What Is Your Ideal Weight?
Health experts suggest that you can weigh more than your ideal weight and still be content even happy. For an overweight person losing ten percent body weight is considered healthy enough to avoid health hazards such as diabetes high cholesterol risk of heart disease and weight-related depression. The healthiest way to go about weight loss is by slowly changing eating and exercise behaviours.
Are you struggling to lose weight, with little to no success, just to fit into that impossibly small sized pair of jeans? Now ask yourself this 每 do you really need to lose all that weight? Health experts suggest that you can weigh more than your ideal weight and still be content, even happy. For an overweight person, losing ten percent body weight is considered healthy enough to avoid health hazards such as diabetes, high cholesterol, risk of heart disease and weight-related depression. Experts also suggest that this kind of weight loss lasts longer and helps you maintain your weight better in the long run. Confused? Read on＃
Just like your ideal body temperature is supposed to be about 98.6 degrees, your body weight is regulated naturally to stay within a range of 10 to 20%, also known as ＆set point＊. This set point has very little to do with genetics, and everything to do with your eating and exercising habits. Overeating overwhelms your internal regulatory system and causes an increase in your body＊s set point. Your body automatically adjusts to the increase in the weight and ＆resets＊ the set point in order to maintain the new weight.
The 10% Solution to Weight Loss
Maintaining a 10% loss in your weight for a period of six months to a year helps your body re-adjust to a lower weight, thereby resetting the set point lower. When you lose a large amount of weight at once, in a hurry, your body goes through an internal struggle, which leads to a spike in hormones like ghrelin. These unnatural hormonal levels make you hungrier as your body tries to protect its comfortable range.
The healthiest way to go about weight loss is by slowly changing eating and exercise behaviours 每 and then continuing or maintaining this new weight for a few months before trying to lose some more. This enables your body to lower its set point while you can adjust and maintain your new, healthier lifestyle.
The Eternal Question: How Much Should I Weigh?
Most people miscalculate how much they should weigh and how much weight they should ideally lose, which leads to frustration and unhappiness. In order to find your happy or healthy weight, we suggest you look back at your health history as an adult and identify the weight you were able to maintain fairly easily and naturally.
If you＊re just starting off on a weight loss journey, we suggest you forget numbers and scales for now. Focus on behavioural goals: Eat right, exercise daily, get adequate rest and understand your body type.
After you have adjusted to these new behavioural changes, your weight will settle to a more attractive number, and you will be able to maintain it a lot better than earlier when all you did was starve and then later, binge.
*Image courtesy: ? Thinkstock photos/ Getty Images
An essayist and journalist by profession, Mansi is a Mass Communications major with a focus on health and fitness writing. With 2 years of journalism experience under her belt, Mansi loves obsessing over topics like body image, nutrition, mental health, and stress reduction, along with art, multiculturalism, fashion and gossip writing. Overall, she is a twenty something whose fitness philosophy boils down to: Do the healthy thing more often than you don't do the healthy thing. Persistence matters, not perfection.
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