Getting to a Healthy Weight: Lifestyle Changes Part I

Do you truly want to be healthy? Are you willing to do what is necessary to become healthy? Or would you just wait until you develop cancer, heart diseases and other illnesses?
Before you want to achieve a healthy body weight, the first and the most important thing you should do is to have a change. If you want health, live long healthy years and a good body shape, you need to do what is necessary to become healthy. Yes, it means a change, a major change to your current lifestyle.
Our lifestyles today are very busy. We have family, work, school, leisure to fit into a limited time. We need to be healthy to cope with the demands of daily life. But what does it mean to have a healthy lifestyle? A healthy lifestyle provide plenty energy for our bodies, help us feel good and stay at a healthy weight. And it lowers the risk for serious health problems.
To have a healthy lifestyle, we need to:

1. Eat healthy foods-This consists of plenty of fruit and vegetables, enough carbohydrates for our energy expenditure, low intake of fats, sugars and salt. Also, it is important for us to eat some source of protein, even the vegetarians or not. It is because protein is responsible for the rebuilding of muscle tissue. If you eat meat, choose lean meats or white meat such as fish. For the vegetarians, choose soya or milk. Plenty of wholegrain foods high in fiber are a must especially for breakfast and a great start of the day. Water is a must requirement. Roughly drink about 8 glasses water regularly throughout the day. Do always read the labels of foods as they are important guidelines and avoid processed foods as they contain many additives, sugars and salts. Besides, you can still have dessert and treats now and then, the goal is moderation.

2. Get exercises-Doing regular exercises help improving your health and prevent serious illness. Instead of visiting the gym or running marathons, you can go walking or cycling, take up a hobby or sport that keeps you active, instead of lift take the stairs and so on.

3. Relax-Nowadays, there are many people suffer from stress. Some people find that eating is their way of managing stress. If you have a lot of stress in your life, it might affect you to make a healthy change to your lifestyle. Just do what you want, eat what you want (but surely those food should be healthy), go where you want when you feel stress. And go for a walk and listen to some music.

4. Get enough sleep-Many of us forget the body needs time to recuperate. We should all getting 8 hours sleep a night and preferably getting to bed before midnight. Without sufficient rest, we are not only becoming tired, motiveless and stressed, but also gaining more weight too.

5. Non smoking-Weight gain is a big issue for many people who want to quit smoking. We might notice that smokers seem to be thinner than non-smokers. However isn’t it a more serious health risk to keep smoking than to gain a few extra pounds when quit smoking? Smoking seems to be more harmful to our life than weight gaining.

6. Drink less alcohol-As we all know that alcohol can make us happy and feel relaxing. Especially dinking red wine could help blood circulation, and stronger our cardiopulmonary function. But if we over drink alcohol, it might affect our health and daily life. So the maximum is up to 2 drinks a day for men, 1 drink a day for women.

To achieve a healthy body weight, you should first become more active and improving your living and eating habits. Then start changing your sick lifestyle into a healthy lifestyle .

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Why pay attention to your body weight?

We all know that being obesity is no good for our appearance. It is even worse for our body’s internal systems and increase the risk for several diseases. From my last post, you have already found out your body mass index (BMI) which is based on your height and weight. Calculating the BMI to know whether your weight puts you at risk or you are at a healthy weight. Once again, do remember that elevated BMI alone is not an adequate measurement of your risk for diseases. According to the BMI, if your BMI is between 25 and 30, you are considered overweight. But you will be considered obese if your BMI is 30 or even greater. People who are obese have a much higher risk for many major diseases, such as heart disease, stroke and diabetes and more.

The followings are the diseases associated with obesity:

Reduce immune defenses – Excess weight may reduce immune defenses.

Heart Disease – Obesity increase the risk for Heart disease because increase the pressure in the body increase the pressure along the blood vessel walls. This pressure and added weight erode the blood vessel walls and make obese people to have heart attack.

High Blood Pressure (hypertension) - Overweight people have risk for gallbladder disease 2-3 times greater than the healthy weight people.

Type II Diabetes – The body overworks with breaking down the sugars using natural insulin. Because the weight is a great factor associated with type II diabetes, therefore obese people have greater risk for diabetes.

Gallbladder disease (gallstones) – Overweight people have risk for gallbladder disease 2-3 times greater than the healthy weight people.

Cancer – For example, breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer, and pancreatic cancer. Excess body fat increases the cancer risk.

Metal Health - obesity is more likely to lead to problems with depression and other metal diseases. Some Doctors believed that obese people are more likely to develop chronic depression.

Low Fertility – Many Doctors have stated that higher BMI leads to a greater incidence of reproductive cancers, polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), and other conditions that contribute to infertility. In addition, there is a link between infertile, obese women is some sort of reversible endocrine problem, such as a thyroid imbalance.

Other Health Problems from Obesity – For example, low IQ, eating disorders, and early puberty.

From the above, can you realize how serious problem is to obesity? If you have excess fat, let’s take action to control your body weight and get a healthy body weight to stay away from those diseases.

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