The Benefits of Losing Weight and How to Maintain It

Learn about why it's important to lose weight & how you can do it safely & effectively with these strategies & tips.

The Benefits of Losing Weight and How to Maintain It

Maintaining a healthy weight for your height is essential for promoting overall health benefits. These include lower cholesterol and blood sugar levels, lower blood pressure, less stress on bones and joints, and less work on the heart. It is important to sustain weight loss for long-term health benefits. Exercise is a great way to lose weight and keep it off. Exercise can increase your metabolism, or the number of calories you burn in a day.

It can also help you maintain and build lean body mass, which also helps increase the number of calories you burn each day. The best way to lose excess body fat is to make small, healthy changes in your eating and exercise habits. These changes should be things you can maintain as part of your lifestyle, so that you can lose weight and keep it off. You may want to lose weight for personal reasons or you may need to lose weight to improve your health. Doing so may lower your risk of certain conditions, such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

It may also lower your blood pressure and total cholesterol level. Additionally, it can relieve symptoms and prevent injuries related to being overweight. The most important component of an effective weight management program should be the prevention of unwanted weight gain due to excess body fat. The military is in a unique position to address prevention from the first day of a person's military career. Because the military population is selected from a group of people who meet the specific criteria for body mass index (BMI) and body fat percentage, the main objective should be to foster an environment that promotes the maintenance of healthy body weight and body composition throughout the military career of one person. There is significant evidence that losing excess body fat is difficult for most people and the risk of regaining lost weight is high.

From the first day of initial training, each individual should be communicated with an understanding of the root causes of excess weight gain, along with a strategy to maintain a healthy body weight as a way of life. It may sound strange, but it seems that people who struggle with their weight don't taste food as well. An important role for weight management professionals is to review such sites so that they can recommend the most useful ones. Aside from the obvious need to increase energy expenditure relative to intake, none of the strategies that have been proposed to promote weight loss or maintain weight loss are universally recognized as useful in weight management. In 1994, Congress passed the Dietary Supplements Health and Education Act, which exempted dietary supplements (including those promoted for weight loss) from the requirement to demonstrate safety and efficacy. The fact that exercise alone does not produce significant weight loss may be due to neurochemical mechanisms that regulate eating behavior making people compensate for the calories spent on exercise by increasing food intake (calories). However, over an 18-month period, people who engaged in short sessions of physical activity did not experience improvements in long-term weight loss, cardiorespiratory fitness, or participation in physical activity compared to those who engaged in longer exercise sessions. Several studies have evaluated long-term weight maintenance with self-managed meal replacements (Flechtner-Mors et al.).

Table 4-4 summarizes the current safety and efficacy profile of a number of alternative compounds promoted for the purpose of weight loss. All studies resulted in the maintenance of significant weight loss after 2 to 5 years of follow-up. Side effects sometimes encountered may also restrict the use of weight-loss drugs in some military contexts. It has been estimated that the percentage of people who lose weight and maintain successful loss is as small as 1 to 3 percent (Andersen et al.). In addition, relatively few people who lose large amounts of weight with VLCD are able to maintain weight loss when they resume normal eating. Weight loss alters metabolism in obese people, limiting energy expenditure and reducing protein synthesis.

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