Weight gain for pregnant mums
It is important that you gain an appropriate amount of weight during your pregnancy. Too much weight is bad news for pregnancy symptoms like backache, fatigue and the risk of pregnancy diabetes and other complications. It is also difficult to assess the size of your baby.
Too little weight gain means babies may be born prematurely and suffer developmental problems. Just because you have put on four stone, it does not necessarily mean your baby is huge. You could gain a conservative amount of weight and give birth to a 4.5kg baby.
The key to your weight gain is of course a healthy and nutritionally sound dietary intake. See healthy diet in pregnancy for further help in this area. The NHS says that a healthy amount of weight to gain during your pregnancy (unless you are carrying multiple babies) is about 7 – 12 kg (about 1.5 -2 stones). Any more than this and you are compromising your and your baby’s health.
A steady weight gain is what your midwife will be looking for and on average you won’t gain more than about 1.8 kg over the first trimester, then you will probably gain about 0.45kg over each week in your second and third trimesters, until the last month when you will probably stop putting on any more weight. If you haven’t gained any weight for a couple of weeks, or you are gaining lots without overeating, you must see your doctor for advice.
Your midwife will explain to you at your booking visit about what is a ‘normal’ weight to gain throughout. The information provided is very much a general guide as each person has individual circumstances (health issues, starting weight, lifestyle etc), which will doubtless affect how you gain weight. Importantly, pregnancy is no time to try and lose weight because you could seriously affect your baby’s health, if you do.
You can work out your healthy weight for your stage in pregnancy by using our pregnancy weight calculator.
If you want to talk to other pregnant mums about weight gain, you can do this on the Guide to Pregnancy area of our chat forum. Remember you can upload a photo of your baby bump into our gallery.
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Last Modified: 09/07/2007
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