Editors
Most Rated Articles
Meg Dilts's Articles
The prevalence of obesity (BMI≥30) continues to be a health concern for adults, children and adolescents in the United States. Data from the most recent NHANES survey shows that among adult men the prevalence of obesity was 31.1% in 2003 -2004, and 33.3% in 2005 - 2006, a small but not statistically significant change.
Choosing a weight-loss program may be a difficult task. You may not know what to look for in a weight-loss program or what questions to ask. This fact sheet can help you talk to your health care professional about weight loss and get the best information before choosing a program.
If your health care provider tells you that you should lose weight and you want to find a weight-loss program to help you, look for one that is based on regular physical activity and an eating plan that is balanced, healthy, and easy to follow.
Overweight refers to an excess of body weight compared to set standards. The excess weight may come from muscle, bone, fat, and/or body water. Obesity refers specifically to having an abnormally high proportion of body fat.
Various methods are used to determine if someone’s weight has increased his or her health risks. Some are based on the relationship between height and weight; others are based on measurements of body fat. The most commonly used method today is the body mass index (BMI). BMI is an index of weight adjusted for the height of an individual.
To use the table, find the appropriate height in the left-hand column and then move across to a given weight. The number at the top of the column is the BMI at that height and weight. Pounds have been rounded off.
The definitions or measurement characteristics for overweight and obesity have varied over time, from study to study, and from one part of the world to another. The varied definitions affect prevalence statistics and make it difficult to compare data from different studies.
Overweight and obesity are found worldwide, and the prevalence of these conditions in the United States ranks high along with other developed nations.
As the prevalence of overweight and obesity has increased in the United States, so have related health care costs—both direct and indirect. Direct health care costs refer to preventive, diagnostic, and treatment services such as physician visits, medications, and hospital and nursing home care.
Only 26 percent of U.S. adults engage in vigorous leisure-time physical activity three or more times per week (defined as periods of vigorous physical activity lasting 10 minutes or more). About 59 percent of adults do no vigorous physical activity at all in their leisure time.
Good news - if you are a very large person, you can be physically active - and you can have fun and feel good doing it.
TO start being more active, try these tips: Think about your barriers to being active. Then try to come up with creative ways to solve them. The following examples may help you overcome barriers.
Set short-term and long-term goals. A short-term goal may be to walk 5 to 10 minutes, 5 days a week. It may not seem like a lot, but any activity is better than none. A long-term goal should be to do at least 30 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity on most days of the week. You can accumulate your physical activity in shorter segments of 10 minutes or more. An example of a long-term goal is to walk briskly on 5 days of the week by the end of 6 months.
Weight-bearing activities, like walking, climbing stairs, and golfing, which involve lifting or pushing your own body weight.
You should talk to your health care provider if you have a chronic disease or have risk factors for a chronic disease, such as asthma or diabetes.
If you are not active now, start slowly. Try to walk 5 minutes a day for the first week. Walk 8 minutes the next week. Stay at 8-minute walks until you feel comfortable. Then increase your walks to 11 minutes. Slowly lengthen each walk by 3 minutes—or walk faster.
Dancing on your feet is a weight-bearing activity. Dancing while seated lets you move your arms and legs to music while taking the weight off your feet. This may be a good choice if you cannot stand on your feet for a long time.
You do not need to know how to swim to work out in water—you can do shallow-water or deep-water exercises without swimming.
You can do many activities in your home. But there are other fun places to be active, including health clubs, recreation centers, or outdoors. It may be hard to be physically active around other people. Keep in mind that you have just as much right to be healthy and active as anyone else.
Weight training builds strong muscles and bones. Getting stronger may also help prepare you for other kinds of physical activity. You can weight train at home or at a fitness center.
If you cannot lift a weight six times in a row, the weight you are lifting is too heavy. If you can easily lift a weight 15 times in a row, your weight is too light.
You can bicycle indoors on a stationary bike, or outdoors on a road bike. Biking does not stress any one part of the body—your weight is spread among your arms, back, and hips.
The long-term health effects of a high-protein/low-carbohydrate diet are unknown. But getting most of your daily calories from high-protein foods like meat, eggs, and cheese is not a balanced eating plan. You may be eating too much fat and cholesterol, which may raise heart disease risk.
High-protein/low-carbohydrate diets are often low in calories because food choices are strictly limited, so they may cause short-term weight loss. But a reduced-calorie eating plan that includes recommended amounts of carbohydrate, protein, and fat will also allow you to lose weight.
Studies show that people who skip breakfast and eat fewer times during the day tend to be heavier than people who eat a healthy breakfast and eat four or five times a day.
