What Do YOU Do to Lose Weight?

Ways to shed weight:  what works, what doesn’t. 

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asked 1,431 men and women what they were doing to lose weight.  The answers varied quite a bit.  Here’s how they responded, in order of the most frequently used approach, along with our comments:

            • Weighing themselves regularly.  As previously mentioned, watch out for the scales; they’re usually inaccurate.  Have your body fat tested by ultrasound, skinfold calipers, or other such method.

            • Walking.  A great aerobic exercise and fat-burner.

            • Drinking diet soft drinks.  As pointed out earlier, these have no nutritional value and are particularly high in sodium — a disaster for weight loss.

            • Taking vitamins and minerals.  Nothing yet developed that you can swallow will “burn” fat.  Enough said!

            • Counting calories.  Self-defeating!  More important than the calories you consume is where those calories came from.  Fat calories, for example, are the most fattening and also the most unhealthy, especially those from saturated fats.  Saturated fats (the kind that are solid at room temperature) lead to high cholesterol, heart disease, strokes, and some cancers.

            • Skipping meals.  This causes the metabolism to slow down.  It’s actually better to eat more than three meals a day.  This keeps your metabolism humming along.

            • Using commercial meal replacements. A chief concern here is that many of these preparations don’t contain the recommended nutrition vital to good health.  Health is almost surely and nearly always impaired.  Plus, there are the specific problems of stomach upset, gas and constipation, due to the lack of bulk and roughage in the diet.  Not only that, food has a unique way of fulfilling the body’s needs, and no beverage in the world has the ability to satisfy the way complete foods can.

             • Taking diet pills.  This stuff is bad news, stay away!  The following disorders have been associated with their use:  heart disease, fatigue, menstrual irregularities, and hypertension.

            • Participating in organized weight-loss programs.  These can be helpful in keeping you accountable and motivated. 

(Source:  Levy AS; Heaton AW.  Weight control practices of U.S. adults trying to lose weight.  Annals of Internal Medicine 1993 Oct 1;119:661-6.)