Good nutritional habits aren’t just important for preventing diseases, they can also help you watch your weight.
Rates of overweight and obesity are higher than ever in the United States, alarmingly so.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than six in 10 American adults are overweight or obese—and most adults are about 25 pounds heavier than people were in the 1960s.
To make matters worse, more than half of all overweight people actually think they’re at a healthy weight, according to a recent Associated Press poll.
In theory, weight management to stay at a healthy weight is a simple matter of balancing energy intake (the calories supplied by food) with energy output (the calories expended by physical activity, the digestion of food, and the functioning of your body).
To lose weight, you need to expend more energy than you take in. In practice, however, the task is not that simple. While the basic principle of energy balance remains true, several factors—genetic, metabolic, and environmental—can affect how much you eat and how your body uses and stores energy.
Even if the genetic and metabolic components involved in weight management are mostly beyond your control, the good news is that environmental factors ARE controllable and can have a significant impact. By manipulating these controllable factors to your advantage, you can successfully lose weight and keep it off.
In this series, we will be talking about the factors that contribute to your weight loss and gain, and what you can do about them, for effective weight management, or even weight loss.
