During Pregnancy

Your health and nutritional state before you become pregnant not only affect your ability to conceive but also the health of your baby and your own health down the road. To help ensure conception and delivery of a healthy baby and to protect your own health, you should get your weight into a healthy range even before trying to conceive.

If you're undernourished and underweight, you may stop menstruating and become unable to conceive. If you do become pregnant while malnourished, you're starting off with inadequate stores of nutrients for both you and your baby. To lessen your chances of giving birth to a premature, underweight baby with a higher than normal risk of birth defects, it's important for you to start eating well before you decide to become pregnant.

Overweight women also run the risk of developing more complications during pregnancy and tend to gain more weight than normal-weight women during pregnancy. If you're obese, you have a higher risk of developing high blood pressure or gestational diabetes, a form of diabetes that develops during pregnancy, usually disappears afterward and poses risks for both mother and baby. You may also deliver an overweight baby. If, however, you are overweight and do become pregnant, now is not the time to try losing weight. Instead, you'll have to work a little harder to gain no more than the appropriate amount of weight throughout your pregnancy