Sensible Weight Management
Don't bother just to be better than
your contemporaries or predecessors.
Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner
There's so much advice out there about weight management that anyone who is trying to lose weight should forget what they think they know and read this story.
The National Weight Control Registry is an ongoing research study to determine how people successfully lose weight and maintain healthful weight for many years. The results of the study show...
- 98% of Registry participants report that they modified their food intake in some way to lose weight.
- 94% increased their physical activity, with the most frequently reported form of activity being walking.
- Most report continuing to maintain a low calorie, low fat diet and doing high levels of activity.
- 78% eat breakfast every day.
- 75% weigh themselves at least once a week.
- 62% watch less than 10 hours of TV per week.
- 90% exercise, on average, about 1 hour per day.
Professor Laura Svetkey's study showed that overweight American adults lost an average of 15 pounds by walking or exercising about 30 minutes a day and following the recommendations of the DASH Diet.
Sensible and successful weight management requires having a realistic plan.
- Keep a diary/journal of weight management activities. Modify activities that do not work.
- Keep faith with the intention to have a healthy weight. Don't let inevitable setbacks demoralize you.
- Forget slim, go for health. Images in media suggest that a healthy body is slim and muscular. However, a variety of body shapes, sizes, and fat percentages are healthy. Sensible weight reduction and management requires living healthfully and letting your body find the weight that is right for it.
- Be patient. Fast weight reduction never works in the long run. Aim for a loss of between 2-4 pounds a month. You do this by cutting back on about 200-300 calories of junk food a day and increasing activity about 30-40 minutes a day. After you lose about 10% of your body weight, your body will resist further weight loss. Keep to your plan regardless. After a while you will start losing weight again. Thus, weight loss tends to be stepwise rather than continuous.
- Eat only when hungry and don't overeat. Pay attention to your body's hunger and satiety signals. Be aware of habits and family/social customs that influence your food consumption. You don't have to eat everything on your plate. Don't work, study, watch TV, or use the Internet while eating and vice versa. When out with friends, drink water or tea instead of a soda or high-calorie coffee drink.
- Eat healthy foods by following the Healthy Eating Pyramid Guidelines. Limit consumption of sodas, fast food, packaged pastries, and vending machine products to less than one time a week.
- Move your body. You don't have to breathe hard and sweat. Walk. Get a pedometer or use a mobile app to count your steps. Shoot for 10,000 steps per day.
- Don't feed your feelings. Stress, anxiety, loneliness, boredom, fatigue, and anger can motivate eating in order to derive psychological comfort. Employ non-food activities to soothe uncomfortable feelings. Anchor or meditate, write in your journal, take a brief walk.
