Posts Tagged ‘Weight Management’

I don’t count calories. Calorie counting I find to be both counter productive and an impediment to a healthy diet. It has taken some years to come to this conclusion. It’s not that calorie counting is not only useless it can be dangerous. Personally I have no intention of drinking Diet Coke or using artificial sweeteners. The question is do I want to poison myself to cut calories. Neither will I opt for a low fat variety of a whole food product. When calorie count mentality is out for the count health will win out.

Main Stream Diets

This is what I have against most main stream diet plans. They go with the flow and use  America’s perception of what getting slim is about. We would be a slim nation if we just ate whole unadulterated food.

What I find is that the popular diets get repeat business, by using the wrong guidelines, calories in and calories out. Weight management in this country is counter intuitive. It is becoming more and more desperate as people balloon off the charts.

Calorie Counting isn’t a Promising Solution

Bariatric sugery, and gastric bypass are drastic attempts to fix a problem that is so out of control. Part of the reason things have gotten to this point is we are relying on the calorie content of foods. Some of the heavily looked up terms are calories in strawberries, calories in apples and fruit calories. These terms get anywhere from 75,000 to 240,000 of look ups per month. Look where this information has taken us. We now can eat less fruit and vegetables and substitute them with 100 calorie snack packs of cookies.

Count Nutrients

Instead of counting daily calories a far better approach would be to count the nutritional content of the day’s food. Weight management should be about much more than calories. It shouldn’t be about how slim we can get, but on how healthy we can become. With that as a goal we will be able to maintain our idea weight. What we should want is a incredible body that functions incredibility.   

This is another way to look at what we do to ourselves, that no other species does.

 Can you give me the calorie count, before I indulge in some nutrient dense food?

The reason for the title BMI BMI is because it is a subject that calls for a double take. You hear this term all the time, but what does it mean?

What is BMI?

The body mass index (BMI) is an amazing tool. It is one of the easiest weight assessment tools. This is the good news, it is essentially the fastest way to find out where you fall in the weight scheme of things. It was invented in the 1840’s and has been used ever since. Body mass index is a number calculated from a person’s height and weight.

BMI is a starting point in determining if an individual is too thin or too heavy. It will not tell one if they are made up of more fat than muscle. However, it is a great starting point. Once you know your BMI you will have an idea of what your weight is and what it should be.

Body Mass Index

Is the body mass index (BMI) a powerful indicator of health? The answer is yes. Of course it’s not a guarantee of perfect health; it is a means to better health. It is a test that tells you if you have a serious weight issue. It does not tell you your overall body composition, how much of your weight is lean body mass and how much is body fat.

This point is brought up by detractors of this method to determine optimal weight. It has some merit, but the healthiest thing you can do to ensure physical health is keep your weight in check. The real point here is how you choose to manage your weight, if it is just about starvation diets than the body compositions will be unhealthy. Cutting out whole groups of foods and subsisting on coffee and toast is not how you deal with a weight problem.

BMI Calculator

A healthy weight is of the utmost importance throughout life. Obesity reduces life quality and expectancy. Regardless of all other tests your BMI is a strong indicator of overall health. Aiming for a healthy BMI can turn the page and help launch a simmer you. 

There is a good BMI calculator on the website: www.metabolicway.com that is more fun than the usual ones. For women it provides a way to see what their weight looks like. Let me know what you think.  

Childhood Obesity is going to become a dominant force and have an impact on health care. There are children as young as ten are doing what teens and adults do in the insane world of weight loss, which is making themselves vomit. This is now becoming a tool for managing weight and eating. With vomiting becoming a tool for weight management we are a culture who lost our way. This is more common among boys than girls, according to a study of nearly 16,000 school children according to a study published by the Journal of Clinical Nursing.

These findings have prompted to issue a warning that self-induced vomiting is an early sign that children could develop eating disorders and psychological problems, such as binge eating and anorexia. They also think that this problem can be tackled by making sure that children get enough sleep, eat breakfast every day, eat less fried food and night-time snacks and spend less time on the computer.

This isn’t a holistic solution. As long as we think Pepsi refreshes, and packaged faux food is fuel for the body then we aren’t going be able to stop the damage. We as a nation have to improve the food supply or childhood obesity will be the number one health concern on the planet.

 A study of 120 schools, carried out for Taiwan’s Ministry of Education found that 16% or the boys made themselves sick, compared with 10% of the girls. America’s food manufacturing is big business and it is reaching foreign soil. When the dust settles we will see a world that depends on fast convenient food. Obesity is becoming a growing problem in industrialized countries, and has just about tripled over the last three decades.

“For example, a study by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, published in 2010, found that 4% of students had vomited or taken laxatives in the last 30 days to lose or stop gaining weight. And a South Australian study published in 2008 said that eating disorders had doubled in the last decade.”

The Taiwan study found that 18% of the underweight children used vomiting as a weight-loss strategy, compared with 17% of obese children and 14% of overweight children. Normal weight children were least likely to vomit (12%).

When the researchers carried out an odds ratio analysis, they found that using a computer screen for more than two hours a day increased the vomiting risk by 55%, eating fried food every day by 110% and having nighttime snacks every day by 51%. They also found that children were less likely to make themselves sick if they slept more than eight hours a night and ate breakfast every day. These sollutions will stop childhood obesity from becoming a world wide plague.