Healthy pregnancy weight
From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.
Health guidelines say obese women are supposed to gain 11 to 20 pounds during pregnancy. Gaining too much can make it more likely that the baby is born so big that the delivery is complicated, and that the newborn might develop obesity later in life.
So researchers at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland, Oregon, designed a program to help obese women manage their weight. The techniques included keeping food and exercise journals, and attending weekly support meetings. Researcher Kim Vesco says the women also were encouraged to maintain their starting weight:
“By asking women to gain no weight, they were actually able to gain weight within the guidelines and limit their weight gain.”
The study in the journal Obesity was supported by the National Institutes of Health.
Learn more at healthfinder.gov.
HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss.