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| Home > Nutrition and Health > Weight Gain
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| | Weight Gain during preganancy
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 There is no established formula to determine how much weight you should put on during pregnancy. Weight gain is dependant on a variety of factors notably, your pre-pregnancy weight and stature, the size of your baby and placenta and the quality of your diet before and during pregnancy. Pre-1970, North American Physicians limited weight gains to between fourteen and seven-teen pounds. They thought that this weight gain would result in easier labors and less postpartum obesity, assuming that the fetus always managed to extract the necessary nutrients. However, around 1970 researchers studying the correlation be-tween weight gain and the health of the baby, found that a higher weight gain during pregnancy led to more full-term pregnancies, with healthier and larger babies.. This led, the National Research Council`s Committee on Maternal Nutrition in 1970 to recommend higher weight gains with some allow-ance for individual circumstances.
If you were underweight during your pre-pregnancy days, it is advisable for you to gain more weight than women who are normal or overweight. You would gain more weight if your baby is large (more than eight pounds) than if your baby is of average or small size.
If you are on a well balanced diet and the quality of your diet is normally excellent and you and your baby are of average size, you will probably gain about twenty-five pounds.
Alternatively, if you are obese, accustomed to high calorie, non-nutritious foods before your pregnancy you may not gain twenty-five pounds after you make adjustments, like eating a well balanced diet full of nutrients. That is to say, by replacing the high-calorie, Non-nutri-tious foods with better quality foods, you may gain less weight, while benefiting your baby.
Your weight gain is of secon-dary importance to the quality of your diet. If you are on a well balanced diet, you need not bother about weight gain.
Your weight will be recorded at each prenatal visit. A chart of your weight gain is maintained. You will gain weight slowly early in the pregnan-cy picking momentum with the growth of the baby and its support system. A sudden spurt or fall in your weight between two consecutive prenatal visits indicates sign of illness or problems in your pregnancy. It could also indicate starvation or food binge between visits.
Most women do not mind the increase in weight during pregnancy, especially when they realize that it is lost either during birth or shortly thereafter. They do not consider that it will be very difficult to remove the extra five or more pounds of fat being accumulated. Many weight-conscious women dislike putting on fat during pregnancy since it takes months to disappear.
A part of your weight gain will be fat deposition on your body. You possibly cannot gain only the weight related to the growth of the baby and the placenta without adding the fat to your own body. You cannot say I will gain only 20 lbs and not the 5 lbs of fat. In fact, fat is produced gradually along with the other components of the weight gain. Avoiding fat will deprive you and your baby of essential nutrients.
Most women are able to shed their extra weight gradually over a period of five to six months after the birth of the baby, provided they eat sensibly. If you breast feed your baby, you would requires 900 to 1.000 calories per quart. The stored fat provides some of these calories; the rest comes from an additional 500 calories a day that should be taken in by the breastfeeding mother.
Pregnancy is the time when you concentrate on a high-quality diet. This is not an appropriate time to keep a watch on your weight.
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