ABSTRACT
The majority of adverse complications of obese pregnancies for both mother and child are strongly associated with prepregnancy BMI 1 ; therefore, it can be reasonably assumed that preconception is the optimal time to introduce strategies to encourage weight loss so that women become pregnant with a healthy BMI. However, as a large proportion of pregnancies are unplanned, this approach will only be appropriate for a motivated subgroup, until such time when public health strategies to reduce weight in adolescents and young adults have met with success. Most intervention strategies therefore focus on the pregnant woman, and in recent years, as the global epidemic of obesity has spiralled, so have the number of studies attempting to reduce the burden of obesity on the health of the mother and her child. While interventions to obese subjects often meet with failure in the general public, encouragement can be taken from the knowledge that pregnancy is often a time of high motivation for women, to address and maximize not only their own health but that of their unborn child. Given the increasing evidence that a child nurtured in utero by an obese woman may have an increased risk of obesity and cardiometabolic disease in later life, 2 interventions in pregnancy may also have the benefit of impacting favorably upon the health of the next generation.
