We all get it. Postpartum and the years after having a baby is no walk in the park. But you know what? It isn't just about depression or anxiety either.
Hey, my friend, I'm Maranda Bower, a homesteading mama with four wild kids. My life, passion, and education are all about supporting mothers and providers and understanding the science, the art, and the sacredness of healing after birth. What we know as common sense in the postpartum years has many women feeling just plain awful. It's time to bring back the truth. Get you the tools you need to heal and thrive in motherhood and beyond.
My friends, welcome to today's episode where we are going to get into quite a hot topic around how the postpartum body actually gets depression, anxiety, and autoimmune diseases. When we are able to understand the how and the why of why this happens to so many women in the years after having a baby, that information can be used to prevent it from occurring and even completely reverse the damage of not knowing how to heal our body or how it functions during this transition.
And I know I used the word prevention in relation to maternal mental health, and for some of you professionals listening in, I get that might make you cringe because everything we are taught professionally goes against this statement. If you find yourself cringing at this, I absolutely want you to listen into this. Before I begin, it's important to note that this is the typical journey that I see time and time again. And it goes into depression, anxiety, and autoimmune issues, and even a few other mental and physical health concerns. They're all very related. But I will note that everybody is different. We all come to this place with different backgrounds, different socioeconomic statuses, different diets and deficiencies, and different birth experiences. These all create a starting point of your health and postpartum.
There are different starting points, and I'll explain how that materializes disease and dysfunction in the body as well. So let's start by first acknowledging that it takes some serious work of growing a human being. You literally use your body and the work of God to create life. Hands down, amazing. And we all know nutrients and hormones. Hormones are mostly ran from nutrients. They do the work of growing this baby with you. So much so that your baby will pull nutrients from your own body to get what they need to grow. So if you're not getting enough calcium from your daily meals, your baby will pull calcium from your bones. The same goes for many nutrients, especially water-soluble nutrients that need to be replenished daily. They're not stored in your body.
So, your body grows a baby and it requires lots of nutrients on a daily basis, requires lots of hormones. And many of us deal with morning sickness in the first trimester or have other young kids and not fully healing from their pregnancy and birth experience. Studies show that even wealthy populations who have the ability to buy really good food still do not eat well enough to hit our minimum nutrient requirements for a given day. The fact becomes that most of us run on deficiency. Most women never get enough.
So if you had a planned pregnancy, you detox beforehand, you ate well for months prior, you have a great hormone balance, you never suffered from morning sickness, then you go through pregnancy in a far better place nutrient-wise. But let's be honest, that experience, everything that I shared there, that's a rare bird. So it's probably easy to see that unless nutrients and nutrition are your number one priority, and you are eating well all the time, you're most likely starting off in pregnancy, not even postpartum yet, deprived of many nutrients. If you suffer from a pre-existing issue like food allergies, autoimmune disease, or diabetes, then you're starting from another place of lack. For example, my first pregnancy started two months after I learned I had several food allergies, and these food allergies caused major inflammation in my body, especially my intestines. So getting nutrients for my body was a struggle because my inflamed body couldn't absorb the nutrients I was getting well enough to meet my minimum daily needs. Even though I was eating really good foods, I wasn't able to get the nutrients derived from those foods into my body at a level that my body needed. They were literally passing right through me, even though I was desperately needing them.
And then pregnancy comes to completion, right? So let's talk about pregnancy afterward, and then we go into labor. Your body literally goes through a massive trauma. Now, the way in which I'm using the word "trauma" is not the same as how it's been noted in birth. So although you may experience the birth of your baby as amazing and perfect, it's still a physical trauma that your body has to spend months, if not years, healing from. Birth, especially cesarean birth, sends your body into immediate survival mode. And if you did experience birth trauma in the true sense of that word, which accounts for nearly 30% of U.S. births, then you have another layer here that sends this spiral on overdrive with a different process added to it. This is an entirely different show, so I won't get into all of those details, but in short, when trauma happens in birth, there is fear, loss, anger, and a host of valid and difficult feelings that have a mother questioning her self-worth, her body, and her ability to mother. This creates an overactive nervous system coupled with the way the brain changes in early postpartum.
It's really easy to develop PTSD, depression, anxiety, and so much more. But again, that's a whole different topic that deserves its very own show.
So, we're going to kind of stick with the physical processes of birthing a baby. Certain processes in the body slow down rapidly after you give birth. Digestion is the first on the list to slow. Digestive juices and acids, as well as digestive enzymes, become very low. The body has to exert energy to keep up with those processes, and that energy is better spent preventing you from hemorrhaging and to heal other things and get your body in a state of balance and well-being and breastfeeding and all of those components.
So, during the immediate postpartum period, your digestive juices and enzymes, which are what breaks down your foods so that your body can use the nutrients from it, are not in their prime operating place. So when your body is in this state of healing, it doesn't operate at that digestive level it wants to use to. Rather, it's slowed down considerably. So although you may be starving after giving birth, digesting that food remains slow and weak.
You need to eat in a way that is beneficial to the body that is in this state of healing, and we'll get to that a little bit shortly here. Then you create breast milk and rapid-fire fats, vitamins, minerals, and all the goodness for your baby. So on top of breastfeeding, your body also needs to heal. It's using things like fats and proteins and vitamin A and so many others to really help heal the uterus and stop the bleeding and simply return to this non-pregnant state of being while simultaneously supporting your baby and sustaining the baby's life through your breast milk.
