Thursday Wellness Watch

Healthy Weight Loss

After writing my post last week for Kelly's Show Us Your Life: Diet and Weight Loss Tips I have decided to come up with a series that i will post every Thursday entitled Thursday Wellness Watch with nutrition, weight loss, or general health tips that i have gained through working in the field of community and work site wellness. Please feel free to let me know if you have any specific questions you would like answered or specific topics you;d like to hear more about. Today we will talk about healthy weight loss, a healthy diet, calories, and energy balance.

For most people, weight loss means restrictive diets, detailed calorie counting, being deprived and hungry, or exercising to pay penance for binges or to earn food. For most people, this typically leads to failure because it is not a set of new, learned behaviors that are realistic for the long run.

Those people that lose weight and keep it off do so by making realistic lifestyle changes; creating new habits and sticking with them.

Tips for healthy weight loss
•Take it slow!
•Set realistic and achievable goals.
•Avoid “all or nothing” thinking.
•Make your personal health a priority.
•Adapt a more active lifestyle—simply move more.
•Reduce calories and maintain balanced nutrition.
•Focus attention on behaviors instead of the scale.
•Develop stress management and coping techniques.
•Take care of your whole being: mind, body, and spirit.


What is a healthy diet? A healthy diet is one that:
• Emphasizes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and fat-free or low-fat milk and milk products;
• includes lean meats, poultry, fish, beans, eggs, and nuts;
• is low in saturated fats, trans fats, cholesterol, salt, and added sugars; and
• stays within daily calorie needs.

To understand nutrition and how it fits into a healthy lifestyle, it helps to know what makes up the food you eat.

Foods contain six basic nutrients:
Carbohydrates, protein, fat, vitamins, minerals, and water. Individual foods contain nutrients in varying amounts; therefore, eating a variety of foods is necessary to provide a good balance of each nutrient in your daily diet.

How many calories do I need?
Consider this: If you eat 100 more calories a day than you burn, you’ll gain 1 pound a month or about 12 pounds a year. The bottom line is, to manage your weight, it is important to eat less and move more.

In order to lose one pound of fat, you need to create a deficit of 3,500 calories. There are many ways to create a calorie deficit. For example, if you eat 250 less calories per day and burn 250 calories a day with exercise (totaling 500 less calories per day), you should lose one pound per week.

Calorie need is determined by your gender, age, and activity level.

1. What is your ideal weight? _________
The simple rule of thumb is:
• For women, allow 100 lbs for the first 5 feet and 5lbs for each additional inch.
• For men, allow 110 lbs for the first 5 feet and 5 lbs for each additional inch

2. What is your activity level? Assign yourself a point-value based on the scale below:
• Sedentary = 12
• Lightly Active = 13
• Active = 14
• Very Active = 15

3. Multiply your ideal weight and activity level from your results above to find out your calorie need.
___________ x ___________ = ____________
Ideal weight activity level calorie need

Our bodies use energy in three ways:
• To keep our body functioning (heart beating, temperature regulated, etc.)
• To breakdown food
• To fuel activity

Our bodies get energy from the food we eat in the form of calories.

Energy Imbalance
The most common cause of weight gain is energy in being greater than energy out; in other words, we are eating more calories than we are burning off.

A stable weight depends on the balance between the amount of energy being put into your body and the amount of energy being used.

Thus, what you’ve heard all along is true: to lose weight, you must eat less and move more!


Next Thursday we will talk about label reading, food logs/journals, portion control, and the perfect plate.