What to do if you gain weight during early pregnancy

Expectant mothers will gain weight after pregnancy, and because they need to absorb nutrients, their bodies will naturally look plumper. As their body shape recovers after giving birth, they will slowly lose weight again. So gaining weight during pregnancy is actually very normal. You can lose weight after the pregnancy. However, gaining weight in the early stages of pregnancy will make it difficult for many girls to accept it for a while. How should pregnant women understand the correct weight during pregnancy?

Generally speaking, healthy women who become pregnant at an ideal weight will gain an average of about 8 to 12 kilograms during pregnancy. Regardless of your weight before pregnancy, it is inappropriate to gain less than 1 kg per month or more than 3 kg per month during the second and third trimesters of pregnancy. Although you cannot lose weight, you must control your weight. Otherwise, in addition to body deformation, it may also lead to difficulties in childbirth.

Are you really fat?

The current popular aesthetic classics are a bit unrealistic! Being 1.6 meters tall and weighing 58 kilograms puts you on the edge of normal weight. If you grow another 2 kilograms, you will be overweight. You can calculate your reasonable weight index by yourself. The method of calculation is: divide your weight (in kilograms, of course, your weight before pregnancy) by the square of your height (in meters). The resulting index should be between 18 and 23.

If you weigh 58 kg and are 1.6 meters tall, your index is: 58 ÷ 1.62 = 22.6; if you weigh 60 kg (1.6 meters tall), your index is: 60 ÷ 1.62 = 23.4. If your index is around 20, the ideal weight gain during pregnancy is 9 to 12 kg; if you are 1.7 meters tall, you can increase to 15 kg. On the contrary, if your index is above 23, you can only gain about 6 to 8 kilograms if you want to maintain your ideal weight during pregnancy.

The dangers of being overweight

If your weight gain exceeds the "normal standard", it will increase your burden. During pregnancy, gaining too much weight can lead to high blood pressure, which may cause pregnancy-induced hypertension, which can be dangerous for your body. At the same time, high blood pressure may also cause gestational diabetes. After giving birth, you may continue to be a diabetic. Even if the gestational diabetes disappears, it may bring lifelong diabetes risks to your child. Fortunately, today doctors follow up very closely with overweight expectant mothers and can usually avoid serious consequences.

However, high blood pressure can complicate your pregnancy and delivery and is not good for the development of your fetus. High blood pressure can cause water retention. Water entering your body's tissues causes edema, which will further compress your blood vessels and make venous blood return more difficult for you than for other pregnant women, which may cause varicose veins or even phlebitis. In addition, the increase in sugar in the blood can cause hardening of the placental arteries and hinder blood circulation. The consequence is that your future baby will not get enough nutrients, resulting in fetal distress or developmental delay, and he may be a low-birthweight newborn.

On the contrary, if the fetus absorbs too much sugar, you may give birth to a "giant baby", that is, a baby weighing more than 4 kilograms. This can cause a lot of trouble for your delivery. If this happens, your obstetrician may consider performing a cesarean section.

Newborns who are too light or too heavy will have adverse effects on their future growth. Fortunately, I just lost a little weight.

In the early stages of pregnancy, pregnant women will "lose" 1 to 2 kilograms of body weight due to nausea and vomiting. But after 3 months, once the morning sickness disappears, you will regain the weight you thought you lost within a week, and may even gain 1 kg. From the fourth month of pregnancy, weight gain should be an average of 1.5 kg per month.

But don't be happy too soon. Because weight gain during pregnancy is not linear, even if you don't specifically change your diet, your weight will rise straight up like the pointer on the scale (this is related to hormone secretion).