It isn’t just the fact that putting on too much weight during pregnancy is bad for the mother to be and is really difficult to shed later; this is also bad for the baby. A large new study published in the Lancet has found that found that mothers who gain more weight during pregnancy have larger babies, according to the new study.
Details of more than a million full term births over a period of 15 years were examined to arrive at the conclusions of this study, which found that too much weight gain during pregnancy sets up both the mother and baby for health problems in the long term.
When one woman gained a certain amount of weight during one pregnancy and then the same woman gained double that amount of weight in her next pregnancy, her baby was found to be heavier in the latter case.
The more weight the mother gained during the pregnancy, the more were the chances of having a high birth weight baby. A high birth weight baby is defined as being 8 pound and 13 ounces or more at birth. Women who gained 52 pounds (as against the recommended weight gain of 18 to 22 pounds) were 2 and half times more likely to have heavy babies.
I’ve also heard that it’s bad for the newborn when the mother gains a large amount of weight. This can lead to the baby being over weight as a toddler all the way up to adulthood with an increased chance of diabetes as well. But we all know how hard it is to exercise when we’re pregnant especially in the third trimester.