Obesity
some facts about obesity and weight loss
- Physicians generally agree that women with more than 30 percent body fat and men with more than 25 percent are obese. Obesity occurs when a person's caloric-intake is consistently greater than the amount of energy he or she is expending.
- Obesity increases the risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and some types of cancer. Other health problems associated with obesity include gout (a disease affecting the joints), breathing difficulties, emotional suffering and many more.
- Obesity may have more than one cause. Genetic, environmental, psychological/social and other factors may all play a part.
- Losing excess body fat is essential for living a healthy lifestyle. Studies show improved health in people after losing as little as 10 to 20 pounds. A varied diet rich in fruits and vegetables and lowfat dairy products, coupled with physical activity and monitoring of calories, can help achieve and maintain a healthy weight.
Finding the Right Diet
Diets entice us with their promises of quick weight loss. But the people we know who eat well and look healthy are not at all dieting. They have simply adopted good eating habits. Diets can be so restrictive that they set up for failure. Some are so low in caloric intake that the dieters literally don't have the energy to continue with them.
You do not need to join a commercial diet program, purchase special foods or dietary supplements, or use diet pills to succeed at weight loss. In fact, the best thing that you could do would be to start eating healthy right now and continue to do so for the rest of your life.
Of course very few people could do such a thing, so think of a diet or the use of diet aids as tools to help you in the right direction.
While we do not recommend any specific diet and want to support people on all diets, the above paragraph describes the conventional formula of eating healthier foods and fewer calories and could be labeled a low calorie diet. There are many other options including low carb diets, low fat diets and diets based on highly nutritious, low calorie foods.
A good diet will be healthy from the start and will be based on principles that you can follow for a lifetime. Depending on the diet plan you select and how your body reacts to it, you may not see results as quickly as you would like. Before you begin, make a commitment to stick with the plan for a specified length of time. This will help to ensure that you don't give up prematurely and you will therefore have a greater chance of success.