Postpartum weight retention is commonly considered an important precursor to long-term weight gain, with existing research suggesting that failure to lose weight in postpartum has significant future health implications. While postpartum has been identified as a possible ‘window of opportunity’ for women to make health behaviour change and manage their weight, it remains unclear how mothers, and in particular ‘large’ (BMI ≥ 40 kg/m2) mothers, experience health and engage with health-related behaviours at this particular point in the life course. Existing research has done little to enhance our understandings of the lived, embodied and practical realities of caring for an infant and, crucially, how this impacts health and weight management during the postpartum period. In addition, qualitative research focusing on postpartum has largely ignored the temporal dimensions of this period and, instead, has tended to focus attentions on a single ‘snapshot’ in time. To address these gaps in the literature, this study employed longitudinal qualitative methodology to explore 15 ‘large’ (BMI ≥ 40 kg/m2) women’s lived experience of health and weight management over the first six months following childbirth. Participants were recruited from a specialist antenatal metabolic clinic based in Edinburgh, Scotland. When possible, three in-depth semi-structured interviews were carried out with each participant: the first at six weeks postpartum, the second at three months and, the third at six months postpartum. Both six weeks and six months have consistently been identified in the literature as important markers for postpartum women. Hence, it was hoped that by interviewing at these and an intervening time point (i.e. three months) it would be possible to capture and understand processes of change with regards to weight management in the postpartum period. The analysis revealed that accounts of health and weight were far from straightforward and seemed to be heavily influenced by the wider social context, which routinely pathologises, demonises and stigmatises ‘fatness’. Challenging contemporary discourses of the ‘obesity epidemic’ which frame the large body as a direct consequence of individual lifestyle, participants principally drew upon lay notions of inheritance and implicated a genetic predisposition to resist individual responsibility for weight and body size. The analysis suggests that concerns for health were largely predicated on subjective experiences and, in the absence of tangible and embodied experiences of ill-health, participants expressed little if any impetus to engage in weight management for the purpose of improving their health. In short, the idea that their weight was an indicator of poor health, or future health risk, was not a view shared by participants. Instead, they expressed more complex understandings of their weight, and their responsibilities to engage in health changing behaviour. Despite articulating often strong desires to engage in weight management ‘for the baby’, the longitudinal focus revealed a disjuncture between these intentions and the reality of those engagements. Influential in this discordance was the transition from an intensely medicalised and closely monitored pregnancy, to a period of minimal or no follow up in postpartum. The lack of ‘surveillance’ appeared to have a notable impact on participants’ engagements with health-related behaviours once at home and going about the day-to-day tasks of caring for their infant. Dominant discourses around ‘good’ mothering also made it difficult for participants to prioritise their own needs (such as weight management) ahead of those of their children and other family members. When participants reflected on their experiences of mothering they frequently drew upon understandings of themselves as relational beings and, at times, positioned themselves as phenomenologically inseparable from their baby. This relationality was often experienced as a diminishing of individual autonomy, as the body of the mother and the baby became inter-embodied and bounded. Consequently, my analysis serves to problematise the individualised expectation surrounding a mother’s ability to act autonomously and engage in health-related behaviours in postpartum. These findings also call for a stronger appreciation to be developed of the complexities surrounding engagements with health-related behaviours at this particular point in the life course. In particular this research demonstrates the importance and utility of adopting a more embodied approach, which in turn has some notable implications for public health policy and practice.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:726512 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Connolly, Suzanne Gertrude |
| Contributors | Lawton, Julia ; Harden, Jeni |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/25480 |
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