Getting to a healthy weight
Being overweight may involve choices we make in our diet, but obesity is now proven to be a disease that we have to control according to nutrition and health care provider experts. So here are some tips on what we advise.
1. Find a health care provider to understand this, and help you negotiate strategies that keep you healthy. It's not about the scale, it's about being healthy.
2. If you are obese there are health choices you need to make and no one should be blaming you for choices. Forge pathways to success.
3. Like any chronic illness such as diabetes and hypertension obesity will be a life long condition, even if with medical management you have controlled your BMI, your weight and your body fat. At Mass General Hospital they tell their patients they will never be technically 'cured.' So it is important to get ongoing care with a provider who can watch your body composition and nutrition and keep you healthy.
4. Eating better reduces heart disease risk. Mediterranean diets are the best. Improving your risk of heart disease doesn't equate with improving your numbers on the scale.
5. Genetically obese patients are driven to eat more. Ways that can help reverse these food intake drivers are critically important to long term success
6. Stress reduction improves obesity. Meditation and mindfulness has been proven to work, neither have side effects that are unwanted, either!
7. Medications fundamentally treat some of the genetic mis-coding, if you do chose surgery as a pathway out of obesity, remember this surgery will causes malabsorption of fundamental nutrients. You may be trading one sort of diet struggles with another.
8. Fitness programs that are stable will not increase weight loss, you have to up your fitness game if you want to lose weight without dropping your calorie count much. .
9. Your body does want to hold on to fat. This is somewhat true of fat removal, there are individuals that will have their fat come back in areas of removal if they don't control their genetic problems.
For nutritional monitoring, advice about mindfulness and medication management call WHP Health at 217-356-3736.