A low-fat or fat-free food is often lower in calories than the same size portion of the full-fat product. But many processed low-fat or fat-free foods have just as many calories as the full-fat versions of the same foods.
Children grow at different rates at different times, so it is not always easy to tell if a child is overweight. If you think that your child is overweight, talk to your health care provider. He or she can tell you if your child’s weight and height are in a healthy range.
Involve the whole family in building healthy eating and physical activity habits. This benefits everyone and does not single out the child who is overweight.
Tell your child that he or she is loved, special, and important. Children’s feelings about themselves are often based on how they think their parents feel about them.
Buy fewer soft drinks and high-fat or high-calorie snack foods like chips, cookies, and candy. These snacks may be OK once in a while, but always keep healthy snack foods on hand. Offer the healthy snacks more often at snack times.
Foods that are small, round, sticky, or hard to chew, such as raisins, whole grapes, hard vegetables, hard chunks of cheese, nuts, seeds, and popcorn, can cause choking in children under age 4.
Like adults, kids need daily physical activity. Here are some ways to help your child move every day. Set a good example. If your child sees that you are physically active and that you have fun doing it, he or she is more likely to be active throughout life.
Your child might enjoy trying the following physical activities: Riding a bike, Climbing on a jungle gym, jumping rope, Playing hopscotch, Bouncing a ball, Dancing, Playing catch.
Set limits on the amount of time your family spends watching TV, playing video games, and being on the computer.
Ask your health care provider for brochures, booklets, or other information about healthy eating, physical activity, and weight control. He or she may be able to refer you to other health care professionals who work with overweight children, such as registered dietitians, psychologists, and exercise physiologists.
Weighing too much may increase your risk for developing many health problems. If you are overweight or obese, you may be at risk for: type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease and stroke, metabolic syndrome.
Type 2 diabetes is a disease in which blood sugar levels are above normal. High blood sugar is a major cause of coronary heart disease, kidney disease, stroke, amputation, and blindness. In 2002, diabetes was the sixth leading cause of death in the United States.
Diet pills you buy without a prescription won't make a big difference in how much you lose each week or how long you keep the weight off. If you do use them, read the label carefully.
AGB works primarily by decreasing food intake. Food intake is limited by placing a small bracelet-like band around the top of the stomach to produce a small pouch about the size of a thumb.
RYGB works by restricting food intake and by decreasing the absorption of food. Food intake is limited by a small pouch that is similar in size to the adjustable gastric band.
BPD-DS, usually referred to as a “duodenal switch,” is a complex bariatric operation that principally includes 1) removing a large portion of the stomach to promote smaller meal sizes, 2) re-routing of food away from much of the small intestine to partially prevent absorption of food, and 3) re-routing of bile and other digestive juices which impair digestion.
VSG historically had been performed only as the first stage of BPD-DS (see above) in patients who may be at high risk for complications from more extensive types of surgery.
Early complications of these operations can include bleeding, infection, leaks from the site where the intestines are sewn together, and blood clots in the legs that can progress to the lungs and heart.
Your body's main source of energy is the carbohydrates which you get from eating your daily meals. As you sleep at night for 6-8 hours, your body burns up all those carbohydrates as energy for various metabolic functions that go on even while you sleep.
BromaCleanse is primarily a colon cleanse supplement but it can also give you tremendous weight loss results that will outperform the outcomes of even those other supplements touted as the best weight loss formulas.
Weight loss is not always easy. Any form of help to help you achieve it would go a long way. There are many types of food and food supplements to help you lose weight.
Burning fat can be difficult. There are so many methods around and so many empty promises that it is hard for you to know the best method for you. There is a simple solution. This solution doesn't involve loads of heavy exercise or difficult starvation regimes.
On the average bride to be, you can gain up to 15 pounds of excess weight before your wedding. Well, it is not so surprising. You are so busy getting everything arranged, making sure everyone know where they are suppose to be, and let us not forget all the mini celebrations prior to the wedding.
Eating at work is a form of comfort eating. When one is stressed, eating can alleviate it. However, the drawback is that we often overeat or we eat what's available at work. So, it is better to avoid snacking when working.
It's not unusual, of course, for those who wish to lose weight to think first about cutting back on food. But that may not be the most effective course of action. Especially if you severely decrease your food intake, the method may be dangerous.
The chemicals in diet pills can do more harms to your system than the weight you might lose with them. Also you might develop a dependency which can make your weight control even worse.
However, there are several foods that could help in some degrees. Among them, the noticeable ones are any kind of raw nuts. That's one of the reasons that you hear so much about vegan diet.
