3 Ways the Holiday Season Can Impact Your Pelvic Health….

And what you can do about it!

With the holiday season now underway, its important to care for yourself, and your pelvic floor.

Many of the habits that we create around the holidays have a huge impact on our pelvic floor health and we may now even know it. And most of these are not great for our pelvic health, but there are some ways you can change that before we get into the holidays

1.) Stress - The holiday season can be very stressful for people. Its a busy time of year, we have family stress, financial stress, obligations and commitments and it can be very overwhelming. This can cause us to have more pelvic floor symptoms including urinary incontinence and pelvic pain.

Here’s what you can do - take 5 minutes each day to get into a comfortable position and focus on breathing. Focus on the inhale relaxing your pelvic floor muscles.

2.) Hydration - The holiday season brings along a lot of alcohol and sugary drinks, which can impact our pelvic health in a negative way. Often when we drink these “fun” drinks we are less likely to drink water. This can put us at increased risk for UTIs, and cause more bladder urgency.

Here’s what you can do - limit the sugary and alcoholic drinks and opt for water with lemon and make sure you are drinking 3x the amount of water as you are alcohol.

3.) Food - Often during the holidays we are also eating more foods that we dont normally eat. These often include more refined sugar and white flour which can negatively impact our bowels leading to more constipation. When we are more constipated our pelvic floor often tenses up more and it can also lead to more urinary incontinence issues and increase symptoms of pelvic organ prolapse.

Here’s what you can do - Fill your plate with as many vegetables as possible and make sure you are drinking water. Try not to eat these holiday foods for more than one day in a row. Often our bodies can recover better if we are only exposed to these foods once rather than for a whole week.

Happy Holiday Season!