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Tactics For Sustained Weight Loss: Michael Greger, MD - Rich Roll PodcastSustainable weight loss -
The data to date confirm the importance of self-regulation, and in particular self-monitoring of the day-to-day behaviors that drive energy intake and energy expenditure, especially eating behaviors. Those who have high self-efficacy belief in your capacity to execute certain behaviors for exercise in particular are more successful at sustaining weight loss.
And more recently, researchers have been decoding elements of the proper mindset that instills high self-efficacy for the larger constellation of important weight management behaviors.
One recent study used machine learning and natural language processing to identify the major behavioral themes — motivations, strategies, struggles, and successes — that were consistent across a group of over 6, people who had successfully lost and maintained over 9 kilograms about 20 pounds of weight for at least a year.
Among this large group, they consistently advised perseverance in the face of setbacks, and consistency in food tracking and monitoring eating behaviors, as key behavior strategies. And most of them stayed motivated by reflecting on their improved health and appearance at their lower weight.
The evidence suggests that age, gender, and socioeconomic status are not significant factors in predicting weight loss maintenance. But most weight loss studies oversubscribe white, educated, and midlevel income-earning females. Given that the prevalence of obesity and its related comorbidities is disproportionately higher in more socially disadvantaged and historically marginalized populations, we need richer, more representative data to paint a full and inclusive picture of a successful weight loss psychology.
We need to better understand the lived experience of all people so that we can determine the most powerful and unique motivations, effective behavioral strategies, and likely challenges and setbacks, particularly the environmental determinants that dictate the opportunities and barriers for engaging in and maintaining a healthier lifestyle.
What we can say for certain is that for any and all of us, maintaining weight loss necessitates getting comfortable with discomfort — the discomfort of occasionally feeling hungry, of exercising instead of stress eating, of honestly deciphering reward-seeking versus real hunger, and resisting the ubiquitous lure of ultrapalatable foods.
This is no easy task, as it often goes against environmental cues, cultural customs, family upbringing, social influences, and our genetic wiring. In order to help each other achieve health and weight loss in our modern environment, we need to learn and practice the psychological tools that help us not only accept, but eventually embrace, this inevitable discomfort.
Be prepared to adapt your lifestyle as necessary to maximize your chances of success. Simply replacing unhealthy foods with healthy ones—not for a few weeks, but forever—will help you achieve weight loss while also offering numerous other benefits. What does a healthy diet look like?
A healthy diet favors natural, unprocessed foods over pre-packaged meals and snacks. It is balanced, meaning that it provides your body with all the nutrients and minerals it needs to function best. It emphasizes plant-based foods—especially fruits and vegetables—over animal foods. It contains plenty of protein.
It is low in sugar and salt. Here a few examples of healthy meals for weight loss. For breakfast, a bowl of bran flakes with sliced strawberries and walnuts with nonfat milk. For lunch, a turkey sandwich on wheat with vegetables and an olive oil and vinegar dressing. For dinner, a salmon steak on a bed of spinach.
Healthy snacks for weight loss include almonds or pistachios, string cheese with an apple, Greek yogurt or a banana with peanut butter.
Before you begin your weight-loss journey, do some brainstorming about the kinds of healthy foods you enjoy so that you can have lots of choices as you plan your meals and snacks. Such styles of eating tend to have a few things in common—they tend to be plant-based diets, they emphasize healthy fats, no simple sugars and low sodium, and they favor natural foods over the highly processed fare typical of much of the Western diet.
For example, the Mediterranean style diet gets its name from the foods available to various cultures located around the Mediterranean Sea. It heavily emphasizes minimally processed fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and whole grains. It contains moderate amounts of yogurt, cheese, poultry and fish.
Olive oil is its primary cooking fat. Red meat and foods with added sugars are only eaten sparingly. Besides being an effective weight loss method, eating a Mediterranean style diet is linked to a lower risk of heart disease, diabetes, depression and some forms of cancer.
