Focus on Weight Control

We had a lot of interest on our last blog post on dieting and weight control.  Most of the questions focussed on the following areas so I hope these points below help:

– Dieting (restriction of calories and/or focus on one food type) can be unhealthy as what can happen is that you focus on quitting food and not on eating “balanced” meals.  Just eating one type of food can be bad for your health because you may be missing out on vitamins and other essential nutrients.

– Psychologically this can be a bad time for you too and exacerbating circumstances (e.g. family or work stress) could force you to return to overeating and gaining more weight that you had in the first place!

– Being overweight or obese can lead to other health complications: Heart disease, Diabetes, Depression, conditions associated with inflammation etc.

The solution is simple but quite difficult to implement:

• Many people are used to eating high carb/high fat foods and not doing exercise.  This “chain” needs to be broken.
• You need to teach your body to burn more fat than it is storing – i.e. eat less fats in combination with burning more fats.
• Lower intake of fats especially saturated and trans-fats. And eat more lower High Glycemic Index Carbohydrates.   Basically this means reducing levels of simple sugars and increase complex carbohydrates (Think sugary cakes v. green vegetables).  Check out our sister blog for more info on Glycemic Index.
• Exercise (walk, cycle, swim, play with the kids….move!)
•  Eat more foods that satiate = vegetables that have  low Glycemic Index (Cauliflower, etc).  Drinking an infusion can also help to feel “full” and some infusions have natural herbs (Green tea, Garcinia and Caralluma etc) that can help in this respect.
• Balance is better than concetrating on one type of food. Eat a range of food types like Vegetables, Fruit ,Fish and low fat meat e.g. chicken etc.

“There is no magic bullet and it takes time to get your eating right and to return to a healthy weight – create solutions not resolutions!”  A. Ward (InnOrbit)