It’s true that during pregnancy the body’s demand for vitamins increases. Just keep in mind that vitamins don’t mean calories!No matter how happy a woman is about being pregnant, there is always stress involved: worries about whether the child will be healthy, whether there will be enough money to pay the bills, whether you’ll have to leave your job, and so on. And these stresses take their toll on mother and fetus.The body responds to stress by producing more adrenal hormones. These provide the extra energy that’s necessary when action is called for. But if there’s no physical outlet for the energy, it’s redirected to the digestive or nervous system or to some other organ system. In many instances, this is what’s responsible for pregnancy fatigue, headaches, insomnia, and morning sickness. But, more important, this accelerated adrenal hormone production revs up the metabolism to such a degree that stores of valuable calcium are depleted, along with protein, phosphorus, and potassium, which are rapidly excreted just when the growing fetus needs them most.*5/137/5*
Many women in this age group take supplementary iron and vitamins. A good all-round diet, including vegetables, fresh fruit, a reasonable amount of meat and dairy products, nuts, fish and poultry, will usually provide all the items necessary for good health. Just the same, an added multi-vitamin capsule or tablet may assist, in the event of an absorption deficiency being present in the bowel. So will a daily iron tablet or capsule (dosage is usually written on the label). A blood test indicates whether there is anaemia.Apart from this, getting hooked on masses of so-called ‘health foods’ and fringe medicine medications is often quite useless and enormously expensive, a waste of time, money and effort. Stick to well-known proven principles, and let the fringe medicine ideas quietly slip by.Think positively: A positive, happy outlook on life, claiming confidence, eating sensibly, exercising regularly and becoming involved in outside activities, will enable an enjoyable and action-packed life for many years ahead.Happy days. Happy nights, and a happy lifetime ahead.*118\45\4*
Almost all psychiatric textbooks speak of mental diseases in terms of ‘disintegration of the personality’ and ‘unbalanced and chaotic states.’ Such descriptions are based upon the unexpressed assumption that the ideal person is able to correspond to the statistical average, and this average is taken as a measure of order, balance, harmony and health. Thus, it seems as if individuals going through psychotic states appear as the chaos and disorder for a culture with aparticular idea of order and sanity. This black/white, polar classification of the human being lies at the root of DSM III, which only weakly tolerates the concept of a wellness-notwellness continuum of inner experiences. Change and differentiation are needed (cf. Boyle and Morriss; Engel, Greist et al., 1982).Process concepts understand ‘mental illness’ as an extreme state which everyone goes through. As we shall see in the following chapters, process science perceives psychotic states not as chaotic, but as highly, even mathematically, ordered structures; they are not disintegrations, but highly patterned evolutions.The concept of chaos and unpredictability is related to the therapist’s or observer’s awareness and experience. Predictability is a concept relative to a given observer and is not an absolute characteristic of a patient. As far as the therapist is<r-concerned, what he sees in a client is a total surprise to him when information appears which he, the therapist, has never (Consciously) been aware of before.One of the tenets of process oriented psychology is that if you are surprised by someone, you have not consciously perceived signals forewarning you of a coming event. In other words, the ‘chaos’ or unpredictability of a client is a function of the therapist’s inability to process information in front of him, not of the client’s inherent ‘disorder.’ Suicide, insanity, unfaithfulness in relationships, criminal behavior, etc. are all apparent in the signal system of our clients and friends.It is important for the therapist to constantly extend and improve his ability to pick up signals from his clients. We tend to focus only upon the content of what people say and do not pay conscious attention to their other signals, such as their tone of voice, their sitting position, the movement of their legs, etc.*10\227\8*