Pregnancy Weight Gain Guidelines Might Be Revised
Not long ago, and today in fact, many women joke that getting pregnant gives them a free pass to eat whatever they want and exercise minimally, since they’re gonna gain all that water and baby weight anyways. I was not immune to joking about this on several occasions either. In fact, just the other day I was joking with a pregnant, far along friend of mine and said I should get pregnant so I can go nuts and eat bad stuff and be lazy with my workouts.
I mean, after all, you’re still going to have to get back into shape after you have the baby anyways, so why not have a little fun while you can, right? Well, doctors are saying a big WRONG to this, and many have been pushing to revise what they say are outdated pregnancy weight gain guidelines that do not take into consideration the burgeoning waistlines of Americans.
Currently, most women are told that they should not gain more or less than about 35 pounds with each pregnancy, but the new guidelines want to be guided by a woman’s BMI, or Body Mass Index, rather than making a general blanket statement to all women when in fact 35 pounds may be too much for someone who is obese or heavy and too little for someone who is too thin to begin with (think Nicole Ritchie thin).
The general rule of thumb here, is that during pregnancy, you should take in no more than about 300 extra calories from what you consume per day than you do normally, when you are not pregnant. This is a far cry from what many women were doing, some consuming a thousand or more extra per day, thinking it didn’t matter because they’d have to lose the weight afterwards anyways.
Doctors have even cited the outdated pregnancy weight gain guidelines for the increasing obesity issues today, because many women do have great difficulty in shedding such high volumes of weight after they have had their children.
