Summary: In pregnant women with overweight or obesity, a multicomponent lifestyle programme softened the usual decline in physical activity across pregnancy and produced a small vigorous-activity signal, but did not meaningfully raise overall activity compared with standard care.
PICO Summary
| Element | Detail |
|---|---|
| Population | 522 pregnant people with BMI ≥25, second and third trimesters (LIFE-Moms, pre-specified secondary analysis). |
| Intervention | Multicomponent lifestyle interventions: dietary support plus physical-activity counselling, activity measured by accelerometry. |
| Comparison | Standard prenatal care without specific diet or activity guidance. |
| Outcome | Significant between-group difference in vigorous activity (p=0.024) but no clinically meaningful overall difference. MVPA fell across pregnancy (72.9 to 63.9 min/day; p<0.0001) and inactivity rose; more inactivity tracked with worse pro-inflammatory (p=0.003) and cardiometabolic (p=0.030) biomarkers. |
Expert Commentary
I appreciate a trial honest enough to report that its intervention mostly slowed a decline rather than reversed it, because that matches what I actually see when I counsel activity in pregnancy. The realistic verdict here is modest: structured lifestyle support blunted the expected fall in activity and nudged vigorous activity, but it did not lift overall activity to a clinically meaningful degree, and that is consistent with the wider literature on prenatal lifestyle programmes. What I find genuinely useful is the reframing. The association between inactivity and worse inflammatory and cardiometabolic markers, although correlational and not proof that moving more fixes them, points me toward a more achievable target, cutting prolonged sitting, rather than chasing large activity gains a pregnant woman with obesity is unlikely to hit. Can I use this with my patients? Yes, but with calibrated expectations: I counsel early, repeat it across trimesters, pair it with dietary advice, and define success as preserving movement and reducing sedentary time. I would want hard perinatal outcomes, gestational diabetes and pre-eclampsia, before promising more than that.
References
Cabre HE, Drews KL, Pomeroy J, et al. LIFE-Moms: effects of multicomponent lifestyle randomized control trial on physical activity during pregnancy in women with overweight and obesity. Int J Behav Nutr Phys Act. 2025;22(1):119. doi:10.1186/s12966-025-01805-9