundation.
We are not talking about nutrition and smoothies and salads are one of the most promoted foods in postpartum and they’re some of the worst foods that you could ever ingest after having a baby. Then we got to talk about the autoimmune disease risk rising and at an exponential rate 28% of women are at a risk of developing an autoimmune disease after a childbirth, an increased risk. Women and babies are suffering immensely from childhood illnesses. The list and list can go on. We talk about thyroid disorders, how long does it take for a woman to be diagnosed with one, an average of seven years, and one in seven women will be diagnosed with one. So, so many issues are occurring in our worlds, and we need to have these conversations and we’re not doing it. Evidence supports traditional medicine and female intuition regarding postpartum health, but there’s this male bias in our healthcare system that ignores those facts in favor of money. And I told you I’m going to call it out like it is. It’s a boxy toast and then how it really is, you know, a new mother’s best friend, you know, during breastfeeding. the release of oxytocin that happens then, you know, reduces cortisol, reduces stress, activates reward and pleasure centers. So it kind of, I guess, it takes oxytocin and labor and birth to the next level. What happens? Postpartum with oxytocin and how does it help? You know, not just women and children, we’re not just talking humans here, we’re actually talking every mammalian species because oxytocin is actually a quintessential animal hormone and mammals are the genus of mammals or the group of mammals means mammary glands we suckle our young so we have oxytocin this magical hormone in common amongst all of our mammalian cousins as well and it has the same effect and it basically as I said contributes to mother nature’s superb design and it’s not just about labor and birth and I guess this is the bigger picture of you, you know, having a baby or giving birth amongst our mammalian cousins. It’s not just about, you know, a live baby and a live mother in the end. It’s about species survival. It’s about the long-term survival. It’s about the evolutionary perspective that has mothers and babies survive the birth and thrive and go on to have more offspring who survive and thrive. So oxytocin feeds into all of that, not just by optimizing the outcomes of labor and birth, but through its release during breastfeeding, as we just discussed, during skin disc and contact, during social interactions between mothers and offspring of all mammalian species that really contributes to species survival and long-term beneficial outcomes.
That’s why we’re all here today. I just can’t imagine dropping a six-week-old baby off at daycare. That’s what’s crazy to me is that somehow we’ve reached the point in America where motherhood in the workplace is hopefully a pumping break and a picture of a baby on a desk. That’s not what motherhood is. If any business owner in America thinks that a woman’s going to come back to work after having a baby and she’s going to pump it up, a picture on her desk and she’s going to pump and then she’s going to be the same employee the rest of the hours of the day.
No, like you’re completely missing the point, but I feel like as soon as business owners check their egos at the door and realize that, you know what, you’re not the most important thing anymore in this person’s life, their baby is or their child is, but then really truly getting to know that new version of them because everybody’s different after every single baby and learning what new skills and strengths they can bring to the table? It’s such a beautiful thing. Amazing misconceptions and it’s mind-boggling that we still have these misconceptions in our society but there’s still so much that we don’t know in regard to postpartum nutrition and how to support what in general within motherhood. And so I’m gonna dive into a little bit more here, but first I want to talk about how food is truly the life force that fuels your body and every process within it. Without nutrients that you get from food, your body cannot work or function properly. So everything from your organs to digestion, to your body, to your body, to your body, to your body, to your body, to your body, to your body, to your body, to your body, balance, sleep, memory, so much more require nutrients to run smoothly. And that is one of the key reasons why I speak about nutrition, especially in postpartum so often, because it’s one of the most underused tools in healing our body. We don’t use it enough, and when we do use it, miraculous things happen. It’s kind of mind-boggling to me that we don’t use it as much as we should. Right. And we all know about herbs. We all in some form or fashion, we know somebody who’s taken herbs and has benefited our herbs grow in our backyard. It’s so versatile. It’s so available to everyone. And it’s so inexpensive, I find compared to the other medicinals that we have access to in our world, or maybe