Thinking of Getting Pregnant? Part 1
Yippee! My husband and I decided to enhance our family with a baby! Now what? I know it can take awhile, what should I be doing to get my body ready?
That’s where I started out.
The first thing I recommend is taking a look at your vitamins. What are you currently taking? At a minimum you need to take a women’s multi-vitamin and Folic Acid. An easy way to accomplish this is to take a prenatal vitamin. I had plenty of women’s multi-vitamins on hand so I didn’t want to just abandon them. What I found was a Folic Acid supplement at GNC. It was less than $4.00/bottle and combined with my multivitamin, had the same amount of Folic Acid as a prenatal vitamin. Another good reason to just add Folic Acid is to ward off anybody who is nosing around in your medicine cabinet. 
All women should be taking Folic Acid anyway, so you can just say you are taking care of your body. Prenatal vitamins scream, “We’re trying to have a baby.” If that’s ok with you, no big deal. For my husband and I, we did not want the pressure of people knowing we were trying. Especially our parents. It ended up taking 3 tries to conceive! My best friend conceived both of her children on the first try. <Grrr>
So why Folic Acid?
Taking Folic Acid before and after you become pregnant helps protects your baby from neural tube defects. Neural tube defects lead to spina bifida, skull malformations, and brain malformations. Folic Acid consumed before, during, and after conception greatly reduces this risk. Folate is necessary for fertility in both men and women so it is a good idea to check your partner’s vitamins as well!
What can I eat that has Folic Acid?
Leafy vegetables such as spinach and turnip greens, dried beans and peas, fortified cereal products, sunflower seeds, liver, and certain other fruits and vegetables are rich sources. If you are like most people you don’t regularly eat liver, spinach, and turnip greens. I love cereal, so that helped me. But when it comes to my baby’s health, I decided that the best solution was the extra vitamin. I do my best do eat well, but I could not guarantee that I’d eat enough of these foods every day. After you get pregnant, some of these might make you nauseous as well. You just don’t know!
How much do I need?
The Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for Folic Acid for pregnant women is 600 micrograms, twice the normal RDA of 300 micrograms for unpregnant women. Most prenatal vitamins have 800-1000 micrograms. When I asked my Doctor about taking a prenatal vitamin vs. multi-vitamin plus Folic Acid, he said as long as I hit 1000 micrograms I was good. You can check with your doctor, but everything I read says 300 micrograms is the absolute minimum, 400 micrograms is better, and 800-1000 micrograms is best. More than that is not necessarily better.
One last note, see if your insurance will cover your prenatal vitamins. Some companies will!
Enjoy getting your body ready for a truly amazing experience!