Healthy Weight Gain During Pregnancy

: How many pounds you should gain during a pregnancy?

A woman who is normal body weight, or normal body mass index should gain anywhere between 25 pounds, 15 to 25 pounds during the whole pregnancy. Those are the recommendations from the Institute of Medicine. And if you're obese, do you gain less? Yes, it's actually broken down into four different categories. If you're normal body mass index, low body mass index, body mass index that's a little bit elevated and then frankly obese. And the body mass that's in the little elevated range, it's recommended that you gain between, instead of the 15 – 25, it's recommended that you gain between 10 and 15, and then in the obese group, it's recommended that you really tailor the weight gain to the actual weight of the person, because there's lots of variability in the actual weight and then in the low body mass index group, it's recommended that you gain even more, up to 35 pounds.