Gestational Diabetes

First things first

First of all, congratulations! You have a little human taking shape inside you and that is magical. Failing your glucose tolerance test does not make it any less so. In fact, you can still have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby despite gestational diabetes.

I know that hearing the news of this diagnosis did not exactly make you jump up and down with joy. I was sad and scared the first time I was told I had gestational diabetes. At age 28, it was a complete unknown to me. I know that sinking feeling. Diabetes is something that happens to others, right?

Another perspective

But, may I suggest another way of looking at this? We are lucky to live at a time when modern medicine can screen for this and warn us in advance. We are given the gift of this knowledge and

Knowledge is power!

It is power to take matters in our own hands. Power to give our baby the best start in life.

What is happening to my body?

It is normal to see a tendency towards higher blood sugar and what is called "insulin resistance" in pregnancy, especially in the third trimester. Nature is ensuring that enough energy is reaching the baby, so it makes it a little harder to get glucose into your own cells (insulin resistance), which means more stays in the blood and gets to the baby to make sure it has enough to grow.

Gestational diabetes is when this natural process gets a bit out of hand, your cells become a bit too closed up to letting glucose in, which means that a bit too much glucose stays floating in the blood and so the baby - instead of a healthy dose of glucose - gets a mega boost. This means it can grow a bit too big and give you a harder time on his/her way out. (For a deeper dive on what exactly is gestational diabetes see this blog post).

An opportunity not to be missed

Knowing that you have gestational diabetes and risk having a big baby as a result, tends to be a good motivating force to make us be good girls and do what the doctor and the nurses say. We go home with the little devise and we poke our finger and we note down our numbers and we go to all our appointments and ...

But in all this baby excitement there is one thing we are forgetting. We are forgetting:

to reflect more broadly on our own health.

Pregnancy puts a strain on the body and in doing so it shines a spotlight on all the weakest links.

If gestational diabetes happened, it means that there is a weak link somewhere in that system of glucose regulation. Sure, the "diabetes" - as it is defined by the medical world - may "go away" once the baby is out and the pressure is off, but the weak link will still be there. And other things may well gradually put the pressure back on.

I invite you to see this diagnosis as an opportunity to reflect more broadly on your health and way of life and to see what could be optimised, not just during the few months ahead until baby arrives, but going forward. For the sake of enjoying many healthy years ahead raising that baby :)

Ready to eliminate that weak link?

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