Five Steps to Weight Loss
A no-nonsense guide to losing weight from Aerobics and Fitness Daily.
Medicare has recently announced that they now consider obesity to be a disease.
Recent studies show that 65% of Americans are overweight, and 31% are obese.
Obesity has reached epic and unprecedented proportions in the United States, and global studies indicate that the trend is similar in much of the rest of the world. Clearly, something has changed about the way we live to cause this. Increased wealth, larger portions, high calorie foods, and a lack of exercise are all factors in the phenomenon.
The question is: what can you do about it?
If you are like the 65% of Americans who need to lose weight, read on for five steps to shedding those pounds and living a healthier life.
1. See your doctor!
Before you do anything, make an appointment with your doctor. Tell your doctor that you are concerned about your health and want to begin a weight loss program. Your doctor will give you advice on how much exercise you should engage in and how many calories a day you should be consuming. He may also give you referrals to nutritionists and other health professionals to get you started on your weight loss journey.
2. Understand that there is no quick fix
Plenty of diet programs promise you the world, but deliver nothing more than pain in the checkbook. It took time to put the weight on, it will take time to take it back off. Most experts recommend losing no more than 2-3 pounds a week. Losing weight too fast can be bad for your health. Remember, the goal of losing the weight is to increase your health, not decrease it.
3. Eat sensibly.
If you consume fewer calories per day than you use, you will lose weight. That’s the closest thing to a law that you’ll find in weight loss. Most diet programs are nothing more than caloric restriction all dressed up. The simple truth is that a straightforward calorie counting diet will work. Other diets do as well, so long as you restrict your caloric intake to fewer than you burn in a day. You don’t have to be accurate to the tens of calories a day, its good enough to keep track to the nearest one hundred or two hundred calories. 3500 calories is equal to one pound of weight, which means that losing one pound a week requires you to take in 500 less calories per day than you use. Your doctor can tell you the number of calories you need to maintain your current weight and can give you advice on the minimum number of calories per day that you should be eating.
4. Get some exercise.
Your body is stingy on using energy when you are sitting on the couch. You need to get up and get moving to supplement your weight loss program. At a given level of food intake, the more exercise you get, the faster you will lose weight. Exercise is also healthy for us. You don’t have to become a marathon runner and any amount of exercise is better than none at all. Shoot for a minimum of thirty minutes of exercise three times a week.
5. Realize that you have to change your life, not just your weight.
To lose weight, you need to change your habits. Many people succeed in reaching their weight loss goals, but then return to their old food and exercise habits. The weight comes back, and all their hard work was for naught. You have to keep up with the habits that allowed you to lose weight in the first place for the rest of your life. You need to realize that, and make that commitment to yourself from the beginning.