NICE - Guidelines on weight and pregnancy

[notyummy]

here

Interested in people's thoughts on this.

Most threads I see on here about this are posted by very over weight/obese ladies concerned about the impact on their pregnancy - or FURIOUS that people want to weigh them to work out how much risk they may be running.

A lot of the replies run along the lines of 'There, there, everything will be all right. They are all a bunch of body facists. I had an easy pregnancy and birth and I weight XX stone. Don't let them weigh you.'

And so on and so forth.

Should we be getting a bit tougher on this? (I am not sure how, btw - just opening a debate.) After all, it's not just the woman hereslef at risk - its a heightened risk to the baby. Plus the additional costs to the NHs as a result of more CSs/higher infection rates/more complications for babies.

Interested in other perspectives.

Just like smokers don't like being told they may die a horrible death, overweight people (and I put myself in both categories BTW) don't like being told their over-eating may cause them to have horrible diseases related to being fat.

And it is over-eating. If you can't or don't do much exercise then you have to cut down your calorie intake to compensate.

It's not fun to diet and it's no fun to give up smoking if you are addicted.

Smoking can affect other people whether you are pregnant or not. Being over-weight affects your baby when you are pregnant.

Just because you don't like the message it doesn't mean it shouldn't be out there.

Many women find the strength to give up smoking when TTC or find they are pregnant. Why shouldn't losing weight (if you are fat) be any different.

I've got an acquaintance who went through hell to get pregnant, she gave up smoking, drinking, did the whole temp taking, timing sex thing, but she didn't consider the most obvious fact that she was obese. It took her years and a miscarriage before she finally succeeded.

Surely her mental and physical health would have been better served by losing the weight, but everyone mollycoddled her and no-one would dare mention the weight thing.