Experts developed the DASH diet Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension specifically as a heart-healthy regimen. The combination of food types contained in the diet seem to work together especially effectively to lower blood pressure and decrease risk of heart failure.
The key features of DASH are low cholesterol and saturated fats, lots of magnesium, calcium, fiber and potassium, and little to no red meat and sugar. Unsurprisingly, that equates to a list of foods similar to those of the Mediterranean diet—whole grains, vegetables, fruits, fish, poultry, nuts and olive oil.
As its name implies, the MIND diet Mediterranean-DASH diet Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay was designed by doctors to take elements from the Mediterranean and DASH diets that seemed to provide benefits to brain health and stave off dementia and cognitive decline.
In practice, it is very similar to both the Mediterranean and DASH diets, but it puts stronger emphasis on leafy green vegetables and berries, and less emphasis on fruit and dairy.
In recent years, the Nordic diet has emerged as both a weight-loss and health-maintenance diet. Based on Scandinavian eating patterns, the Nordic diet is heavy on fish, apples, pears, whole grains such as rye and oats, and cold-climate vegetables including cabbage, carrots and cauliflower.
Studies have supported its use both in preventing stroke and in weight loss. What do all of these diets have in common? Eating for your health—especially your heart health—by adopting elements from these diets is a smart way to lose weight. But is fasting healthy, and does intermittent fasting work?
Fasting—abstaining from eating for some period of time—is an ancient practice that is safe when not taken to extremes. Traditionally, the benefits of fasting have been both spiritual and physical. People who fast for religious reasons often report a stronger focus on spiritual matters during the fast.
Physically, a simple fast lowers blood sugar, reduces inflammation, improves metabolism, clears out toxins from damaged cells and has been linked to lower risk of cancer, reduced pain from arthritis and enhanced brain function. A common intermittent fasting schedule might restrict eating to the hours of a.
to p. But there is no specific, prescribed schedule. Some people have more or less generous eating windows, setting the rule that they will not eat after, say, p. During a period without eating, insulin levels drop to the point that the body begins burning fat for fuel.
Numerous studies have demonstrated the benefits of intermittent fasting for weight loss. One possible reason for the success of intermittent fasting is that most practitioners have quit the habit of eating during the late evening and night hours.
There are certain people who should not try intermittent fasting without first checking with their doctor, such those with diabetes or heart disease. It sounds counterintuitive, but many people find success losing weight—especially initially—by eating more fat, not less.
The theory is that by eating so many healthy fats and restricting carbohydrates, you enter an altered metabolic state in which you force your body to begin relying on fat for energy, burning away your fat stores instead of sugar for fuel.
Research does show that keto is an effective way to jump-start weight loss and improve blood-sugar levels. However, it is hard to maintain, and to date we are lacking long-term studies that show it to be a sustainable eating pattern for keeping weight off.
New research shows little Sustainable weight loss wdight infection from Sustainable weight loss Joint health optimization. Discrimination Sustainble work Sustainable weight loss linked to high blood pressure. Sustainabe fingers weivht toes: Poor circulation or Raynaud's phenomenon? According to the CDC, nearly three-quarters of us are overweight or obese. That suggests that losing weight is not easy—yet it is entirely possible when done right. There are two keys to success when it comes to weight loss. The first is to find an approach that works for you specifically, one that makes you feel good and keeps you motivated.Sustainable weight loss -
This means that based on our best estimates, only one in five individuals who is overweight is successful in long-term weight loss. These include various energy intake-reducing behaviors — limiting calorie-dense foods and sugar-sweetened beverages, portion control and a consistent eating pattern across days, increased fruit and vegetable consumption — as well as being physically active for at least an hour per day.
This makes sense and is consistent across the scientific literature. Any successful weight loss necessitates tipping and keeping the scale toward greater energy expenditure and less energy intake a net negative energy balance. The most important determinants of weight loss maintenance are those that cement changes in behavior.
