Watching Your Weight after Giving Birth May Help Your Child

To help your baby avoid becoming overweight later on, establish healthy habits when your baby is young and provide a good example as he or she grows up.

If you gain more weight than your doctor recommends during pregnancy, it can be hard to shed after you give birth. You might also pack on even more pounds after your baby comes.

Watching your weight may not be high on your list. But it may help to know that keeping a stable weight may also help your child.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: Depression and Anxiety During Pregnancy Remain Underreported

Gaining weight is completely understandable

Your sleep will be interrupted routinely after you give birth. Lack of sleep is linked to weight gain when it disrupts your body clock, and you typically end up eating at odd hours. Fatigue and breastfeeding make it difficult to keep up an exercise routine. If you have any time, maybe you’d rather nap.

You may be feeling depressed or anxious, which often happens after birth. Many new mothers have little energy or time for shopping and preparing ideal meals, along with not enough help.

People who are tired, sad, or busy tend to rely on fast food and pick-me-up snacks, which generally turn into fat.

The more you gain, the harder it may be to reverse things. Being overweight increases your chance of type 2 diabetes and heart disease, among other health problems, and your child may end up facing those risks alongside you.  

How weight gain affects your child

Childhood obesity rates have soared over the over the past decades. In fact, statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that nearly one in five U..S children and teens are obese.

Children who have parents with obesity — specifically mothers with high weight after childbirth — are more likely to struggle with obesity at ages 4 to 7. The risk even increases during middle childhood up to the teen years when parents are obese.

Your doctors may have warned you that too much weight gain during pregnancy affects the child growing within you. But it may be less obvious that weight gain after childbirth is a separate risk factor.

A Dutch study of nearly 3,400 children and their mothers looked at the difference. Children of mothers who gained too much during pregnancy had a 20 percent higher chance of being overweight throughout childhood.

If a child’s mother gained more than two pounds a year after delivery, the child gained more weight between ages 1 and 14, compared to children whose mothers didn’t gain. Among children of mothers who gained too much during and after pregnancy, the chance of being overweight at age 14 more than tripled.

Overweight children, especially when they hit adolescence, are more likely to have bone and joint problems, sleep apnea, and psychological problems. They are also more likely to develop type 2 diabetes.

The first two years of life are a key time to set your child on a path towards a good weight. Your child’s first solid foods may set taste preferences for a lifetime.

Genetics alone don’t account for excess pounds in many kids, according to Leni van Rossem, a senior researcher at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, who headed the study.

Instead, lifestyle and a kind of intrauterine programing are believed to play roles in childhood weight gain. For example, Rossem suggests that an excessive amount of sugar can pass through a pregnant woman’s placenta and may program her unborn baby’s metabolism to respond to a high-sugar diet after birth, contributing to weight gain.

Although how much an expectant woman should weigh during pregnancy varies depending on baseline weight and health, the Institute of Medicine’s guidelines advise that most women at a healthy normal weight prior to pregnancy should gain only between 25 and 35 pounds over the course of nine months.

You should plan to return to your pre-pregnancy weight by six to 12 months after delivery. Most women lose half of their baby weight six weeks after giving birth. The rest of the weight typically comes off over the next several months.

If you don’t shed those pounds — and possibly gain more — within a year of giving birth, you raise your risk of diabetes and heart disease, according to one study. 

Researchers followed 305 expectant moms throughout their pregnancies and during the year after the women gave birth. After 12 months, about 75 percent of the women had lost at least some of their “baby weight,” and tests showed they had maintained healthy levels of cholesterol and normal blood pressure.

But one quarter of the women gained weight over the course of a year, and they experienced a significant increase in risk factors for both diabetes and cardiovascular disease. 

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: Don’t Be Fooled by these Pregnancy Myths