From Your Health Journal…..”MedPage Today is such an excellent online resource with quality articles, so I am always happy to promote their site. Today’s article is called Diet Plan Helps Obese Moms written by Crystal Phend. Obesity before and during pregnancy has always been an issue for many women. Some woman look at pregnancy as a green light to eat more, while others try to maintain their figures for as long as they can. Diet programs with light or moderate exercise helped obese women avoid gaining excessive weight during pregnancy. In a study, obese women attending weekly weight management sessions gained 7 pounds less over the course of their pregnancy versus controls and actually dropped below their pre-pregnancy weight by 3 weeks after delivery. Of course, pregnant women should always get approval from their doctor before starting any exercise program during pregnancy, but I found this article to be interesting, and encouraging for many woman. Please visit the MedPage Today web site (link provided below) to learn more about this study.”

From the article…..

Diet programs with light exercise helped obese women avoid gaining too much weight during pregnancy, two trials showed.

Obese women attending weekly weight management sessions gained 7 pounds less over the course of their pregnancy versus controls and actually dropped below their pre-pregnancy weight by 3 weeks after delivery, Kimberly Vesco, MD, MPH, of Kaiser Permanente and colleagues found in the Healthy Moms trial.

Gestational weight gain in a separate Italian trial fell within Institute of Medicine (IOM) guidelines for 78% of obese women in a calorie-restricted diet and exercise program compared with 30% of obese controls (P=0.003).

The interventions also cut down on pregnancy complications and kept babies in a healthy weight range, the groups reported here at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine meeting.

These findings show that the same kinds of weight-management strategies used to help overweight adults generally work in pregnancy too, Vesco told MedPage Today.

The 2009 IOM guidelines for obese women suggest a weight gain of no more than 11 to 20 pounds during pregnancy, but Vesco noted that over half of such women in her region exceed that gestational weight gain.

The problem is growing along with obesity in the general population, Elisabetta Petrella, MD, of Italy’s University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, pointed out in her presentation of the Italian trial.

That prospective open-label trial included 63 women with a pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI) of 25 kg/m2 or more who were randomized in their first trimester to either a restricted calorie diet (1,700 to 1,800 calories per day) and 30 minutes of walking at least 3 days a week or usual care plus a simple nutritional booklet.

The overweight group with BMIs in the 25 to 29 kg/m2 range showed no impact on weight gain by the end of their pregnancy, at 11.3 kg (24.9 pounds) in both groups, or in the proportion who stayed within the IOM guidelines.

But the obese group gained an average of 6.7 kg during pregnancy with the intervention compared with 10.1 kg among controls (14.8 versus 22.3 pounds, P=0.047) along with the more than doubling in proportion who kept weight gain in the recommended boundaries.

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