As an adult I have struggled with weight gain consistently. I have tried every diet known to man, and finally found success with the Weight Watchers Turnaround program. This program is relatively cheap compared to others and provides many options for an individual to lose weight.
When I needed to lose the weight from having three kids, I turned to weight watchers. Their program was free to start and the weekly fees are very cheap. You can weigh in private and even if you gained some weight they don't make you feel bad.
Long a staple of Eastern and holistic medicine, the Goji Berry is renowned for its antioxidant properties that provide a variety of benefits including increased energy and heightened immune function.
Goji berries have been used for 6,000 years by herbalists in China, Tibet and India to: protect the liver, help eyesight, improve sexual function and fertility, strengthen the legs, boost immune function, improve circulation , promote longevity.
Caralluma fimbriata is a succulent plant, in the cactus family, that has been used as a natural appetite suppressant in India for centuries. It's a new arrival in the family of cactii and succulent plants that are becoming increasingly popular for their appetite suppressant, and weight loss properties, as well as their ability to lower blood sugar.
A list of free colon cleanse products that have free trial offers. You pay only shipping and handling. It works to both quickly and thoroughly remove the toxins from your body which have accumulated as a result of our diets.
A list of available Acai products that have free trial offers. Pay only shipping and handling. Try many Acai products for free.
Recently Approved Articles
When a person is overweight, the fat can build up in the liver cells which can cause injuries in the liver. In extreme cases, the liver becomes inflamed and severely damaged. Eventually the liver can fail to function called liver failure.
Many people choose to lose weight on their own; but some people prefer a structured weight loss program. There are many successful and quick programs in the media, but how does one choose the right weight loss program that offers long term results?
A list of free colon cleanse products that have free trial offers. You pay only shipping and handling. It works to both quickly and thoroughly remove the toxins from your body which have accumulated as a result of our diets.
A list of available Acai products that have free trial offers. Pay only shipping and handling. Try many Acai products for free.
Caralluma fimbriata is a succulent plant, in the cactus family, that has been used as a natural appetite suppressant in India for centuries. It's a new arrival in the family of cactii and succulent plants that are becoming increasingly popular for their appetite suppressant, and weight loss properties, as well as their ability to lower blood sugar.
Recently a new product has come to light that may help people trying to lose weight stay on the healthy end of the spectrum: Resveratrol Select, which is unlike many diet supplements in that it uses a combination of natural and herbal ingredients designed to help the body stay healthy while losing weight.
Goji berries have been used for 6,000 years by herbalists in China, Tibet and India to: protect the liver, help eyesight, improve sexual function and fertility, strengthen the legs, boost immune function, improve circulation , promote longevity.
Lose Weight and Get Ripped! Studies have shown that this little berry is one of the most nutritious and powerful foods in the world! This version of Acai Berry Select is specifically geared toward men as a work out supplement.
Long a staple of Eastern and holistic medicine, the Goji Berry is renowned for its antioxidant properties that provide a variety of benefits including increased energy and heightened immune function.
When I needed to lose the weight from having three kids, I turned to weight watchers. Their program was free to start and the weekly fees are very cheap. You can weigh in private and even if you gained some weight they don't make you feel bad.
Random Articles
Many people choose to lose weight on their own; but some people prefer a structured weight loss program. There are many successful and quick programs in the media, but how does one choose the right weight loss program that offers long term results?
Studies show that people who skip breakfast and eat fewer times during the day tend to be heavier than people who eat a healthy breakfast and eat four or five times a day.
You can do many activities in your home. But there are other fun places to be active, including health clubs, recreation centers, or outdoors. It may be hard to be physically active around other people. Keep in mind that you have just as much right to be healthy and active as anyone else.
Diet pills you buy without a prescription won't make a big difference in how much you lose each week or how long you keep the weight off. If you do use them, read the label carefully.
The chemicals in diet pills can do more harms to your system than the weight you might lose with them. Also you might develop a dependency which can make your weight control even worse.
Type 2 diabetes is a disease in which blood sugar levels are above normal. High blood sugar is a major cause of coronary heart disease, kidney disease, stroke, amputation, and blindness. In 2002, diabetes was the sixth leading cause of death in the United States.
Good news - if you are a very large person, you can be physically active - and you can have fun and feel good doing it.
A list of available Acai products that have free trial offers. Pay only shipping and handling. Try many Acai products for free.
Dancing on your feet is a weight-bearing activity. Dancing while seated lets you move your arms and legs to music while taking the weight off your feet. This may be a good choice if you cannot stand on your feet for a long time.
Fat does not have the same chemical structure as sugars. Saturated fats are called saturated because they have large amount of carbon-hydrogen bonds.