It's inevitable that women gain weight when they are pregnant. The problem is that most women do not return to their pre-pregnancy weight after giving birth. Losing this weight is difficult because daily exercise and other routines have been upended by the arrival of a new being who needs attention.
On average, after they give birth women weigh 11 pounds more than they did before pregnancy. If the additional pounds stick around, they can affect cardiometabolic health and contribute to belly fat. Post-pregnancy weight gain can also increase women's long-term risk for obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, as well as risk negative outcomes in future pregnancies.
The period after the arrival of a new baby is a challenging time that can make it difficult for new moms to follow standard weight-loss approaches such as counting calories or keeping a food diary.When people are given a time-restricted window in which to eat, they tend to eat about 210 fewer calories a day, even without changing their eating habits or counting calories.
Camille Worthington, lead investigator on the study, told TheDoctor, “We wanted to look at other, potentially less burdensome weight management strategies that could promote mild calorie restriction, weight loss and cardiometabolic health postpartum.”
The researchers surveyed 10 new moms within six months of delivery at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital about the women's postpartum eating habits and factors that influenced those habits, like infant schedules, availability of childcare, help with food preparation and partners' work schedules.
The new mothers also were asked to rank different ways to coordinate their eating with metabolism and the body's internal clock, ranking their likelihood of following three chrononutrition strategies:
- Time-restricted eating — limiting food intake to the same eight- to 10-hour window each day
- The bedtime stopping rule — not eating from a certain time before bed until breakfast the next morning
- Eating a king's breakfast and a pauper's dinner — eating a large breakfast (about 45 percent of daily calories); a medium-sized lunch (35 percent); a snack (five percent); and a small dinner (15 percent).
The least preferred strategy was the king's breakfast/pauper's dinner strategy because this approach would make it necessary for new moms to change their meal prep habits, a big inconvenience and something they had little desire to do. Feedback from the women indicated they were also concerned that the king's breakfast/pauper's dinner would require more calorie tracking than was feasible.
Some of the moms who were breastfeeding were concerned that eating a small dinner before fasting overnight could affect their milk supply, but no studies have found this to be true. “We would not expect a small dinner to harm milk production overnight,” Worthington, an assistant professor in the department of nutrition sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said. Women who are breastfeeding should know that having a large evening meal or overnight eating are not necessary for overnight milk production, she added.Women who are breastfeeding should know that a large evening meal or overnight eating are unnecessary for overnight milk production. You don't need to eat late.
Having the chance to share family meals, particularly family dinners, was one thing new moms said they considered when thinking about which of the different chrononutrition strategies were more practical for them. “In this population, we need to be mindful of when the evening meal happens, and how we can accommodate that within these time-based eating approaches,” Worthington explained.