As more recent evidence confirms, the proper psychology for weight loss is critical for regulating the physiology that supports weight loss. Only recently have we started to evaluate the psychological and cognitive determinants of weight loss maintenance.
We all have anecdotal evidence from family, friends, and colleagues. But systematically collecting, processing, and analyzing the qualitative experiences, strategies, and challenges from successful weight loss maintainers is difficult.
Weight loss takes time and is different for everyone, so there shouldn't be a definitive time frame attached. Plans that sell products: If a plan requires you to buy or eat certain products in order to lose weight, what happens when you stop using them?
Remember the "year test": if you're not planning on eating or using these products for the rest of your life, the plan isn't sustainable. Plans that are overly restrictive: Things like juice or soup cleanses, detox teas, and two-week "clean eating" plans that omit entire food groups lure people in, because they promise to work fast.
While fad diets may work initially to help you shed a few pounds, they aren't sustainable for the long haul, so you'll end up gaining the weight back. Weight loss is an extremely complex process that takes time, effort, and often-major lifestyle alterations, George says.
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Write For Us Advertise With Us Accessibility Contact Archives. If you are physiologically hungry, eat. First, when people lose weight rapidly, especially via fad or crash diets, they are typically unable to maintain it because the weight they lose is often more muscle mass and water and less fat mass compared to people who lose weight gradually.
But when you lose weight too quickly, you lose muscle and your body slows down calorie burning. Fast weight loss can even cause permanent slowing of metabolism.
Rapid weight loss often leads to the dreaded yo-yo weight cycling many chronic dieters experience. The study also found that the contestants regained a substantial amount of their lost weight in the six years following the competition [14] Fothergill E, Guo J, Howard L, et al. The effect of rate weight loss on long-term weight management: a randomised control trial.
The Lancet. Further compounding the issue, when people lose weight rapidly, appetite often increases as metabolism decreases, making it almost impossible to keep the pounds off. A study in Obesity reports our bodies prompt us to eat calories more per day for every pound lost [16] Polidori D, Sanghvi A, Seeley R, Hall K.
How Strongly Does Appetite Counter Weight Loss? Quantification of the Feedback Control of Human Energy Intake. Popular fad diets also very often result in nutrient deficiencies.
The bottom line: Shedding weight sensibly is the way to go. Experts usually say a safe rate is losing around half a pound to 2 pounds a week. With that goal in mind, here are some tried-and-true ways to drop pounds and keep them off for good. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC recommends losing 1 to 2 pounds per week.
Additionally, the CDC claims that people who lose weight gradually are more likely to keep the weight off than those who lose weight rapidly. Losing weight through healthy lifestyle changes like improved diet and increased physical activity offers a host of benefits, from reductions in body fat to improved joint pain and more.
Consider the following advantages of losing weight safely. Maintain weight loss. People who lose weight gradually 1 to 2 pounds per week through lifestyle changes like healthy eating, getting regular exercise and stress management are more likely to keep their weight off than those who lose weight quickly, according to the CDC.
Improve blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol. Losing weight through lifestyle changes like getting regular physical activity and eating healthy foods can help reduce the risk of high blood pressure, cholesterol, heart attacks and strokes, according to the American Heart Association AHA.
Additionally, losing weight by implementing healthy habits may reduce the progression of prediabetes and type 2 diabetes or control type 1 diabetes. Lose more body fat. One small study published in the International Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism examined 42 individuals with excess weight or experiencing obesity found that those who participated in slow weight loss experienced greater reduction in body fat compared to those who participated in rapid weight loss, as well as greater decreases in waist and hip circumference.
Those who participated in rapid weight loss, on the other hand, experienced greater losses in fat-free body mass, lean body mass and total body water [17] Ashtary-Larky D, Ghanavati M, Lamuchi-Deli N, et al.
Rapid Weight Loss vs. Slow Weight Loss: Which is More Effective on Body Composition and Metabolic Risk Factors? Int J Endocrinol Metab.
