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More Weight Control, Nutrition & Exercise Articles
Fed Up With Dieting? Let's Lose Some Weight
Obesity affects countless people with tremendous health and social consequences. It is associated with chronic pain, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, increased cancer risk, sleep apnea, and many other chronic conditions.
A simple loss of 5-10% of your body weight has a huge impact on your health, decreasing your heart attack and stroke risks, as well as giving you more energy and a better state of mind. Any diet can make you lose weight for a short while, but invariably they seem to fail after several months, leaving you feeling hungry, weak, and miserable along the way.
Often you may gain the weight back and add even more. Look at the TV series “The Biggest Loser” and you can see how dieting to produce weight loss can result in failure. Why is that? Our bodies are hormonally driven to maintain a specific body weight through our resting metabolic rate, otherwise known as our thermostat.
The weakness, cold feelings, and general malaise of losing weight that can be produced by the arduous methods of calorie counting is a result of the body lowering its metabolic rate. In essence, the body thinks it is starving.
Eventually, if the underlying causes of weight gain are not corrected, you may begin to gain weight on even a lower intake of calories than when you started your diet. Some of this has to do with diets that cause you to burn off your muscle mass inappropriately. The importance of periodic monitoring of your resting metabolic rate and muscle mass cannot be understated as it gives valuable insight into different directions your weight loss plan should be going.
Insulin resistance plays a key role in weight gain and anything that lowers its levels will promote weight loss. Low carbohydrate diets are one such pathway to weight loss, in particular the ketogenic diet, which is high in fat and in moderate protein. Add to this periodic fasting and elimination of snacking on other days to promote even better outcomes.
Weight loss will result from lowering your average insulin levels, which promotes the use of fat stores in your body for general energy use. Exercise, on the other hand, plays a small role in weight loss, but is excellent for weight maintenance and muscle preservation during your diet. An assessment of your medications is important as well to determine how they are affecting your weight. Finally, lifestyle modifications such as more sleep, which promotes weight loss, and not eating after 7 00 p.m. are very helpful in your success.
The most important part of dietary success is continuous monitoring of your progress while keeping realistic goals in sight. Obesity is the result of a relentless pound by pound progression over many years, so don't expect to reverse it all overnight. On the other hand, there are many new tools to help you.
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