YOU: Having a Baby: The Owner's Manual to a Happy and Healthy Pregnancy Book

Few life experiences feature emotional swings as extreme as those of pregnancy—it’s a monumental mix of both intense excitement and skip-a-beat anxiety. How do you respond to such a situation? If you’re like most, you scour websites, read books, browse blogs, and pick the brains of every friend, family member, and store clerk who’s ever had a baby. You talk about the ups and downs, the cravings and the nausea, the maternity clothes and the stretch marks. During this 280-day journey, this sometimes scattered mind-set is perfectly natural—and healthy. But often you need help cutting through the clutter. In YOU: Having a Baby, Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Michael Roizen, America’s Doctors, will help ease your tension by teaching you not only about what you can do but also why you should do it. They’ll explore the biology of your body with amazing insights about a cutting-edge new field called epigenetics, which gives you the power to change the genetic destiny of your child. And they’ll give you all the ins and outs of nutrition, exercise, hormones, fetal development, and many more pregnancy-related issues. Using their signature wit and wisdom, they’ll test your knowledge, bust many myths, and reassure you that your maternal instincts are usually pretty darn good. After all, the doctors want the exact same thing as you do during this journey—a healthy baby (and a healthy mom). Be assured that YOU: Having a Baby will be one of your favorite passengers on this wonderful ride.

Publishers Weekly

Media-star physician authors Roizen and Oz have published no less than six bestsellers beginning with You: The Owner's Manual. Having covered optimal self-health, diet and nutrition, longevity and beauty, they now tackle the issues and questions of parents-to-be. In their familiar straightforward, colloquial and often humorous style, and assisted by ob/gyn Margaret L. McKenzie and other expert writers, they take on pregnancy and birth in this brand-extending volume. Like other pregnancy guides, the book covers all the basics: fertility; risks; prenatal nutrition and supplements; managing stress, “pregnancy brain” and mood; physical symptoms; exercise; sex; choosing a birth plan and medical professional; delivery; the postpartum period; and infant care, along with self-tests, sidebars, food plans and recipes, and content-heavy appendixes. Proceeding topic-by-topic instead of the formulaic week-by-week or month-by-month diary approach of most pregnancy books, it also provides interesting biological and physiological information about hormones, digestion, morning sickness and other maternal-fetal interaction. Although the updated edition of What To Expect When You're Expecting is in many ways a more useful reference, this volume will serve as an excellent compendium. (Dec.)