On the news this morning, researchers were suggesting that women of normal/healthy weight should be gaining 25-35 pounds during a normal pregnancy. At the end of the piece they claimed that “most” of this weight is lost during delivery, although they were completely unspecific re: what they meant by “most.”
So…a normal birthweight is (I think) somewhere between 6 and ten pounds. How much does the rest of the stuff (amniotic sac/fluid + placenta and anything else expelled from the uterus during or shortly after birth) typically weigh?
I remember my wife’s doctor saying that the first 20 lbs of pregnancy weight were the easiest to lose. She said it in a way to make me believe that 20lbs is what you will lose during the actual birth.
I don’t have a factual answer for you, but I do have an anecdote, and isn’t that even better, mmm?
I gained a peak of 33lbs during my recent second pregnancy, although I had dropped back to 22lb above my pre pregnancy weight by the time I reached term (largely as a function of struggling to eat by the end). I gave birth to an 8lb12oz baby, the placenta and all the other fluid and gunk that accumulates during pregnancy, and when I weighed myself four days after giving birth, I weighed exactly the same as on the last day of my pregnancy. I couldn’t see how that was even possible.
I wish I’d been weighed immediately after giving birth but the hospital doesn’t do that and I had other priorities at the time. Meanwhile I dropped back to my pre-pregnancy weight three weeks after the birth, so all’s well that ends well.
This really highlights the problem with figuring out how much weight you lose–water retention can screw with the numbers under the best of circumstances, and pregnancy and childbirth do insane things to water retention rates. It really makes all the data in the weeks right before and after childbirth kind of meaningless.
For example, I knew a woman who gained 15 lbs in the last three weeks of her pregnancy. The bulk of that had to be water. That’s a totally different type of weight gain than if she’d gained those 15 lbs over the course of her pregnancy, and of course it dropped off very quickly after delivery. That’s in addition to the stuff you actually deliver: you lose it through sweat, urine, and (to a surprising degree) breathing it out.
I developed toxemia/pre-eclampsia after my first trimester, so I gained a lot of water weight.
When I started labor, I was weighed immediately before they started hooking things up to me, and then shortly (like a couple of hours) after giving birth. I’d lost less than five pounds, but my daughter weighed more than 6 pounds. I was retaining a lot of the fluids that I’d had by IV.
And I’m surprised to see that amniotic fluid is so insignificant. A gallon of water weighs eight and a third pounds, so 2 pounds of water wouldn’t even be a full quart. There are more solids in amniotic fluid so it should be take up slightly less volume at the same weight. Less than a quart of fluid just doesn’t seem like enough to support a baby.
Like others have said you can gain and retain a lot of water weight (easily over 10 lbs) prior to delivery and it can stick around for some time after delivery. I know women who have lost 30 lbs within the couple of days they spent in the hospital after birth.
Huh? The amniotic fluid serves as cushion and at the end of pregnancy, contains some waste, but it is not intended to serve as a support system. The developing fetus gets its nutrients from the umbilical cord.
I mean support literally, keeping the baby protectively suspended in fluid instead of right up against the uterus. You know, like how our brains aren’t flush against the inside of our skulls.
Babies are small and (if I go by how I see other animals positioned) everything is pretty “tight”. On a compact, six pound baby, I can see just one quart being needed to lubricate the baby.
BTW, the placental membranes and uterus are not harsh surfaces by themselved, either, they’re soft, pliable, and “mushy”. And the placenta has fluid other than the amniotic sac, so it wouldn’t surprise me if part of that 1-2 pound in placenta included that fluid. And there’s the whole area of blood exchange between placenta and uterus, the attachment area, which would be quite non harsh.
Surprisingly, even though brains are not right against our skulls, there is actually little noticeable fluid inside. It’s not as if the brain is floating in liquid. Yes, there are membranes separating skull from brain, yes, there is some fluid, but it is surprisingly very low (low) amounts.