Healthy Weight Loss Blog

With the number of overweight Americans approaching 60% and with obesity and its related health problems the number one health epidemic in the country, weight loss is on just about everybody’s minds.

Whether you have simply packed on a few holiday pounds and want to get rid of them, or whether you have a more serious long-term concern, such as that you are suffering from actual chronic overweight or obesity, losing weight and then maintaining a healthy weight is about changing your entire lifestyle to incorporate healthy eating habits and an exercise program that you can stick with, not about “quick fixes” or crash diets. Indeed, crash diets only hurt you in the long run, not just because they are nutritionally unsound, but because they are so restrictive that you simply cannot stick to them over the long term. They are meant for “quick” weight loss and quick weight loss is neither healthy nor long lasting. They are also nutritionally unsound, either because they severely limit calories and/or because they exclude or severely limit entire food groups, such as complex carbohydrates.

Additionally, severe calorie restriction actually encourages weight gain over the long term. This is because it makes your body go into starvation mode, where it thinks you’re starving and seeks to conserve energy. Therefore, your metabolism drops and if the calorie restriction goes on long enough, you actually begin to gain weight rather than lose it, because your metabolism has been damaged and can no longer burn calories adequately, so that you gain weight even though you are eating fewer calories.

Therefore, it’s clear that the word “diet” needs to be replaced with “lifestyle” when it comes to talking about weight loss and food choices. A healthy lifestyle incorporates not only healthy food choices and adequate (but not excessive) calorie intake, but exercise and adequate water and fiber intake as well.

There are probably two major factors contributing to the obesity epidemic today. The first is that Americans are far more sedentary than they used to be. With the advent of long commutes, desk jobs and entertainment that simply involves plopping in front of the television set, American children and adults alike simply don’t have physical activity incorporated into their day the way they used to when work often involved plowing the fields or building houses (or even doing the laundry on a washboard, instead of simply plopping it into a machine) or when having fun meant going outside for a game of catch, riding bikes with friends, etc.

The second major factor that contributes to the obesity epidemic is, to put it simply, the food we choose. Not only is food much more easily available and cheaper today than at any other time in history, but far too often, it is comprised of white flour, sugar, salt and saturated and trans fats. Forget the nutritious whole grains, vegetables, legumes and beans, and meat and seasonal fruits our grandparents ate when they were growing up. These days, dinner is more often than not a Big Mac grabbed from the corner McDonald’s, topped off with dessert from Krispy Kreme. Our diets are devoid of nutritional value and fiber, even while they are overly laden with calories, simple carbohydrates including white flour and sugar, fat and salt. (It might also surprise you to know that while our agriculturally based ancestors often required as many as 10,000 calories a day to get through their incredibly physically active days, because of the labor they were required to put forth in their work, at most, adult Americans, on average, these days only require 1,500 to 2,000 calories a day, depending on level of physical activity and whether you are male or female.)

Therefore, to lose weight, what you want to do is incorporate a healthy diet, with plenty of fruits and vegetables, and modest amounts of lean meat, good fats such as fish oils, beans and legumes, dairy and complex carbohydrates such as brown rice and whole-wheat flour instead of their white, refined counterparts.

Secondly, you want to incorporate a modest but regular exercise program. Experts recommend at least 30 minutes of exercise every day, preferably an hour. The exercise you choose should be a combination of aerobic exercise such as swimming, and anaerobic exercise, such as weight lifting. You can get a lot of this exercise simply by choosing to walk instead of drive or take the stairs instead of the elevator, when you can. Experts recommend that we walk at least 10,000 steps a day and pedometers are inexpensive and can be worn unobtrusively at the waist, even under clothing, to help you keep track.

If you want to go more high tech, there’s a lot of exercise equipment out there, most of it touting “fast and effective” weight loss, but the simple fact is, whatever you choose, you must use it. Most of this equipment is, in fact, effective if you use it, but absolutely none of it is effective if you don’t use it. If you want to choose good exercise equipment that can give you whole body exercise that both strengthens and provides aerobic exercise in a minimum of time, you might want to consider one of the elliptical exercisers on the market. Elliptical exercisers are great because they are low impact, meaning they minimize wear and tear on the joints, but at the same time, they are weight bearing and their use builds muscle and strengthens bones. They are also aerobic, because with proper use, they require you to exercise your entire cardiovascular system, get your heart rate up and encourage deep breathing. They also minimize the need to stretch, because you can start slowly on them and increase your speed as your muscles warm up. As your endurance increases, you might want to supplement your use of the elliptical exerciser with free or hand weights to further increase muscle mass.

The pedometer, elliptical exerciser and some hand weights are a great way to start out your exercise program. As you become more fit and want to diversify your exercise, you may want to consider either getting a membership to a gym or adding things like a home gym to your own equipment, but for starters, these three things are easy to use, relatively inexpensive, and effective for both conditioning and muscle building, as well as weight loss.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2007 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Healthy Weight Loss, Weight Loss Aids. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.