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Overactive bladder is a condition that you can control! In fact, I haven’t seen any cases of overactive bladder that weren’t eventually relieved. See some of the other articles on OAB on the site to learn more.
Personal habits play an important role in every disease and health disorder. It behooves us all to evaluate whether our personal habits are helping us or hurting us.
It’s conceivable that some of your habits could be contributing to those embarrassing moments and acting as overactive bladder triggers.
The habits that make the biggest difference to a person with OAB are related to diet, hydration, and habits for urination.
Habits to Consider
Let’s evaluate these personal habits:
- Eating too much chocolate.
Chocolate can irritate the bladder and urinary tract. How much chocolate do you eat? One piece of chocolate a day may not cause urinary incontinence, but you won’t know your limit until you experiment.Keep a journal of your daily activities. During the first week, continue on with your life as you have been. This is the way to establish a baseline. During week two, introduce one square of chocolate to your diet per day. You will get more health benefits from chocolate bars that contain 65% or more dark chocolate. Dark chocolate has less sugar than milk chocolate.Evaluate what happened to your urinary incontinence during week two. Has the number of times you were incontinent increase, stay the same or decrease? If the number stayed the same, then you could increase the amount of chocolate to two squares. This is how to scientifically determine what your body does and how it interacts with chocolate.
- Drinking too much coffee.
Coffee irritates the kidneys and is a natural diuretic. It will increase number of times you will want to urinate. Coffee also contains caffeine, which can stimulate the body in a variety of ways.You can test the effects of coffee on your body in the same way as chocolate. Say you’ve been drinking three cups of coffee a day for quite awhile; start a log and use three cups coffee per day as your baseline. Make sure you record the number of incidents of incontinence as well as the number of times you were close to incontinence. Record also the number of times you urinated during the day and your other beverages you drank.During the second week, you can either increase or decrease the number of cups of coffee you drink daily. By increasing the amount to four cups a day, you’ll learn what the extra caffeine does to your body. If there’s no difference in the data collected from the previous week, then it’s probably safe to say that coffee isn’t influencing your incontinence.You could also decrease the number of cups of coffee you drink during the second week. If there’s a decrease in the number of incontinent episodes and close calls, then you can assume that coffee is a trigger. The following week decrease the coffee to one cup a day and then analyze the results. And finally, the following week, don’t drink any coffee. Analyze the results; you’ll be amazed by the results.
- Not drinking enough water.
Your body functions on water, so drink one ounce per two pounds body weight each day.
Experiment with your personal habits until you discover what works for you. Whatever you do, once you find that something to be effective, count it as part of the solution. It’s often the combination of several habits that makes the biggest difference.