Improvements in joint pain. Losing weight can reduce the amount of pressure on joints as well as inflammation associated with weight gain.
Losing just 10 to 15 pounds may significantly reduce the risk of developing osteoarthritis later in life and may improve the severity of arthritis symptoms. Losing more than 1 to 2 pounds per week may cause side effects including loss of muscle, body water and bone density, and is generally not recommended.
Other side effects of rapid weight loss may include:. Additionally, those who lose weight rapidly are more likely to regain weight quickly. Consult with your health care provider to determine a plan to lose weight safely.
Losing weight fast is generally discouraged as a safe and sustainable method of weight loss, but children, teenagers, pregnant women and older adults should be especially cautious with rapid weight loss.
The best way to achieve sustainable weight loss includes implementing healthy lifestyle changes like eating a balanced and nutritious diet, getting regular exercise and managing stress.
Individuals who lose weight gradually are more likely to keep the weight off and reap benefits like reduced body fat, improved heart health and more. Meanwhile, people who lose weight quickly are more likely to lose muscle mass and water weight and risk experiencing side effects like loss of bone density or weight regain.
Speak with your doctor to determine the best weight loss plan for you. Cutting back on calories and engaging in regular physical activity may lead to gradual and sustained weight loss.
Experts recommend getting at least minutes of exercise per week or 30 minutes per day five days a week and eating fewer calories a day to lose up to 1 pound per week. The best diet to lose weight includes unprocessed, whole foods like fruits, vegetables and lean meats like poultry and fish.
Drinking plenty of water especially before a meal and eating more fiber can lead to greater satiety feeling full after eating and may prevent overeating, which may contribute to weight loss over time. Research indicates that losing weight slowly through improved eating habits and increased exercise may lead to reductions in body fat.
Consuming fewer calories a day may lead to one pound of weight loss per week. A calorie calculator can help you determine how many calories to aim for per day. Information provided on Forbes Health is for educational purposes only.
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She is a top barre and dance instructor, a former National Competitive Aerobics Champion Bronze Medalist and a Broadway performer. She has also starred in 10 exercise videos. For more, visit: www. Rafael Sepulveda Acosta is a board-certified physician with experience in internal medicine, pediatric and adult sleep medicine, and obesity medicine in Northern California.
He practices as a sleep medicine specialist and weight management physician in the North Bay of the San Francisco Bay and Sonoma County. His focus and skills include the evaluation and treatment of obesity, weight-related disorders, obstructive sleep apnea, central sleep apnea, restless legs syndrome, narcolepsy, insomnia, parasomnias, behavioral insomnia of childhood and other sleep-related disorders.
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Take Quiz. Reduce Your Intake of Ultra-Processed Carbs and Sweets A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reveals what you eat is most important for weight loss [1] Ludwig D, Ebbeling C..
Eat More Plants Research shows a plant-based diet not only promotes weight loss, but is also easier to stick to than a low-calorie diet [2] Turner-McGrievy G, Mandes T, Crimarco A. Enjoy 1 Free Month Of Membership At Sign Up.
The Lsos Health editorial team is independent and objective. To Sustainable weight loss support our reporting work, and to Vitamins for mens health our Sustainale to Sutainable this content for free to our readers, we receive compensation from the companies that advertise on the Forbes Health site. This compensation comes from two main sources. Firstwe provide paid placements to advertisers to present their offers. This site does not include all companies or products available within the market. Weeight your wejght for Sustainable weight loss to ,oss Sustainable weight loss, you want Sustainablr do it in Fiber optic communication healthy way — and you want it to last. Sustainable weight loss you're eager to drop pounds, you may want to know how to lose weight quickly or how to lose belly fat. Unfortunately, quick weight loss isn't sustainable, and you can't choose where you lose fat. Weight-loss plans that promise fast results tend to be overly restrictive, and they don't work in the long term. They can lead to disordered eatingcause weight gainand make people miserable. But healthy weight loss is possible!
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