This 1 Number Could Reveal Whether You'll Gain Excessive Weight During Pregnancy
What if there were a way to predict how much weight you'd gain during pregnancy? There actually might be - your BMI, or body mass index, before you even get pregnant could indicate whether you'll gain too much weight during your pregnancy, according to study recently published in PLOS ONE.
Researchers from the University of Michigan took a look at the medical histories of over 1,000 women who gave birth when they were young - between 15 and 24 - and came to the conclusion that their BMI predicted whether they'd gain a lot of weight during their pregnancy, and, in turn, run the risk of possibly becoming obese later in life.
And though gaining too much weight during pregnancy can present itself as a vanity issue for some women, it's noted in the release that it can also cause a lot of harm to a baby, such as gestational diabetes, high blood pressure, or fetal growth abnormalities.
The researchers acknowledged that even though a 15-year-old is certainly different from a 24-year-old (and, yeah, that is true!!), "younger mothers in our sample did not have a different risk for excess weight gain than older mothers," which, in turn,"highlights the importance of pre-pregnancy BMI at any age for predicting weight gain during pregnancy." Meaning: No matter how old you are, your BMI before you're pregnant matters.
It's important to reiterate how crucial being healthy is when you're young - it's not something you can just make up for when you're pregnant and scrutinizing everything that goes into your body.
"When I talk to young women, I emphasize that their health as young adults is going to impact more than themselves," Tammy Chang, M.D. and an assistant professor at Michigan Medicine's Department of Family Medicine, said in the release. "It's going to impact the health of their future families and future children."
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