According to data, around one in four women will experience some form of urinary incontinence in the year following childbirth. It can be a distressing condition for moms, and something that leads to leakages and all kinds of other issues. Fortunately, there are many ways that you can deal with the problem and make your life easier.
Urinary Incontinence: How To Cope
Here are some strategies that you can try.
Maintain A Healthy BMI
If you are struggling with urinary incontinence, being overweight or obese can make the problem worse. It is a good idea, therefore, to find strategies that will allow you to lose weight.
Don’t go on a diet. Instead, look at ways that you can change your lifestyle for the better. For instance, you might commit to cooking meals in the evening instead of ordering convenience food. Alternatively, you might subscribe to one of the many healthy, plant-based ready meal providers who simply ship meals for you to eat, directly to your door.
Other easy ways to lose weight include things like walking to work and avoiding snacking before bed.
Do Some Yoga
Evidence suggests that doing yoga is a great way to enhance your pelvic floor health. That’s because yoga strengthens all the muscles in the area of your abdomen and pelvis. Some of the best poses include the reclined angle pose and legs-up-the-wall pose.
Learn How To Insert A Catheter
Having somebody else insert a catheter for you isn’t always ideal. That’s why many people learn how to catheterize themselves. This way, they can take more control of their overall care.
Don’t Drink Tea Or Coffee
Tea and coffee can stimulate the bladder and make urinary incontinence worse, increasing the likelihood of leakages. If you’re looking for delicious drinks, you can get products made of chicory or cocoa that offer the same warm, comforting feeling.
Do Pelvic Floor Exercises
The best way to recover from urinary incontinence is to use pelvic floor exercises. A team from New Zealand, for instance, found that women doing kegel exercises after birth were more than two to seventeen times more likely to recover from urinary incontinence than those who didn’t.
Kegel exercises, however, aren’t the only way to strengthen the pelvic floor. In fact, today, many experts recommend that women find some sort of fun dance practice to strengthen their bladder and pelvic muscles. Making the experience enjoyable helps to boost adherence and makes it more likely that women will stick with the plan.
Dancing is apparently more effective than doing traditional, static pelvic floor muscle movements. Overall, physical therapy may reduce the incidence of leaks by more than 75 percent.
Retrain Your Bladder
You can also take time to retrain your bladder by consciously increasing the time between urination. By forcing the bladder to hold more liquid before you go to the bathroom, you actively strengthen the muscles that surround it, a little bit like how you might train muscles in other parts of the body. Bladder training can help your bladder hold more liquid and prevent it from becoming overactive.