by Chris Scales

It’s that time of the year again.

New Year’s resolution – loose weight!

After slightly over indulging over the festive period you want to shed those holiday pounds and get fit for a brand new year. Sound familiar? Which method are you going to opt for, this year, the Atkins diet, the Cabbage Soup diet or perhaps you feel like giving the Banana-Cottage cheese diet a bash this year? The truth is most people who lose weight on these crash diet programs, end up gaining it all back and more. This is known as the yo-yo effect and can leave you feeling irritated and deprived of vital nutrients.

You have all heard it before. You know you should be looking at long term rather than just a quick New Year’s fix. We should be loosing weight by eating the same healthy foods that you will continue to eat after the weight has been lost. Foods such as grains, fruit and veggies, low fat dairy as well as lean sources of protein. To maintain your weight forever, you must continue to work on eating habits... forever.

The key to weight loss or weight management is calories taken in versus calories burned. If we are taking in more calories than we need to perform metabolic tasks we are going to gain weight, it’s as simple as that. For those of you that lead slightly more active lives, you’ll need to take in more calories to fuel your daily activities compared with the more sedentary individuals.

Counting the calories of every grain of food is not the way to go but you can get a general idea of how many total calories you should eat each day with the following formula.

1. First find your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate, which is the amount of calories needed to perform your normal bodily functions at rest.) BMR = your current weight x 10
2. Next multiply your BMR by an activity factor. BMR x 0.3 for average daily activities (for those who take part in regular physical activity more than 4 times a week raise the activity factor to 0.4 – 0.6)
3. Next add your BMR + activity factor together

Here is an example of how to use this formula, for this example we will use an average 130 pound person.

130 pounds x 10 = BMR of 1,300 calories

1,300 calories x 0.3 = 390 activity factor

1,300 + 390 = 1,690 calories per day.

If this person wanted to loose a few pounds they’d need to create a negative balance by reducing the amount of daily maintaining calories and upping the exercise to burn even more. For example get on a 1,400 calories food plan, plus work out aerobically 4-5 days per week. Be warned however, no one should ever go lower than 1,200 calories a day as you will slow down your metabolism and set yourself up to gain all the weight back.

We also need to set ourselves realistic goals, don’t get carried away with trying to loose a lot of weight at once. Instead break it down into smaller more achievable short term goals. For example, instead of trying to lose 40 pounds, aim for 10 pounds at a time. And don’t let day to day fluctuations due to water, salt and hormones get you stressed out. Limit the amount of times you weight yourself to once a week.

A healthy food plan as well as consistent aerobic exercise help promote weight loss and weight maintenance by revving up your metabolism and help relieve stress.

Best of luck with the New Year’s resolutions and we look forward to your next visit.

Happy New Year 2007 !

Back to the January newsletter