Plan to gain this much weight when you are pregnant
1. Ideally, begin pregnancy in your ideal weight range.
2. Weight gain in pregnancy is very important to feed the baby, keep nutritional reserves, and keep mom active while she's carrying the baby.
3. You can still have a healthy baby if you don't gain within your recommended amounts. Specific weight gains are associated with statistically higher healthy pregnancy.
4. How you gain your weight is critical. Nutrition itself is as important as weight gain, avoid empty calories.
5. Before you conceive find out how nutritionally sound you actually are, and let your gyno help you plan through appropriate testing. And we urge our patients to sit down with their gyno and have a nutritional evaluation and blood work prior to conception. We take into consideration, caloric needs for exercise, heart and lung health, insulin resistance and any history of birth defects or miscarriages.
6. It's your body fat, and your body type that determines the "BMI" that in turn determines your weight gain recommendations. BMI also has to be interpreted within your ethnic background.
7. To gain the proper weight you need about 300 extra calories per day, but that means very few extra calories in the early months, and more than that per day by the end of pregnancy.
8. Most women will only need to gain 2-4 pounds of weight the first 3 months. For the few women who do not gain, or even loose slightly, they will most likely be able to feed the baby well as they get farther along in pregnancy. Eventually you are gaining at least a pound a week.
Guidelines for total pounds of weight to gain during pregnancy* are as follows:
* Underweight women (BMI less than;18.5) should gain 28-40 pounds.
* Normal-weight women (BMI, 18.5-24.9) should gain 25-35 pounds.
* Overweight women (BMI, 25-29.9) should gain 15-25 pounds.
* Obese women (BMI, 30 or higher) should gain 11-20 pounds.
*Weight gain guidelines are for singleton pregnancy; weight gain should be higher for multiple pregnancies such as twins or triplets.
Call to schedule your pre-pregnancy consultation. 217-356-3736