Maintaining a Healthy Weight During Pregnancy

There are two reasons why many expectant women are overweight. One is that some expectant women feel they have to eat a lot of food as they claim they are eating for two. The second is as a result of responding to food cravings. It is common for them to turn to unhealthy foods such as simple carbohydrates and fatty foods to deal with their cravings and this causes extreme weight gain.

Excess weight and pregnancy complications

Excess weight gain in pregnancy causes numerous complications. It can cause diabetes, high blood pressure and breathing difficulties. The delivery will also be affected as you may end up giving birth to an abnormally large child. This may cause an extremely difficult and unpleasant birth.

To avoid these and other complications you must purposefully maintain a healthy weight gain throughout your pregnancy. The first thing to tackle is your food intake. The focus is not to reduce the amount of food you eat but to replace the unnecessary foods with healthy foods.

Unnecessary foods include sweets, cookies, fattening dishes and sweet drinks among others. These are just empty calories, they are not good for you and neither do they benefit your unborn child. Replace this with healthy whole grain foods, fruit, vegetable and lean protein. These foods will have a good effect on you and your baby.

Portion

Next step is to reduce the portions you eat per seating and spread your meals throughout the day. This means eating small snacks and meals composed of healthy foods throughout the day. Avoid starving by all means and drink lots of water to keep your body well hydrated.

You should also reduce the amount of sugar or fat you have in the diet. This means that any processed foods should be out your diet. Trim excess fats from your protein and instead get healthy fats from eating nuts and oily fish such as salmon.

Exercise

Just because you are pregnant, does not mean you are banned from all physical activity and should just sleep and eat until you deliver your baby. On the contrary, you should ensure that you exercise but choose gentle exercises specifically created for pregnant women. Take walks, swim and do some gentle yoga. The more exercise you do during your pregnancy the easier your pregnancy will be and so will the delivery. Exercise also benefits the fetus in the womb as it will ensure that your body functions at its best.

Some pregnancies are difficult, and it is hard to control ones diet or physical activities. In such cases, you can only wait for the delivery of the baby before you are able to work at losing weight. However, just reducing salt, sugar and excess fats from your diet will go a long way.

Prenatal checkups

Prenatal checkups are necessary because they will help you to identify issues like unnecessary weight gain. Unfortunately, some women avoid prenatal checkups or attend them haphazardly and, so it’s hard to monitor issues such as illness or weight gain. Ensure that you diligently attend your prenatal check up and your doctor will help you to keep a healthy weight throughout your pregnancy.

Originally posted 2013-08-10 13:32:11.

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