Drink tons and tons of water.
Seriously. It’s recommended to drink a lot of water during pregnancy for so many reasons, and this is definitely one of them. If I wasn’t drinking water I would drink my one cup of coffee in the morning and sometimes green tea in the afternoon. I made sure to keep a water bottle at my desk and I would drink it all day long. I didn’t want to waste calories drinking anything else.
The last month of my pregnancy I started to drink a lot of sparkling water with fresh lime slices. It helped mix things up and made me feel like I was treating myself and drinking something fancy! I recently fell in love with this lime Italian sparkling mineral water from Whole Foods.
Gain weight slowly so your skin can keep up.
If you put on too much weight too quickly your skin simply can’t keep up with the rapid growth causing stretch marks. Eat healthy, drink a lot of water, and exercise. I didn’t necessarily eat healthy for every meal or even every day (I was pregnant over Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years after all!) but I made a conscious effort to make healthy choices more often than not. My exercise varied almost weekly just based on what trimester I was in and how I was feeling that day.
The first trimester I was nauseous and exhausted almost every day so the most exercise I did was walking from my bed to the bathroom haha.
Second trimester I had a boost of energy and did the most exercise and ate the healthiest for this period. I would walk a 3 mile loop around my neighborhood 3-4 days a week and would mix in light weight training at the gym. The last 3 weeks of the 2nd trimester I started to get sciatic nerve pain in my back and walking would sometimes make it worse. On those days I would find pregnancy yoga videos on Youtube.
The third trimester has been a mixture of the first two trimesters minus the nausea. Some days I am so exhausted that I don’t exercise at all, and some days I have energy to walk the 3 mile loop and feel great. I just take it day by day and focus on eating healthy.
Start using creams/oils early!
I wasted no time using belly butter and vitamin E oil on my belly. Sometime during the first trimester when I felt my pants getting tighter I ran out to Target and picked up these from Burts bees...
I love them so much and used them through my entire pregnancy. The consistency and smell of the belly butter is so pleasant and the vitamin E oil makes me skin feel so moisturized.
I use belly butter in the morning and before bed each night and the vitamin E oil after every shower or bath to lock in moisture. The last month or so I also started using some generic aloe lotion that I love as well!
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