Maintain Weight After Weight Loss

by Healthwin

Maintain Weight After Weight Loss

We hear a lot about losing weight, but not much about how to maintain weight after weight loss. Why work so hard to get the weight off if you are not prepared to maintain the weight after weight loss? This should be just as important as the plan you used to lose the weight.

You know you cannot just go back to how it was before. Eating healthy has to be a lifetime program. I would have to say that portion control should be somewhere at the top of the maintain weight after weight loss plan. I think once you hit your goal weight, it is ok to have some of those foods that were "off limits" in your weight loss plan. In moderation of course. Instead of five pieces of pizza, have one slice and a salad with a fat free dressing and water. You could have frozen yogurt instead of ice cream. Baked chips instead of fried.

How Do I Maintain Weight After Weight Loss?

The thing to remember is you have a choice. You have to be accountable and remember the reason you chose to lose weight to begin with. Remember how you feel now compared to how you felt before the weight loss. That alone should be motivation to maintain weight after weight loss.

Here are some choices you can make to maintain weight after weight loss. Instead of watching television after dinner, try taking a walk. Soda or water? Baked or fried? Stairs or elevator? Cheesecake or key lime yogurt? There are always going to be small sacrifices that we are going to have to make. Isn't it worth it? Aren't you worth it? Of course you are!

Calories to Maintain Weight Loss

Calories for the fastest healthy weight loss and calories to maintain weight loss are going to be different. To achieve the weight loss you have to burn more calories than you are taking in. To maintain weight after weight loss will require more stable eating habits. Not so little calories that you continue to lose and not so many that you begin to gain but a happy middle place. A little discipline goes a long way.

Fastest Healthy Weight Loss - get yourself a buddy to help you keep it off

One other thing that seems to help is to have a buddy system. It is much easier to eat right or get that hour of exercise in if you have a friend encouraging you. Someone you can also encourage. Healthy changes such as these are not just good for maintaining weight loss but also good for depression, anxiety and even certain medical conditions! Imagine that.

You CAN Maintain Weight After Weight Loss!

Get excited about life again. Dare to live a healthy lifestyle. Make those choices that are going to keep you as healthy as you are right after you reach your weight goal. You worked hard to get here so make that extra effort to maintain weight after weight loss. You will never regret these changes. Your body will thank you for it now and in the future.

Say goodbye to old habits and hello to new ones! Being healthy can become the best addiction you've ever had!

About the Author
Healthwin is a 40-year-old dad and husband who has always been concerned with keeping body as healthy as possible using appropriate dieting and exercice plans. For more information on how to maintain weight after weight loss, visit www.best-weightloss-review.net now.

With weight-loss surgery, type of insurance counts

People with private health insurance lose more weight after having weight-loss surgery than those covered by the Medicare health insurance program for the elderly and disabled, U.S. researchers said Monday.

Medicare patients tend to weigh more before having gastric bypass surgery, they said, and are more likely to be depressed, have high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, cholesterol and sleep apnea.

For them to succeed, they may need extra exercise and nutrition support, they said.

Gastric bypass surgery is becoming an increasingly popular treatment for obesity. It works by altering the digestive tract to reduce the volume of food that can be eaten and digested.

Large insurance companies and Medicare, the federal health plan for 44 million elderly and disabled Americans, help pay for the surgery -- which costs from $15,000 to $35,000 -- in severely obese people.

For the study, Morton and colleagues collected data on 750 gastric bypass patients with private insurance, Medicare or Medicaid, a state-federal insurance program for the poor.

A year after surgery, all patients had significant weight loss, but the private insurance patients lost more, Morton said in a telephone briefing.

The Medicare group had slightly higher complication rates, but there were no deaths from any of the operations.

Morton said patients in the Medicare group had the biggest reductions in levels of low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, the so-called bad cholesterol that causes heart disease.

They also had bigger improvements in fasting insulin, a measure of diabetes severity.

Morton said patients in the Medicare group started out much heavier than other patients, with average body mass index scores of nearly 50, putting them in the so-called super-obese category.

