How Overweight Pregnant Women Can Limit Weight Gain (LiveScience.com)

Overweight pregnant women who weighed themselves weekly and received text-message reminders about weight early in their pregnancy gained less weight than women who didn't, a new study shows.

Gaining too much weight during pregnancy can bring on diabetes and may pose risks for babies.

"There is not a lot being done in early pregnancy to avoid weight gain and the complications," said study author Catherine Lombard, of the Monash University School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine in Melbourne, Australia.

The preliminary results from the ongoing study will be presented Sunday (June 12) at the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society in Boston.

The women in the study were overweight, not obese, but were considered at high risk for gestational diabetes due to their weight, age and ethnic background. Further results from the study will determine whether the healthy lifestyle program in which the women participated also reduced gestational diabetes, a serious condition that can cause complications for both the mother and child during the pregnancy.

Overweight and pregnant

Among pregnant women in the United States, about half are overweight or obese, said Dr. Raul Artal, chairman of the Department of Obstetrics/Gynecology and Women's Health at Saint Louis University. Artal conducts research on weight gain during pregnancy but was not involved in the study.

“I and many of my colleagues believe excessive weight gain in pregnancy is a major reason for the obesity epidemic in our country,” Artal said.

The Institute of Medicine guidelines on pregnancy weight gain, which were released in 2009, suggest a gain of 25 to 35 pounds for women of normal weight, 15 to 25 pounds for women who are overweight and 11 to 20 pounds for women who are obese.

Artal said the recommendations "have done a disservice to women." "It is allowing too much weight gain" for women who are already obese or overweight, he said.

Complications from being overweight or obese during pregnancy include higher rates of birth defects and higher risk of gestational diabetes. Women with gestational diabetes are at seven times the risk of getting diabetes later in life than women who do not have the condition, Artal said.

Babies born to mothers with gestational diabetes have their own complications. “These babies have a tendency to be very large and therefore have traumatic deliveries, and more complications in delivery and in the first few days of life,” Artal said. These infants are at higher risk for obesity as children and adults.

Text messages and weekly weigh-in

Lombard’s study included 200 pregnant women who were at risk for gestational diabetes. The participants were divided into two groups, one that underwent the educational program and a control group.

At 14 weeks of pregnancy, researchers gave both groups information that emphasized making small, healthy changes to eating and physical activity, such as walking and eating more fruits and vegetables. One group also received information about how much weight they should gain during pregnancy, an instruction to weigh themselves and frequent reminders by text messaging.

At 28 weeks, the women who had received the extra information had gained, on average, about two pounds less than those in the control group.

This difference might seem small, but it is important at that stage of pregnancy, Lombard said.

Further results will measure weight gain during the entire pregnancy, as well as the rates of gestational diabetes in the two groups. The study is following patients through delivery and the first six weeks of each baby’s life.

Pass it on: A healthy lifestyle program conducted early in a pregnancy can help overweight women avoid excessive weight gain.

This story was provided by MyHealthNewsDaily, sister site to LiveScience.

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Weight Loss in Heavy, Obese Women Boosts Vitamin D Levels (HealthDay)

FRIDAY, May 27 (HealthDay News) -- Older women who are overweight or obese and lose more than 15 percent of their body weight could significantly boost their levels of vitamin D, new research suggests.

The study, conducted by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, also indicates that the surge in vitamin D could help scientists explore new avenues for the prevention of chronic diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

"Since vitamin D is generally lower in persons with obesity, it is possible that low vitamin D could account, in part, for the link between obesity and diseases such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes," study author Caitlin Mason, a postdoctoral research fellow, said in a Hutchinson news release.

Vitamin D is fat-soluble nutrient that plays many important roles in the body, including promoting calcium absorption, reducing inflammation and influencing cell health and the immune system. It's found in certain foods, such as fatty fish, and produced naturally in the body through exposure to sunlight.

The study, published in the May 25 online issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, assigned 439 overweight or obese postmenopausal women to one of four regimens: exercise only, diet only, exercise plus diet and no intervention.

Although women who lost up to 10 percent of their body weight (10 to 20 pounds) through diet and exercise saw modest increases in vitamin D, those levels were roughly three times higher in women who dropped more than 15 percent of their body weight, regardless of what they ate.

"We were surprised at the effect of weight loss greater than 15 percent on blood vitamin D levels," study senior author Dr. Anne McTiernan, director of the Hutchinson Center's Prevention Center, said in the news release. "It appears that the relationship between weight loss and blood vitamin D is not linear but goes up dramatically with more weight loss."

McTiernan concluded the findings suggest the greater the weight loss, the more meaningful the surge in vitamin D levels.

The researchers noted, however, the degree to which vitamin D is available to the body during and after weight loss remains unclear. They also cautioned that more targeted research is needed to understand any link between vitamin D deficiency and chronic disease.

More information

The National Institutes of Health offers more information on the functions and sources of vitamin D.

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Study: For Obese Women, Quality of Life Suffers More (Time.com)

A lot of factors determine your health-related quality of life, including your weight. In general, the heavier you are - that is, the further you veer into overweight territory - the worse your quality of life. But a new survey finds that some groups, such as women, are more negatively affected than others.

For the survey, researchers asked 3,844 U.S. adults aged 35-89 a series of questionnaires designed to gauge the respondents' physical and mental quality of life. The questions included measures of mobility, pain, cognition, "vitality," anxiety and depression, among other factors.

(More on TIME.com: Obese Teens Are More Likely to Smoke, Have Riskier Sex)

Overall, the survey found, people with "normal" body mass index (ranging from 18.5 to 24.9) reported better health-related quality of life than overweight (BMI of 25 to 29.9) or obese (BMI of 30 to 50) respondents. But when researchers looked more closely at African American participants, they found that those in the overweight group reported higher quality of life scores than their normal-weight and obese peers.

Why that's so isn't clear, but the researchers say the findings are in line with past studies that have found a smaller association between increasing BMI and mortality among blacks than among non-blacks. "The mechanisms by which overweight and obesity affect daily living and mortality may also differ between races," the authors wrote. "Lifestyle, roles, bodily pain, or vitality may simply be less affected by overweight among blacks than they are among non-blacks."

(More on TIME.com: Overcoming Obesity)

The questionnaires also suggested that obese women were more likely to suffer lower quality of life than obese men, especially when it came to measures of mental health. The authors wrote:

[A]lthough there has been some emerging evidence that obesity may be negatively associated with mental health among women in non-U.S. settings, our analysis is the first to indicate that such an inverse relationship may be significant among American women, while confirming evidence that among men, the association appears significant only with physical health.

That may be due in part to the fact that obese women tend to suffer more stigma and bias than equally portly men. A study last year that examined salary differences among obese Americans found that obese women tended to earn less than their normal-weight counterparts, while obese men didn't suffer in pay for their size. (For both genders, however, the cost of obesity was high after factoring in increases in sick days and medical costs, premature death, higher grocery bills and even the cost of extra gasoline - the heavier your car load, the more gas you guzzle.)

(More on TIME.com: Want to Sharpen Your Mind? Drop a Few Pounds)

"Our study did not look at why extra weight seems to be less of a burden for blacks and more of a burden for women, but there are several possible explanations," said David Feeny of the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland, Ore., a co-author and investigator of the current study. "These are questions that should be addressed in future studies."

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