More than one-third of U.S. adults are considered obese. Meanwhile, losing weight and staying fit are at the top of the list of resolutions every year.Before you even begin to attack a weight-loss plan, it pays to remember this:we can better take care of our families
Have a healthy life for our families
The core reason most of us want to take care of ourselves is so that we can better take care of our families. Too much weight may undermine both the quality and the quantity of time we have with our children, and the added vigor and confidence we can gain by being in better shape could help us to be better at our two most important roles of spouse and parent.
It’s Not a Diet. It’s a Lifestyle
“Thinking of a diet as something you’re on and suffering through only for the short term doesn’t work,” Beck Busis says. To shed weight and keep it off, you need to make permanent changes to the way you eat. It’s OK to indulge occasionally, of course, but if you cut calories temporarily and then revert to your old way of eating, you’ll gain back the weight quicker than you can say yo-yo.
Use it to lose it. Research shows that one of the best predictors of long-term weight loss is how many pounds you drop in the first month, says John Apolzan, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the Ingestive Behavior Lab at Louisiana State University’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center. It makes sense: Immediate results are motivating. For that reason, nutritionists often suggest being stricter for the first two weeks of your new eating strategy to build momentum. Cut out added sugar and alcohol and avoid unrefined carbs.
There is no doubt that people with an optimum body weight live longer and have healthier lives. Overweight or obese people are more likely to develop diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, osteoporosis, and experience fertility problems. They die younger too. Body mass index is not a perfect measure, particularly for heavy people who are lean and muscular, but it works for much of the population. The healthiest BMIs range from 22.5 to 25. When it reaches 30 to 35, life expectancy falls by two to four years. A BMI from 40 to 45 typically shortens life by eight to 10 years. Many deaths in overweight people are the result of vascular disease.
Don’t Overreact to Mild Hunger
Some women have a hard time losing weight because of hunger anxiety. To them, being hungry is bad—something to be avoided at all costs—so they carry snacks with them and eat when they don’t need to, Alpert explains. Others eat because they’re stressed out or bored. While you never want to get to the point of being ravenous (that’s when bingeing is likely to happen), a hunger pang, a craving, or the fact that it’s 3:00 p.m. should not send you racing for the vending machine or obsessing about the energy bar in your purse. Ideally, you should put off eating until your stomach is growling and it’s difficult to concentrate,
Psychology is a major factor to be wrestled with, but using positive terms can help. Do not to frame the goal of losing weight in negative language, says Pigott, because that only increases the cravings. Instead of “cutting out” this food, and “never again” having that food, look forward to enjoying a healthy routine, one with boundaries on some foods. “You will feel far less hard done by,” says Pigott.
The first goal should be to stabilise eating patterns. For people who eat as and when they can, that means imposing some order, and having more consistent meal times. Having a proper meal routine helps to keep hunger under control. Once mealtimes fall into a regular pattern, look at reducing portion sizes, and how often the menu includes takeaways and treats such as cakes and chocolate. Do not see food as the enemy. “A lot of people who try to lose weight tell me they absolutely hate eating. Food becomes a stressful experience because they feel out of control,” Pigott says. “Try to enjoy it again. Turn off the television and pay attention to what’s going into your mouth.”
There is more to losing weight than cutting down on calories. Look at overall lifestyle to see what small changes can be made straight away and built on over time. But make each commitment realistic and achievable. That could mean walking or cycling to the shops one day instead of driving, hopping off the bus a stop or two early once a week, and doing without that extra portion of potatoes or pudding. Start small and then build.
The new year will see an explosion in fad diets, but Pigott warns against them all. Diets are often hard to maintain in the long run and can even lead to weight gain if people do not change their lifestyle and behaviour, she says. “For me, anything that isn’t a lifestyle change is not an appropriate weight loss strategy.”
Protein, Produce, and Plant-Based Fats Are Your Weight-Loss Trinity
Protein fills you up. You need it to build lean muscle, which keeps your metabolism humming so that you can torch more fat, Dr. Aronne says. People in a weight-loss program who ate double the recommended daily allowance for protein (about 110 grams for a 150-pound woman) lost 70 percent of their weight from fat, while people who ate the RDA lost only about 40 percent, one study found.
Produce is packed with filling fiber. “It’s very difficult to consume too many calories if you’re eating a lot of vegetables,” says Caroline Apovian, M.D., the director of the Nutrition and Weight Management Center at Boston Medical Center and the author of The Age-Defying Diet. Case in point: Three cups of broccoli is a lot of food, yet only 93 calories.
Tim Spector, author of The Diet Myth and professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, went vegetarian when he wanted to lose 10kg some years back. The move cut out nearly all processed food – gone were the bacon, sausages and frozen lasagnes. It meant he ate a wider range of fruit and vegetables and had to get inventive at meal times. That, he says, was good for his gut microbiome, the unseen community of bugs that live in our digestive tracts.
Gut microbes seem to have a bearing on bodyweight, along with plenty of other aspects of human biology, such as the immune system and even mood. In one landmark study, researchers took gut bacteria from human twins, in which one was obese and the other slim. The scientists transferred the bugs into mice and watched them grow. Mice that received gut bugs from the overweight twin grew fat, but those that received bacteria from the slim twin stayed a healthy weight.
How You Eat Is As Important As What You Eat
In order for your brain to register that you’re full, you need to focus on what you’re eating. “Physical satiety is closely tied to psychological satisfaction,” Beck Busis says. “People tell me all the time how difficult it is for them to lose weight because they love to eat, yet they never concentrate on their food—they eat while watching TV, reading, driving, and working.” No wonder that, according to research, eating when you’re distracted results in consuming a significant number of extra calories a day.
Spector advocates eating for a diverse microbiome, and that means a good variety of vegetables. Slim people, he says, typically have a more diverse community of bugs in their guts, suggesting that some strains play a role in controlling body weight.
“The first thing is to decide what you want to lose, have some attainable goal, and kickstart the process in a feasible way,” Spector says. “There isn’t a one-size-fits-all diet.”