Body mass index, or BMI, is a formula that takes into account a person's height and weight. A BMI of 30 is considered obese. People with a BMI of 40 to 49 are considered morbidly obese, while those with a BMI of 50 or higher are considered super obese.

What to Eat to Lose Weight Quickly

by Lee Cole

Virtually everyone wants to lose weight. And, there are tons of diets, weight loss clinics, and various pills and prescription drugs you can take to help you. Also, there's exercise. What's really going to help you lose those unwanted pounds, however, is a diet the more closely resembles what your body was designed to eat. Let's take a look at what that might be.

In nature, we rarely encounter foods that are really high in sugars. Sure, there are some tropical fruits and honey, but these still don't come close to the purity and concentration of, say, a candy bar, ice cream, or a lollipop. Even the sugars found in highly processed breads are rarely found in nature.

We as a species, however, were designed to eat lean meats and fresh vegetables and fruits. So, one of the big issues when it comes to gaining or losing weight is how much sugar you ingest and what's it's purity--that is how fast do you digest it.

When you eat carbohydrates of any kind, your body turns them into sugar during the process of digestion. These sugars are what your cells need for energy. In order to get this energy into your cells, your body creates a chemical called insulin.

When you eat sugars that are too pure or too concentrated, your body creates a lot of insulin in order to deal with these sugars. This insulin spike leads to all sorts of problems--fat storage, type II diabetes, and heart disease, among others.

The main idea, then, of how to eat to lose weight is to avoid these refined sugars and carbohydrates. And eat a more natural diet.

What would that consist of?

Well, here's a list of what you need...

More vegetables. Hate to tell you this, but your mother was right. Eating your vegetables will definitely help in stabilizing and reducing your weight to a more healthy and natural level.

Also, if you eat more vegetables, you will be ingesting more fiber. Fiber helps with maintenance of your weight as well. Also, it's a component of a healthy digestive system.

Work on cutting out deserts and anything with refined sugars in them.
Eat lower on the glycemic index. The glycemic index is a measure of how fast your body turns certain foods into their component sugars. You want to be eating foods that take longer to digest. This way you lengthen out the insulin response.
Sure, there are many other things that will help, including exercise, but this will at least get you started in the right direction.

About the Author
To learn more about how to loose weight quickly, you need to know what to eat to lose weight quickly. The author is a health enthusiast who actually lost 40 pounds two years ago and kept it off!

5 Exercises to Lose Weight Quickly

by Rich Nashawaty

Everyone is always looking for exercises to lsoe weight quickly.
We live in an instant gratification world these day and weight loss is no different. Who wants to spend hours at the gym and not see results from all of our hard work and dieting?

Here are the top 5 Exercises to Lose Weight Quickly:

1. Treadmill--I am not talking about spending an hour and a half on the treadmill. The key here is intensity. The more intense you go, the shorter the workout needs to be. Try running harder for shorter bursts . Your muscles will fatigue and your energy source will deplete more making you a fat burining machine throughout the day.

2. Rowing Machine-- Do 4-6 10 minute sets of rowing whil resting around 3 minutes or so in between for maximum fat burn.

3. Stationary Bike--As with other cardio workouts vary your intensity by peddling hard 3 minutes and then resting for 3 minutes repating the process every 15 minutes.

Click Here! for more ways to lose fat fast.

4. Eliptical Machine--The key here is harder resistance. The more resistance you have, the more muscles will be incorporated into your workout which of course is beneficial.

5. Stairclimber--Again, go slower with harder resistance and your heart rate will be higher and therefore buring more fat.

Of course these are only 5 Exercises to Lose Weight Quickly.

About the Author
Click Here! for more ways to lose fat fast.

Weight-loss surgery boosts patient's sex life

Does weight-loss surgery boost a patient's sex life or libido? Yes, it does, especially when he is suffering from obesity-related erectile dysfunction or ED.


Obese men with ED have low levels of testosterone, and lower still if their girth is greater. Excess abdominal fat, cardiovascular disease, high blood lipids and type-2 diabetes have been associated with ED.

