Weight loss for health

There is a lot of difference between losing weight and maintaining weight. While weight loss is about losing excess body weight, maintaining weight is about weight control or the act of trying to maintain a healthy body weight for long.

Maintaining Healthy Weight

Maintaining healthy body weight requires proper planning and strategic methods to be implemented. One has to include diets that work and improve eating habits and patterns together with daily activities to maintain weight. Weight maintenance also means that a person has to develop an overall pattern of varied behavioral routines that can support the exercise and dietary habits. Maintain healthy body weight is all about adopting a new attitude towards life, yourself and the foods habits you are used to.

Success Strategies to Maintain Weight

There are some strategies that can be incorporated in your daily life to ensure healthy weight control. The strategies include:

Eating a healthy breakfast regularly.
Monitor your body weight from time to time. If not regularly, at least once in a week should be fine.
Exercise for at least 30 minutes a day to burn 400 calories a day. This is necessary to control weight.
Walking is the best exercise to control weight, so try to walk every day.
Follow a diet that works, which would be a fat-free diet. Eat healthy carbs and do not avoid any food groups as each of these groups is equally important.
Control your overall calorie-intake. On an average, a person should not consume more than 1400 calories.

Weight Control and Motivation

It is important to stay motivated when you want to control weight. Failure is a part of life, and it comes in a bigger way when it comes to weight control. Therefore, when you are trying to maintain weight in the long run, make sure you make things difficult for yourself to fail!

Always avoid phrases that start with NEVER! “I will NEVER have French fries.” – It just makes you weak.

There are many occasions that lead to problems when you are on a weight control mode – social occasions, parties, barbecues and dining out. If these occasions are necessary, try to eat only the low-calorie food served. There are diets that actually work at such occasions too if you know how to

Do not nibble food leftovers – it is neither necessary, nor appreciated. It is always better to avoid leftovers or excess foods as they tend to accumulate on the hips and within coronary arteries.

Temptations have to be watched and monitored carefully. Whenever you feel tempted to eat, exercise and be active. Physical exercise can be beneficial to control food cravings and for maintaining weight as well.

Weight Control Mantra – Eat Less, Eat Often

Eating less in portion and more often than usual actually helps in stabilizing the level of blood sugar and keeps you full. It helps in maintaining efficient metabolism levels too.

Losing weight is hard work, but keeping the weight off is even harder.

Take Claudia Hallblom of the Los Angeles area. By her own estimation, she has lost and regained about 1,000 pounds in her 39 years.

While many of us may not go up and down by 1,000 pounds, the gain/loss cycle one that is all-too-common.

But why?

Like many of us, Claudia’s success at weight loss was generally motivated by a specific goal – a wedding, a graduation or other event.

To lose the weight, Claudia would get focused and go on a strict diet – counting calories and closely watching what she ate. Her dieting usually met with success, but after reaching her goal and passing the event, the weight would just come back on.

According to Claudia. “I didn’t know how to lose weight and keep it off.”

TWO REASONS WHY WEIGHT LOSS REBOUND OCCURS

In this article, we will fill you in on the two best tools to help keep the weight off, but first, let’s have a look at why this is so hard.

When you lose weight, two changes take place that work against your new, thinner self. First, your lighter body needs fewer calories to maintain itself. Second, your cravings for food become more intense.

Research shows that when you lose weight, you need about eight fewer calories per day for each pound of weight that was lost. That means someone who loses 40 pounds will require about 320 calories fewer each day than they did before the weight loss.

A change like that is significant and requires a corresponding permanent change in what you eat. Not just while you are losing the weight, but for the rest of your life.

Also working against you after losing weight is your appetite. Weight loss brings about a change in hormones that leave you feeling hungrier.

Studies also show that, after a weight loss, levels of the appetite-regulating hormone leptin are lower than what they used to be. Similarly, the levels of ghrelin, another hormone which stimulates food intake, rise after weight loss.

Keeping the weight off is therefore a battle of the mind against your hormones and metabolism – both of which want to put the weight back on.

According to Paul MacLean, associate professor of medicine at the University of Colorado, Denver, “The big problem is keeping it off. The recent estimates are that only 5% to 10% of people are successful at keeping weight off on a long-term basis.”

Dr. Ken Fujioka, director of nutrition and metabolic research at the Scripps Clinic in San Diego adds: “You lose 10% of your body weight. All of a sudden all these systems kick in to try to keep you from losing weight. People are mad at themselves or depressed after they regain the weight. But I explain: It’s not you. Biology has kicked in now…. You are hungry all the time. You think about food all the time.”

Discouraging, to say the least!

TWO WAYS TO BEAT THE 95% FAILURE RATE

However, the good news is that there are two tools which can help you overcome the problem of weight re-gain.

First – and no surprise to most of you – is exercise. Exercise buffers the body against regaining weight, in ways that researchers of the physical body are just starting to comprehend. “Everyone thinks exercise is about burning calories,” Dr. Fujioka says. “But you are actually returning the system to more like what it should be.”

Second – and a much easier way – is the re-training of old habits through therapies developed by decades of research of the mind and its influence on the physical body. Leading research psychologist Dr. Patrick Porter says “The most powerful force within our bodies resides in our minds. This has been the source of all great achievement throughout mankind and is the single most effective tool to support lasting weight loss.”

There are two colors of fat, brown and white. The type we are most familiar with is white, which comprises most of the fat in the body. White fat is a storage depot for excess calories and provides insulation and produces inflammation, an unhealthy situation for the body. Brown fat is a healthy type of metabolically active fat. Brown fat is named as such because it contains a lot of energy-generating mitochondria which gives rise to the color. Brown fat is considered “good” because it burns calories and generates body heat.

