Question of the week

Been a while since I've done a question of the day, week, month, or year...so here goes:

How do you best maintain a wt loss? Diet? no diet? What do you do???

You've probably heard over and over that “diets do not work.” One of the major reasons diets do not work is that they are a short term quick-fix to a long-term long time in-the-making problem!

You did not put on the weight overnight, perhaps as slowly as 3-4 pounds per year, but after 10 years, it is easy to easy why someone could potentially be 30-40 pounds overweight or more at that point. It is a slow process that is based on learned eating habits, habits that are not easy to break. By going on a “diet”, you’re asking your body to try and lose a certain amount of weight in perhaps an unrealistic amount of time.

If your body likes “its set point” it won’t want to give up those pounds without giving up something else as well, that could be a slow-down of your metabolism, or hunger pains, or cravings.

Unless you are willing to change your lifestyle habits, and learn new behaviors that you will permanently stick with, it’s going to be extremely difficult for your body to maintain that weight loss. If you go on the diet, you're saying “I’m only going to do this short term” and go back to the way I was eating before I went on the diet. Therefore, when you go off the diet, you should expect to also have your weight go back up to where it was before you went on the diet.

It is true, there have been some diets that have proven to be “effective” at weight loss, The Zone, Weight-watchers, Atkins, anything that forces you to watch what you're eating, eat less, and cut out specific foods. On many of these diets, if you follow these people out several years past the diet, they end up where they were or worse off, many of these popular diets don’t mention that fact, otherwise, why would they be popular or sell??

However, I think certain popular diets have gained more favor with the public over time, and others have had to revamp themselves to receive more notice in an ever changing fast world.

I once had someone say to me they went on the ELF diet and the EM plan. When I asked what they were, he said…”the Eat Less Food diet and the Exercise More plan.” I thought it was pretty funny when I heard that.

The ELF EM plan. It makes sense, if you eat less food overall, “ and move your body more, (too many people are far to sedentary), then you will burn more calories than you take in! That’s what it boils down to, energy in minus energy out.

Eat more than you burn you gain weight, eat less, you lose it. So, if you want to lose weight and maintain that loss on a long-term basis, the best thing you can do for yourself, is: start by eating less, get your doctor’s approval for exercise and start slow. Even if you ate 100 calories a day less by leaving a few bites at each meal and burned 100 calories extra a day by walking even one mile, you’d have a deficit of 200 calories a day, and you would lose 2 pounds a month. Ramp that up, eat 200 calories less a day and walk 2 miles ~200 calories, you’ll burn 4 pounds a month! It’s about doing the math.

I would say though, that anything more than 1-2 (max) pounds a week of weight loss, you will have a much more difficult time maintaining that loss, simply because your body gets too uncomfortable with the change in the status quo. If you do it slowly, your body has time to adapt to the changes and then you can not only lose weight, but maintain it.