Personal Fitness Professional - March 2008 - (Page 12) MAINTENANCE OF WEIGHT LOSS: WHAT DOES a comprehensive list of requirements to keep your clients from regaining lost weight by warren e. jones IT TAKE? IF LOSING even more than that. weight were easy, two out of three Americans would not be overweight, and one out of three would not be obese. The only thing more difficult than losing weight, though, is not regaining some or all of the weight lost and maybe WHY IS MAINTAINING WEIGHT LOSS IMPORTANT? Of course, losing weight in the first place and keeping it off will tend to reduce all the health risks associated with being overweight and obese, including hypertension, hyperlipidemia, type 2 diabetes, coronary artery disease and strokes, metabolic syndrome, cancer, obstructive sleep apnea, osteoarthritis, orthopedic injuries, liver and gall bladder disease and, well, premature death. Additionally, according to a fairly recent study in the International Journal of Obesity, weight cycling (losing and gaining weight, etc.) may cause a redistribution of body fat to the “upper body fat compartments” (or, in the context of the study, your tummy). Tummy fat, especially visceral tummy fat (fat in and around your internal organs), has often been associated with hypertension, hyperlipidemia, type 2 diabetes, coronary artery disease and premature death. Also, weight cycling results in adaptive thermogenesis, a physiological phenomenon of some complexity but, for our purposes, is simply a reduced resting metabolism. Simply put, the more one loses weight and regains it, the lower his or her calorie burn at rest (over 24 hours) compared to where it was, pound-for-pound, before the loss and gain. And the lower one’s metabolism is, the lower number of calories one can take in without putting on extra pounds. Many of my clients have achieved great success in their weight loss efforts. We’ve achieved those successes primarily through a combination of exercise and proper food intake. When my clients get to their goal weight, that’s when the chore really begins. Your clients, too, may have lost weight, only to regain it. My clients, and perhaps you, want to know what’s necessary to keep the weight off. To supply my clients a scientifically based answer, I hit the books. I recently reviewed approximately 25 peer-reviewed studies from the world’s leading science and medical journals that have been published over the last five years. 12 MARCH2008 · WWW.FIT-PRO.COM http://WWW.FIT-PRO.COM
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