Weight Gain During Pregnancy Progress Tracker Spreadsheet

Submitted by David Grant on Sun, 2008-11-09 23:57

When woman get pregnant they are supposed to gain weight. Not gaining enough weight can cause problems just as gaining too much weight can cause problems. But when you are 4 months pregnant or when you are 7 months pregnant it is hard to know how much you should weigh at that point in your pregnancy. I made a spreadsheet to help my wife know at any point of her pregnancy whether she is underweight or overweight relative to the end target.

The spreadsheets are available below in Excel and OpenOffice format. I assumed a weight gain of 4-6 lbs in the first trimester followed by steady weight gain all the way until the end of the pregnancy. The defaults are a minimum gain of 25 lbs, a target gain of 27.5 lbs, and a maximum gain of 30 lbs. The minimum and maximum bands are visible on the chart and the goal is to stay within those bands. You only need to enter your starting weight, your date of last menstruation and the low, medium, and high targets on the "Input" sheet and enter your weight weekly (you can skip weeks too and it will still work) on the "Graph" sheet. The defaults are for someone with average BMI.

Supposedly in the U.S., woman with normal BMIs are advised to gain 25-35 lbs whereas in Canada they are advised to gain 25-30 lbs (see "CBC: Pregnancy weight gain guidelines may be too high"). If you have a high BMI you should gain a less weight and if you have a low BMI you should gain a bit more. There are lots of other websites or books with more information on this.

Update: Check out this update from Todd: http://www.epiphanyofthefox.com/private/new_pregnancy_weight_gain.xlsm.

AttachmentSize
File pregnancy_weight_gain.ods27.24 KB
Office spreadsheet icon pregnancy_weight_gain.xls26.5 KB

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Comments

tobbiefox (not verified)

Mon, 2011-02-14 11:53

Hi David:

Thanks for doing this! I took the liberty of updating it to be 100% data-driven. That is, just put in the initial weight and the date of the last menstruation, and it'll do the rest including formatting the axis values. They were hard-coded via settings of options (e.g. axis option). Not anymore.

If you have Excel 2007, I can send you a copy or upload it to a site for you to download and experiment.

Todd

David Grant

Wed, 2011-02-23 14:00

That is awesome! Can you stick it online somewhere where I can download it?

tobbiefox (not verified)

Mon, 2011-04-25 13:39

David,

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner. Didn't realize you responded until now. Your blog didn't have an option to send an email if a comment thread got a response.

Anyway, the xlsm is Excel 2007 and later. I took liberty in combining Input and Graph worksheets into one clean worksheet, and left Calculations alone.

The updated spreadsheet has VBA Code which is shown below for your review. Code is as follows if you don't want to open up the spreadsheet with macros enabled -- it defaults to disabled anyway. MajorUnit is an user-configurable option that you can modify via the Format Axis option -- right now, it's set to 7 units, which really is 7 days.

Private Sub Worksheet_Change(ByVal Target As Range)
' Value (Y) Axis
With ActiveSheet.ChartObjects("Chart 1").Chart

Select Case Target.Address
Case "$C$4", "$C$5", "$C$6"
With .Axes(xlValue)
.MaximumScale = ActiveSheet.Range("$C$5").Value + ActiveSheet.Range("$C$4").Value + 3
.MinimumScale = ActiveSheet.Range("$C$5").Value - 3
End With

With .Axes(xlCategory)
.MaximumScale = ActiveSheet.Range("$B$49").Value + .MajorUnit
.MinimumScale = ActiveSheet.Range("$B$9").Value - .MajorUnit
End With
Case Else
End Select
End With
End Sub

Without further ado, you can get this updated XSLM from this link:

http://www.epiphanyofthefox.com/private/new_pregnancy_weight_gain.xlsm

Best to you,
Todd

Kelly (not verified)

Wed, 2012-01-04 22:53

Thanks for the spreadsheet, guys. I'm not sure why, though, but it's calculating +20lbs to be the maximum and +15 to be minimum. I'm no excel genius but how can I fix this? I'm doing good and I want my chart to show it :)

I started at 137. The chart shows 157 for max and 152 for min, and 155 for target.

David Grant

Wed, 2012-01-04 22:59

Which one are you using, the one from Todd? or the one I provided?

If you're using the one I provided (the one that ends in .xls), switch to the first sheet in the spreadsheet and tweak the values there.

Kelly (not verified)

Wed, 2012-01-04 22:58

Nevermind, I figured it out! Thank you for the chart.

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