Weight loss or weight maintenance
By
David Holt
of
David Holt
Weight loss or weight maintenance: Sensible eating is the key. Make a lifelong plan and avoid fads.
Buying one of the three of four dozen diet books which come out every year will not help you lose weight, unless you carry that book with you every second of the day to make your muscles burn more calories.
Diet fads come and go, yet 97 million Americans are still overweight. So what is the answer.
Make subtle changes to your eating and exercise habits instead of radical changes which you cannot sustain
Gain knowledge about the wasted calories in your diet. Decide which ones to work on.
Here is one page from a nutrition chapter which might help.
Adapted from "Running Dialogue" by David Holt
Avoid
Protein or Fat diets which
try to make carbohydrates the villain in weight gain. The
villains are on both sides
of the absorbed versus used equation. The only guaranteed ways to
lose
weight are to absorb fewer calories than you use, or, burn
more calories than you absorb. If you absorb more calories than
you expend...you will gain weight. Decrease your calorie intake by
100
calories a day to lose another 10 or 11 pounds. Finding
100 calories is easy for most of you--check the calories per serving of
your:
* Ice cream compared to iced milk, sherbet, or low fat yogurt.
* Current milk product versus non-fat milk.
* 8 ounces of orange juice
versus a more filling orange.
* Cream of soups...please look at
the label.
* Potato chips V pretzels.
*
Regular beer over light beer,
or fewer beers--be aware that alcohol increases the affect of drugs like
Ibuprofen...increasing the gastric irritation also. On the plus side,
a drinker can use fewer pills for a desired analgesic affect.
Fast food eaters...look
at:
* Jacket
or baked potato (without
butter) instead of fries.
* Soda...at least go fifty percent
diet. The second glass or can, or the refill you always get. Or drink
more water.
* The chicken sandwich usually has
fewer calories; but
*Take the Mayo and cheese from
your hamburgers and it will be close. Request extra veggies on those
sandwiches to make them more filling.
* Take fruit into
the restaurant. instead of eating two sandwiches. You'd think a fast
food chain would be able to stock apples and oranges for a quarter
each...as a gesture to their patrons good health.
* Few foods are
bad--consume the so-called unhealthy ones in modest amounts.
* Chocoholic -- accept it,
eat the stuff on a regular basis. It's the same as
skipping meals if you don't. You're more likely to pig out.
Need half a cup of sour cream for those nachos or fajitas. Regular sour cream will be about 250 calories. Low fat sour cream 150 calories. You will have saved your 100 calories for this day, and for as many days as that jar of lower fat sour cream lasts.
Use exercise too
Don't attempt to lose weight
with diet alone. If you've decided exercise is good for
you...why wait until you've lost weight. You don. t have
to start with running. If you lose weight by diet alone, 25 percent of
the loss will be from your muscles. The human body is 50 percent muscle...retain
most of it by exercising while losing weight--then you'll lose only 5 percent from your muscles--mostly the
fat which was stored in them anyway. The
act of exercising can increase your muscle mass. It. s the
muscles which burn most of your calories.
HOW CAN YOU LOSE WEIGHT?
More exercise is an option for some--for those under the injury
threshold. A mile of walking or running uses about 100 calories. Go
from 14 to 21 miles a week, and this one hundred calories per day
will take off a pound of fat every 35 days.
Keep your food intake unchanged, do the extra mileage, and every
five weeks you will lose a pound--ten or eleven pounds per year until
you reach your goal.
Most people are overweight due to eating too much of the wrong type of food, combined with the lack of regular exercise.
One or two small food modifications will not take enjoyment out of your food, but they can shed pounds from your body.
As Dr. Sheldon Margen, professor of public health at UC Berkley, and Dale A. Ogar, managing editor of the UC Berkley Wellness Letter recently wrote: "Instead of jumping on bandwagons...why not make peace with the fact that losing weight is difficult...there are no shortcuts.
