Diabetics: Gestational Diabetes

 Gestational Diabetes weight gain??

Gaining too much or too little weight during pregnancy can risk both mom and baby’s health.

Most women think of pregnancy as the one time in their lives that they are free to gain weight. They carry out nightly refrigerator raids, forgo their formerly tough workout sessions and declare family-size ice cream tubs as single-serving containers. Hey, I do have a family member growing inside of me! And while anyone who does comment on a pregnant woman’s weight gain will likely live to regret it, there is reason for concern over too-big belly bumps. About half of women gain too much weight during pregnancy, according to a 2015 Obstetrics & Gynecology study of more than 44,000 women. The effects hit more than vanity. Excess weight gain puts women at risk for health problems including pre-eclampsia (a potentially deadly condition marked by high blood pressure and damage to organs such as the kidneys), says Gema Sanabria-Martinez, a maternal and fetal medicine researcher at the Virgen de la Luz Hospital in Spain.

Furthermore, excess weight gain is to blame for up to 20 percent of pregnant women developing gestational diabetes, in which blood sugar levels are too high during pregnancy. Women who develop gestational diabetes are seven times more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes in the years following pregnancy. This may be due to metabolism disorders that can progress during gestational diabetes, Sanabria-Martinez says.

Mom’s weight can also affect baby’s health. After delivery, babies born to mothers with gestational diabetes are at risk for hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), jaundice, breathing problems and admittance to the neonatal intensive care unit, adds Stephen Thung, chief of obstetrics at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Children of women who gain too much weight during pregnancy are also more than four times likelier to be overweight at age 3 than those whose mothers gained the right amount, per research from Harvard Medical School.

While less common than gaining too much weight, gaining too little (or even losing) weight during pregnancy can also contribute to serious health complications, including preterm births, low birth weights and, according to a 2014 American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology study, overweight children. In the recent Obstetrics & Gynecology study, about 1 in 5 women didn’t gain enough weight during pregnancy. Women with the highest BMIs or body mass indexes, indicators of one’s height-to-weight ratio, were twice as likely to gain too little weight compared to other women in the study.

Know Your Numbers: Healthy Weight Gain During Pregnancy

So where’s the scale-moving sweet spot? Well, it depends on how much you weighed before your pregnancy test displayed a smiley face. According to the Institute of Medicine’s current guidelines, women who were at a normal weight (a BMI of 18.5 to 24.9) before conception should gain between 25 and 35 pounds during pregnancy. Women who were underweight (a BMI of less than 18.5) should gain between 28 and 40 pounds during pregnancy. Women who were overweight (a BMI of 25 to 29.9), should aim for 15 to 25 pounds. For obese women (a BMI of 30 or greater), 11 to 20 pounds gained is recommended. (Although some experts believe it’s OK for obese women to gain less weight, weight loss during pregnancy is always discouraged, Thung says.)

• In California, law AB 2098, which went into effect January 1, 2023, gives the state power to take away doctors’ medical licenses if they spread “misinformation” that goes against the standard COVID-19 rhetoric
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