"This is a landmark study that shows sexual health is clearly linked to overall health," said Irwin Goldstein, who directs the sexual medicine programme at San Diego's Alvarado Hospital.

However, similar benefits are not as clear for women. Obese women do report more sexual impairment than obese men. Published studies indicate this may be more related to low self-esteem, unsatisfactory relationships, social stigma, and other psychological issues.

"A woman's libido can be affected by many factors, such as the stress of caring for a sick relative," Goldstein said. "There is no evidence yet to indicate that weight-loss surgery automatically makes sex better."

He said when it comes to sexual activity, body size doesn't always matter. Thin, healthy people may be perceived as having the best body image and sexual function, but that is not always the case.

"There are plenty of sexually active heavy people and sexually inactive thin people," Goldstein said. "I see them everyday in my practice."

Then there's the new reflection in the mirror. A weight loss of 100 pounds or more may leave folds of excess skin. Plastic surgery is effective, but it is costly and not always covered by health insurance.

Psychologist Lisa Steres, who provides counselling for bariatric (removal of fat) surgery patients at Alvarado Hospital, says it can take years for a patient's brain to catch up with the new body, said an Alvarado Hospital release.

"Body image greatly impacts libido, particularly in women," Steres said. "Young women typically have better body image, and some women are sexually confident at any size."

These findings were recently published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine.

Surgery for obesity

Surgeons once recommended weight-loss surgery only for severely obese patients who failed to drop pounds with conventional weight-loss methods, but a review now finds that bariatric surgery helps the moderately obese lose more weight, too.
"Until recently, only people with severe obesity - with a body mass index (BMI) greater than 40 - were considered for bariatric surgery," said review author Jill Colquitt, Ph.D.

But studies, such as those included in this review, now examine the effects of surgery on people with a BMI of 30 to 40 who have diseases such as type 2 diabetes or hypertension that potentially could improve, said Colquitt, a senior research fellow at the University of Southampton, in England.

"We see a wide range of patients who consider surgery. The majority are people that attempted medical weight loss for years and decades without success, and they have an intimate understanding of what morbid obesity means to them in their life. They're looking for a therapy that can give them some help," said Peter Hallowell, M.D., an assistant professor of surgery at the University of Virginia. He has no affiliation with the review.

In the new review - the third update of a 2002 review - researchers led by Colquitt examined 26 previously published studies on bariatric surgery involving 5,766 patients. Five of the included trials took place in the United States.
Six studies compared bariatric surgery outcomes to those from conventional weight loss management. Twenty studies compared different bariatric surgery procedures.

The review appears in the latest issue of The Cochrane Library , a publication of The Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates medical research. Systematic reviews like this one draw evidence-based conclusions about medical practice after considering both the content and quality of existing medical trials on a topic.

The conclusions of the new review were broadly similar to previous research, Colquitt said. Researchers found that weight reduction surgery in obese patients led to more weight loss than conventional methods, such as dieting and exercise.
However, "since we conducted the first review, we made changes to the inclusion criteria to include people with a lower threshold of obesity," Colquitt said.

Specifically, two trials examined people of moderate obesity - with BMIs between 30 and 40 - who had weight-related conditions such as type 2 diabetes.
In these patients, weight reduction was greater two years after surgery and conditions like diabetes and metabolic syndrome improved, compared to those in the conventional management group.

For example, one study found that moderately obese people who received weight-loss surgery dropped 87.2 percent of excess weight. In comparison, those who used drugs, diet and exercise only lost 21.8 percent of excess weight.

The review evidence also suggested that the type of surgery a patient had affected their weight-loss results. In gastric bypass, surgeons make the stomach smaller and shorten the length of the small intestine, whereas gastric banding involves using silicone bands that the physician can adjust to reduce the stomach's size.

Researchers found that gastric bypass led to greater weight loss than vertical banded gastroplasty or adjustable gastric banding. The results were similar for gastric bypass and two techniques called isolated sleeve gastrectomy and banded gastric bypass.

However, it is not possible to draw any conclusions because of the small number of studies comparing each procedure and the risk of bias in some of the trials, Colquitt said.