So even if you continue to eat all the things that are healthy, your body is going to struggle with absorbing it well enough to give you all the nutrients your body needs to heal and to sustain life through your breast milk and maintain a state of well-being. This is, of course, if you don't eat a healthy postpartum meal plan that includes only broths and soups and cooked veggies, warm foods, and so on. These are the foods that the body doesn't have to exert extra energy to break down. It's all absorbed so much easier. But if you're like me in my first pregnancies, you didn't know this. This is how you support your body in healing through nutrition after birth. All of which I'm telling you here is the very reason why I created the postpartum nutrition plan full of healthy, nutrient-dense, easy-to-digest meals. And I'll leave a link for you for that in the show notes.
So on top of getting enough nutrients, you're not sleeping well. You aren't getting the support you need to rest in your bed for as long as you need. Our society isn't set up to support that. Instead, it teaches women that it's far better for them to get up and be busy and act like they didn't just go through a monumental feat of creating and birthing life. So you become a zombie, you become sleep deprived. And then when you don't get enough nutrients and sleep, your body cannot produce the hormones it needs to regulate itself in early postpartum. Heck, it's not even enough to regulate hormones when you're not postpartum. Nutrients create hormones, and sleep is the time those hormones are created, managed, and cleaned up. Fluctuations are normal in postpartum, but they are not being supported properly because they're not getting what they need. So hormone imbalances become prominent.
Not to mention the pressure and stress of returning to work, finding daycare, the struggles of breastfeeding, trying to manage toddlers and other kids and family life. This stress of all of this changes your hormones as well. As a matter of fact, your brain changes so much after the birth of your baby that you have become overly aware of stress, meaning that stress becomes exacerbated. This isn't your body working against you. It's a normal biological change that helps you recognize danger and nurture and care for your baby. But the stress of life or even perceived stress, such as coming close to the edge of a balcony or looking down a flight of stairs or getting in your car, becomes so much more difficult because your senses are heightened and your nervous system is set on high operation. This means that extra stress makes you feel like a miserable, drowning failure. And because you're not getting nutrients or sleep and you're living in this heightened state of emotional and nervous system response, you crash and burn out really quickly. Hormones are also what regulate sleep and digestion, so if you aren't getting enough already, that nasty spiral begins. Your body starts telling you things aren't right: you feel bloating, gassiness, extreme overwhelm, exhaustion, and intrusive thoughts. These are your first clues.
But often, we're told these are normal because, well, they happen so frequently to mommas. And eventually, those signals and symptoms turn uglier because your body is still not getting enough of what it needs. Things become more urgent. So major hair loss, aching joints, constant bloating and indigestion increase, food sensitivities, mood swings including intense sadness and rage. And if it still is left untreated, depression, anxiety, food allergies, and autoimmune issues can arise. Sometimes this process happens so quickly that you never saw it coming.
It feels like it goes from one to a thousand, and it just takes so much out of you very quickly. And sometimes, this is such a slow process that you can see this progression as I describe it, but maybe you didn't see the progression as you lived it. So many women take a step back around the two to three-year mark postpartum and they ask themselves, "How did I get here? Who am I?" They feel like everything was kind of a blur and they don't recognize themselves anymore.
Remember, all of the things that I'm sharing with you here are all major symptoms of a larger problem. And that problem is exactly what I'm describing. You aren't getting the basics of life: the nutrients, sleep, and hormone balance. And hormone balance is all about nutrition, sleep, stress, trauma, and support systems. These three things are the fundamental building blocks to health, wellness, and well-being. And when there is disease and dysfunction within the body, it's important to step back and assess why.
Why are rates for postpartum depression, anxiety, and autoimmune disease, which is not something we ever really talk about in postpartum, so high after the birth of a baby? It's also important to treat the actual problem rather than the symptoms. And the symptoms are depression, anxiety, or autoimmune disease. Those are not the problem itself. That doesn't mean that you don't seek help for them. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't take necessary means to treat those things. It simply means that if you want to heal, you must go deeper.
If women were given the support and tools they needed to experience a biological or physiological variation of a normal postpartum, most of what we're seeing as postpartum mood disorders would not exist. They are for the most a symptom of nutrient depletion, sleep deprivation, trauma, learned patterns and behaviors, and lack of support on all levels: emotional, economical, medical, all the things.
And here is where the prevention piece comes in. Those of you who have maybe a family history of mental health or are at a higher risk of developing postpartum mood disorders because they pick up on the cognitive and behavioral patterns often live in the same socioeconomic backgrounds. They eat the same foods, express the same coping mechanisms. Their genetics are not causing the problem. Their environment is. And that is something that can be changed.
There are major areas in our medical systems, our communities, and so much more that need to do better at supporting women during this time. My work in sharing this with you is so that you can see that yes, postpartum mood disorders and autoimmune issues are common, but they in no way should be normalized. Rather, they should be addressed and at their very core address the root. And that starts with you, mama. If you are listening to this, if this show resonates with you, you've already begun the healing process because you now have a basic understanding of how your body works.
Education is a huge piece to this puzzle. And in this knowing that no matter where you are in your motherhood journey, you deserve to feel your best. So hopefully, you can see how very interrelated nutrition, sleep, and hormone balance is. This is the basis for care right here. So much so that it's the very reason I work with women in all three areas within my one-on-one program or when I teach and train professionals in postpartum care.
And if you're not sure where to start, reach out to me, to someone you trust, to your provider, whatever you do. It's time to take your healing seriously. And I am with you every step of the way. Thanks for tuning in and taking the time to learn about how to support your body in deep healing. We don't do this work just for us or for you. Your healing impacts your children, your relationships, and your community. We do this work because the health and vibrancy of our world begin with its mothers.
I hope you have taken some valuable information today and applied it to your own life. If you aren't sure where to begin, reach out about working together one-on-one or at minimum learning about my postpartum nutrition plan, which is where I start every single one of my clients. And you can do that by going to Marandabower.com.
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Let us know by leaving a review, and we will see you next time.