Exercise and Pregnancy Weight GainWeight gain in pregnancy is a normal occurrence. On average, women gain 27 pounds of new tissue growth (baby, placenta, fluids, breast tissue, blood and fat) during pregnancy. You do not get to decide how the weight is gained, so attempting to limit your weight gain below the 27 pounds will not prevent the fat from developing. The fat is accumulated as necessary during pregnancy to support the work your body is doing. The average weight gain is 35 pounds, but you can gain more or less than that number and still be healthy. Unfortunately, you can gain more or less than 35 pounds and be unhealthy. Rather than aiming for a specific number, aim for staying healthy. When you aim to stay healthy, your body will naturally gain as much weight as it needs to support a healthy pregnancy. Staying healthy means your body has proper nutrition, adequate rest and appropriate exercise. These three components of health should be maintained in a balance, ensuring your body has what it needs. While exercise will not stop the healthy weight gain of pregnancy, it can help prevent gaining too much weight. If you do strength training exercise, you will increase your metabolism, causing you to use more calories during the day (because muscles use a higher amount of calories than other body tissues). A very simplified equation for weight maintenance is to have your energy intake (calories of food eaten) equal your energy output (calories used during the day). This is why diet and exercise go hand in hand when you want to lose weight. If you decrease the energy intake and increase the energy output your body is at a deficit and you lose weight. When you are pregnant, the needs of your body increase by about 300 calories a day. This is to support the extra work of building a baby and additional body tissues. So already your body is using as much energy as it would burn on the average one hour walk. To accommodate this need, most pregnant women experience an increase in appetite. Some, however, experience sickness or a lack of appetite that causes them to lose weight, putting themselves and their baby at risk for malnutrition. Adding exercise to your daily life increases the number of calories you need to maintain a healthy weight. Some overweight women who begin living a healthy lifestyle right before or soon after becoming pregnant will experience weight loss for the first part of pregnancy. This can be healthy if the goal is to eat a proper diet, get adequate rest and participate in appropriate exercise. Once again, the goal should not be a number on the scale but healthy choices being made every day. It is rare for a woman to lose weight healthfully during the entire pregnancy, and it is not advisable for weight loss to be a pregnancy goal. Exercise has benefits to pregnancy other than weight management. Women who participate in regular exercise during pregnancy have more energy, stronger bodies with more endurance for labor, feel better emotionally along with experiencing less back pain, less constipation problems and a reduced postpartum recovery time.
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