Don’t Fear the Doctor’s Medical Scale
Heading to the doctor’s office for an annual check-up can be a dreaded event. Aside from everything else, you have to reveal the results of last year’s promise to try to lose a little weight. There’s no equivocating when you step on the medical scales in the doctor’s office. The results are there for all to see. It’s enough to make you want to jump on one of those fad emergency diets, but the only way to lose weight and keep it off is the tried and true method of reducing calorie intake and increasing exercise levels.
Fad diets typically involve some measure of calorie reduction, usually very severe reductions that are both unsustainable and detrimental to your health. Whether they supplement that calorie reduction with some kind of special cookies or shots of HCG administered by a “doctor” or just wave a magic wand, it’s the severe calorie restriction that is doing the work. If the level of intake is too low as it often is with these fad diets, then the body may initially lose weight very quickly. Over time, however, the body will start breaking down other tissues for energy. Muscle mass helps burn more calories so restricting calorie intake to the point where muscle mass is lost is counter-productive in the long run.
A moderate reduction in calories combined with an increase in your level of exercise is a weight loss plan that can be maintained over the long term and can be tweaked to provide the results that you’re looking for. The only special thing you need for this kind of diet is common floor scales. Fad diets proliferate because they are extremely profitable. In order to sell a product, producers need to convince you that you can’t lose weight without their help, or that by buying their product, losing weight will somehow become easy if your buy their book or their product.
Commercially offered diet products that consists of pre-packaged meals of specific calorie contents to help make it easier to count your calories and control portion size are one of the few truly beneficial diet products that you can buy. Magic cookies, hormone shots, diet pills, and all the rest of it is better ignored. Any diet or exercise plan should pass muster with your doctor. If you need to lose a lot of weight or have complicating health conditions, your regular doctor should be involved at least to the point of approving your program in advance.
The floor scale should be used to monitor the results of a diet program. A good basic target for most is to lose 1-2 pounds per week on average, although your doctor may set a different goal based on your particular circumstances. If the scale doesn’t show that progress or shows an unhealthy level of weight loss then the diet should be adjusted to get back to the measured progress that is recommended.