Through complex brain-hormone interactions, the body controls its own body temperature. A higher body temperature is the result of increased metabolism. It’s like running an engine; the harder it runs, the hotter it gets. The hormones that raise metabolism, in fact, do so mainly by increasing thermogenesis. Low body temperature means lowered metabolism; we’ve seen this is an indicator of low thyroid function. People with more brown fat have a higher body temperature and higher metabolism because they burn more calories to produce body heat.

Brown fat produces a specialized blood protein known as thermogenin that allows for the production of body heat. Brown tissue is controlled by nerves and stress hormones. The stress hormones epinephrine and norepinepherine, released from nerve cells and the adrenal gland, activate brown tissue, increasing thermogenesis.

Newborn babies have the highest concentrations of brown fatty tissue, but until recently, it was thought that adults didn’t have any brown fat. In 2009, scientists discovered the presence of it in adults. This was considered a major medical breakthrough when the research was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Less than one percent of the body’s fat is brown. Most is located in the front of the neck, shoulders and around the collar bones. It also hides in deeper layers of fat and the number of areas varies among individuals. Thinner people and younger people tend to have the most. Although, you lose brown fat as you get older and as you gain weight, it doesn’t go away completely. In the past, it was thought that once you lost your brown fatty tissue, it was gone forever. However, this is clearly not the case. Everyone has the potential of making more.

Now researchers are working feverishly to find ways to help people make more of this calorie-burning tissue. Researchers are investigating different types of medications and even stem cell transplants as ways to induce brown fat production. Animal studies show that lowering room temperature just a few of degrees will make them lose weight by boosting their metabolism. Cold also makes white fat act more like brownish or beige fat, which burns more calories.

You can make more brown fat by cooling your body down. Even a small decrease in the temperature your body is exposed to will induce your body make more calorie burning cells. From a survival perspective, when the body is cooled, it has to make more brown fatty tissue to generate enough body heat to keep from freezing to death. Researchers have speculated that warm temperatures may be contributing to our obesity epidemic. Turning down the thermostat just a couple of degrees could help boost your metabolism because you need to burn more calories to stay warm.

Exercise done in the water is particularly good at drawing out body heat, forcing your body to burn more calories. You don’t need to make yourself so cold that you feel uncomfortable or shiver. Swimming is one of the best fat-burning exercises. Swimming is extremely relaxing and a great form aerobic exercise. But any water exercise is a great way to cool your body and burn extra calories. Submersing yourself in water that’s cooler than body temperature will cool you down, causing you to make more brown fat to keep you warm. Try walking in a pool, using a kick board or take a water aerobics class. You don’t have to be a great swimmer to use water to help you burn extra calories.

Just as healthy fat can be part of the cycle to help lose weight; dysfunctional brown fat can get in the way. And, ironically – or perhaps not so ironically, considering the constant feedback loops of the body — obesity can cause brown fat dysfunction. If you are very overweight, your fat tissue cannot produce heat properly, so your metabolism is lowered and it becomes even harder to lose weight, ad infinitum.

Not so long ago, losing weight for women and everybody else entailed cutting down on the food intake without much thought on its exact effects in the functions of the body. However, with the many dynamics of life today, weight loss diet programs have been introduced. When looking at the probable programs, women can be placed in different categories as it will be seen here.

The working type women are the most liable to uncontrolled weight gain as they are more tempted to overeat. Their intermittent eating habits are not helped by the fact that most of the foods are processed. This kind of woman will be required to work really hard to ward off the yearning associated with these foods. It works perfectly well if such women can replace some of the junk food with groceries.

For middle aged women without children, a diet program can be easily adopted without causing a lot of adjustments. All you need to do is ensure that each meal is devoid of high fats. Fruits, vegetables and yogurt have little or no fat content and should form the biggest proportion of the meals. Start your morning with a nutritious yogurt or fruit juice as this keeps the body energized and burns extra body fat. For lunch and dinner, try a combination of salad dressing and fresh delicatessen salads. If this becomes monotonous, you could alternate with some bread, balsamic vinegar and feta cheese. The idea here is to avoid carbohydrates as much as possible. This kind of diet plan is simple and flexible and would be useful for overweight girls below the age of 30.

For the women over the age 40 bracket, dealing with unwanted fat is a little bit trickier. The other groups of women could do with a simple diet changes but in this case, an exercise program to compliment is recommended. There are many reasons why it is difficult to lose weight at this stage in life, but the major factor is the body hormones. Women in this age group are advised to set realistic weight losing goals and stick by them. As much as you may have a busy lifestyle, finding time to exercise is vital if the diet program is to be effective. As for the body metabolism, it is believed to be reducing at this stage and the diet chosen should address this. By eating smaller quantities of more meals in a day, you keep the metabolism process active. These meals should come in three hours intervals and ought to be nutritious enough, with a higher preference of fiber and minerals. As for fluids, it is highly recommended to increase water and reduce caffeinated drinks intake. Women around the age of 40 may have water retention problems but this cannot be solved by drinking less water.

Losing weight can be challenging regardless of age but it is manageable through remedies such as the ones highlighted here. Women find it difficult to alter their dietary lifestyle and as such require exercise and emotional support to succeed. A point to remember is that weight loss diet programs may not be quick fix solutions but maintaining a positive attitude and setting realistic goals may just work for you.