How to Prevent Obesity

The prevention of obesity is down to dietary education and diet control.

With two thirds of Americans overweight and one third classified obese (BMI over 30) it’s time to face facts and make some changes to the way you eat.
In the vast majority of cases, a weight problem is down to just three things.

• Over eating (consuming too many calories through portion size)
• Eating the wrong diet (containing too many calories and digested too quickly)
• Lack of physical activity

Let’s address these problems in order:

Over eating

This should be the easiest change to make, but needs some self control. Portion size is one of the biggest problems and it’s so easy to “go large” or “max it”. The fast food industry quickly latched on to this wonderful opportunity to up-sell their products and increase takings, simply by appealing to the human trait of greed.
The first step to reducing your calorie intake is to stay with the regular meal size.

Eating the wrong diet

Before you can make any significant changes to your daily diet it’s necessary to understand what’s wrong with what you eat now. Dietary education is poor, often misleading and in some cases deliberately so. All the big food companies are profit driven and will sell into a buoyant marketplace with little regard for improving public health. Lip service is paid to reducing salt levels and reduced fat products often have their sugar content raised to compensate for the reduced flavor.
The way forward is to read and understand all you can about the benefit of eating more high fiber foods, through increased use of fruit, vegetables and wholegrains in your daily diet. The two main benefits of high fiber foods are:

• The increase bulk of high fiber foods is both more filling for less caloric value and is slower to digest, which delays the return of hunger pangs, reducing daily intake. This slower digestive process is also less likely to create insulin resistance, which invariably leads to the development of type 2 diabetes.
• High fiber intake, both soluble and insoluble is extremely beneficial in reducing cholesterol levels, absorbs and removes toxins from the body and lowers the chances of developing bowel disorders.

Lack of physical activity

With ever diminishing work related physical activity through automation and labor saving methods, less energy is burned; when this is combined with sedentary recreational activities the problem is further compounded, so it’s important to “burn some fat” in one way or another.
Here are 4 simple ways to burn off some of those excess calories:

• Working out in the gym or on home fitness equipment
• Walking the dog an extra mile
• Use the stairs instead of the elevator
• Chop logs for the fire

Whatever you do will help, and if you reduce your portion size, increase your intake of high fiber veggies and wholegrains and do a little exercise each day it will make a difference.

For more free advice don’t hesitate to contact me (Petra Peach) by using the contact link at the bottom of the page.

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