some of us don’t have access to, we have even more access to herbs than we would otherwise. And I think that is very helpful, especially in pregnancy and postpartum, when we are begging for more support, we’re needing that so much. And so we’re seeking it elsewhere, and I’m loving that. Me too, me too. And I appreciate that. That’s one thing that’s really neat about having the apothecary community is that we have a lot of healthcare practitioners that will be a referral source for them, which is something I was not anticipating ’cause we’re talking about Western medicine type of practitioners who were orientalists. And so it’s really neat to be that bridge in that community and people especially when they’re just beginning their journey and holistic in that field to introduce them. You know, like, let me show you all the different options that are available depending where you’re at. It seems to be a topic in question for nearly every single mama who has a baby and I’m often asked questions about whether it’s normal. When is it too much hair loss? Is there anything wrong with me? Really, the question everyone wants to know is how do I stop it? Any kind of hair loss can feel like a massive blow. It feels terrifying, worrisome, and just plain not okay. And for many of us, our hair has personal meaning. It has cultural meaning. It gives us certain feel-good emotions that contribute to our identity and our self-esteem, which makes it even that much more impactful when we’re recovering in a month’s postpartum when we’re discovering who we are as a mother. No matter how many children you have this discovering or rediscovering will always be a part of your journey. So couple this with identity changes, body changes, emotional changes and then hair loss, and you have a recipe for panic. So we get it, especially for those of us who’ve experienced hair loss, or even major hair changes, which we’ll talk about shortly, postpartum hair loss simply feels awful. And considering how common it is, I’m guessing you completely understand what I’m sharing with you. But let’s also be serious and acknowledge that when there is hair loss, it’s our body’s way of letting us know that something is off. And our body is responding accordingly. Our body is giving us a warning sign. It’s saying, hey, something’s up. Can you pay attention to me, please? Meaning that if you have a moment of worry or stress, feelings that something is not right, maybe, just maybe, you’re absolutely right about your body. And I say that cheekily, because I firmly believe that we, as women, and as a community of women, we know more about our bodies than science does.
And just before I do get started, Maranda, your podcast, like my podcast, “Interviewing You” is one of the most popular, I think, I’ve ever done. So I think we’ve got like 66 podcast episodes up there and yours is right up there in terms of how many people have listened and things. So yes, always great to work together.
Love that, thank you.
So I call it Baby Brain and I think in the US it’s more commonly called mother brain but and I try and use this term to sort of reclaim it this concept a little bit because at the moment in our culture usually it’s used as a slur like if you say you’ve got baby brain it means you’re like dumb ditsy forgetful stupid you know and it’s just not really a positive thing but the reason I kind of use that word I’m trying to subvert that meaning is because there’s a huge amount of changes that do actually happen in a woman’s brain when she gives birth and breastfeeds when she’s pregnant and they are largely overall positive.
There’s definitely some challenges involved with it but overall what research shows is that they’re actually protective to a woman’s mental health during that transition so yeah that’s that’s kind of like what Baby Brain is all about. And when I first sort of heard about Baby Brain and I was already doing postpartum work for many years, but I hadn’t really learned about the brain changes, I kind of thought Baby Brain was a bit of a myth. I thought it was something that the patriarchy had made up to keep women in the kitchen. So it was kind of surprising to me to realize that it’s actually is a real biological thing that’s happening that can be seen on brain scans and we are supporting for mothers and the way we see the world, for our children and the way in which they grow. And it’s time to start having these conversations and implementing evidence-based care and women’s stories and traditional healing practices that have worked for thousands of years. It’s time that we start putting all of this together into a holistic blend that’s going to support our whole body healing for all.
Love this episode. Let us know by leaving an amazing review. Your support is everything. Want more? Head over to postpartumu.com. That’s postpartum, the letter u .com, and explore how we support moms like you in holistic, whole body healing that’s specific for the unique needs of moms in the years postpartum. See you there.