Some complications from surgery did occur, such as pulmonary embolism and post-operative death. Most studies had no deaths and those that did had one or two.

Although they aimed to update the review with information about bariatric surgery in patients younger than 18 years, researchers found no studies that compared surgery with conventional management in this group of patients, so they could not comment, Colquitt said. They also excluded older trials that examined surgical techniques no longer used "to keep the review as relevant and helpful as possible," Colquitt said.

"The frontline question is, 'Is surgery better for patients with lower levels of obesity?' Those are areas of research that are just beginning to come to light," Hallowell said.

"Their findings are very important. In the small number of randomized controlled trials to look at, there's clear evidence that surgery is better than not having surgery," Hallowell said.

"There are risks to surgery - we don't want to minimize that to any degree - but the health benefits noted in these studies certainly outweigh the risks for patients who undergo it," Hallowell said.

This project received funding from the UK's National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Technology Assessment Programme.

The Cochrane Collaboration is an international nonprofit, independent organization that produces and disseminates systematic reviews of health care interventions and promotes the search for evidence in the form of clinical trials and other studies of interventions. Visit http://www.cochrane.org for more information.

Colquitt JL, et al. Surgery for obesity. The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2009, Issue 2.

Components of a Good Losing Weight Program

by Bernice Eker

People all over the world are becoming fatter and heavier at an alarming speed. In fact, statistics shows that the rapid increases in the number of people who are becoming overweight and obese are now pandemic.

The most alarming fact is the number of deaths that are associated with being overweight and obese.

According to experts, this condition affects not only adults but also children all over the world. This is due to poor diet, physical inactivity, and fondness of people in calorie-laden foods, super-sized meals, drinks, and greasy foods. People who are overweight and obese are more prone to develop health problems such as heart diseases, high blood pressure, diabetes, sleep apnea, increase cholesterol levels, and other forms of cancer.

The good news is that these threats can be prevented. People that are obese or overweight can delay the onset of health complications, with a little diet modification and some changes. In fact, studies shows even 5 to 10 percent of weight loss can delay the onset of this his health complications.

The proper way of losing weight is having the right attitude and setting an achievable goal.

These are the components of losing weight:

1. Set your goals. Target only what is ideal for your height and body structure. The ideal pounds that dieters can loss in a week is 1 - 2 pounds per week. Drastically losing weight is not good for your heart and body. You loose more of your muscles and not the stored fats in the body.

2. Lifestyle modification is another factor when trying to lose weight. A small amount of change can go along way in your goal of losing weight. Add fun activities that you can incorporate in your daily activities, like walking your dog around the block, walking in the park, walking to the nearby grocery store instead of taking your car, taking the stairs if you are going three floors up or down. This small things will keep you mobile and keep the heart rate going, in due time you will see a great difference.

3. Exercise, keep moving and burn those calories off. Cardiovascular exercises are good to increase your stamina. While fat burning exercise like cross-training exercises, interval exercises are workouts that targets every muscle group in the body. Developing these muscles will increase your metabolism and increase the rate of your body to utilize those stored fats and turn it into energy that your muscles need and even while you are resting, you are burning more calories.

4. Eat sensibly and smart. Diet and exercise goes hand-in-hand, one can never work without one. Eating smart is choosing the right kinds of food. Today, there are an abundance of healthy foods that you can choose from, from low calorie desserts, chocolates, low fat meals and drinks, now abounds in the market today. The choices of food to prepare when you are trying to lose weight does not have to be bland, there are exciting dishes and recipes that you can prepare. Make sure that is filled with fibers, fruits, vegetables, and drink lots of water. This will make you feel instantly full and satiated.

5. Keep a diary of all the food you eat, together with your program. This will help you keep track of your progress and you will be able to address the weak points in your regimen.

One of the secrets of being successful in losing weight effectively is to have fun and enjoy what you are doing. This way you will not see the activities as a tasks but you will see this as your lifestyle and in the end, the reward will be a healthy body.

About the Author
For tips on losing weight and reviews on losing weight diets visit: http://www.WeightLoss2.com