Maybe your eyes glaze over when you smell a freshly bathed baby. Maybe you've been thinking about names and calculating due dates for months. Or maybe you've been trying to conceive for years. Regardless, it's not where you are on the "conception scale" that matters. The key to your healthy pregnancy just might depend on where you are on the bathroom scale.

Loving your spouse, having enough money, owning your own home and obtaining every other indicator of "parental readiness" matters little if your lifestyle and your underweight body can't handle pregnancy.

Everyone knows that exercise is important to good health, but not everyone acts on this little bit of knowledge. "There are people who can't be bothered [with exercise], and then there are people who become obsessed," says Brianna Lowe, a long distance runner in Millcreek, Pa. "That's me. I'm obsessed."

How obsessed is obsessed? "I think I calculated once that I was running something like 25 hours a week," Lowe says. "[Running] was like a part-time job!"

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