PARTNERS | HEALTHY CITY  | HOW HEALTHY | VISION | SUMMIT | PRIORITIES | FUNCTIONS | CITY OF FALL RIVER

To lose weight, you have to change your energy balance. There are just two ways to do this: Either consume less energy (calories) or expend more energy (via exercise and/or increased metabolic rate). The easiest way to reduce your consumption is simply to cut back on the size of your meals and/or the amount of high-calorie foods you consume. This doesn't mean that you have to give up any particular food: In fact, completely avoiding a food can lead to strong cravings that derail your diet. A smarter approach is to just eat less of those high-calorie foods.

One of the most common mistakes that dieters make is to get excited or impatient with their diet and reduce their caloric intake too far. If you do that, your body will respond by lowering your metabolic rate and slowing your weight loss. To prevent this downward adjustment of your metabolism, make smaller changes to your eating habits. Your patience will pay off in terms of more consistent weight loss, more energy, and fewer cravings.

For the best results, add exercise to your plan. Regular exercise expends energy as you're doing it but can also lead to increases in your basal metabolic rate, so you'll burn more calories even at rest. High-intensity exercises burn the most calories, but don't select exercises solely on their fat-burning potential. Instead, pick exercises, such as sports activities, that you enjoy and want to incorporate into your daily routine.

Hunger is one of your body's strongest stimuli and can be an evil challenger to your willpower. Hunger is also relatively slow to subside, and can cause you to eat more than you intended. To break this unproductive cycle, always try to eat before you get hungry. This may seem counterintuitive to someone who's trying to limit their calories, but it's a very effective concept.

Two different techniques can help make this easier to accomplish:
Eat smaller, more frequent meals.

• Instead of three meals per day, try eating five or six smaller meals. By eating more frequently, there will be less time between your meals and less chance you'll experience such intense hunger. As an extra benefit, some evidence suggests that eating more frequently can also help raise your metabolic rate.
   

• Include more slow-to-digest foods in your meals.
  When it's not possible to eat more frequently, make sure that your meals contain a mix of nutrients. In particular, fats and protein are digested much more slowly than carbohydrates. While most carbohydrates leave your stomach within about two hours, protein takes approximately four hours to digest, and fat takes as long as six hours. The slower digestion of fats is one of the primary reasons that people on low-carb diets (such as Atkins and South Beach) experience less hunger than those on low-fat diets. It's not necessary to completely eliminate carbohydrates from your meals, though. Most people on balanced-nutrient plans (like the Zone Diet) also experience better hunger control.
   

• Choose foods with a higher Fullness Factor. Nutrition Data's Fullness Factor rating helps you select foods that are low in calories but keep you satisfied longer. As a result, you'll consume fewer calories and feel less hungry between meals.

If you don't take care of your body, it won't take care of you. So, as a first step, make sure that your diet supplies adequate amounts of vitamins and minerals (more about that below), that you're drinking plenty of water and getting enough sleep and fresh air, and that you aren't under too much unhealthy stress. Everything you do to improve your overall health will help make weight loss more likely to occur.
Permanent weight loss requires permanent change

Remember that short-term diets produce only short-term results. The only successful way to keep the weight off is to make small but permanent changes in your lifestyle. Coincidentally, this is also the best way to improve your health.

Explore components of successful weight loss, from diet and exercise to weight-loss programs, weight-loss products and weight-loss surgery.
 

One of the largest free diet and health-related sites in the world, SparkPeople was voted best online health site in Business Week's 2006 and 2007 "Best of the Web" awards.
 

An interactive tool which permits health care professionals to calculate BMI and plot BMI percentiles on the CDC growth charts for children ages 2 to 20.

To return to the Healthy City Fall River Main Page, click here.