Staying healthy while losing weight is the main objective of any overweight or obese person. It's hard enough to stay healthy when you're at a normal weight, so imagine how much tougher it becomes when you are out of shape.
It's usually confusing staying healthy while losing weight and just how losing weight should be done. You need to fight the confusion of balancing the healthy state without compromising your weight loss goals, and the rate of weight loss.
Starvation Misconception
Some individuals who are forever on diets, tend to become desperate and try some drastic changes in their weight loss attempts. Some changes put them in a non-nutritive state, which leads to malnutrition with complications. Skipping meals and frequently changing the daily meal plan can do great harm, even generate ulcers and give you nausea. Starvation diets just don't last and is too extreme for your body to handle.
Something else they may do, instead of focusing on a longer term plan of moderate weight loss, is make the error of exercising too much. They assume, more exercise will lose weight faster for them.
Wrong. Exercise builds muscles and muscle mass weighs more than fat.
So this ends up with more frustration, and more stress that is quite harmful. Suddenly, it's too much stress to take, and the interest in seriously losing weight goes by the wayside. Back to all the bad eating habits, and the merry go round continues. Your goal of staying healthy while losing weight just hit the skids again.
Overworking The Body
There is a misconception regarding losing weight and assuming it can be done faster with more exercise per day. Well this might be true, but our body can only take so much extra exercise before it tires out.
Besides tiring our bodies too quickly, this intensifying of the exercise can be quite harmful. You'll probably end up with your body rebelling as it needs to gain strength naturally and slowly. So the brain says "hey, back off! I don't need this crap". So the body slows down the matabolism as a survival mechanism.
Furthermore, complications like muscle injuries and joint sprains may occur as you subject your body parts to a load without having them adapt to it gradually.
Muscle Atrophy
In addition to the slow down of metabolism as a rebound effect, there is also another detrimental outcome. The body wants to preserve as much energy reserves [read: fat deposits] as possible, so instead of burning up the fatty deposits, muscle cells get used up instead.
This is because protein is easier to synthesize into smaller components for energy sourcing than fat. Also, fat has larger energy content per unit than a protein, therefore allowing the body to efficiently store energy at a greater ratio.
Such a phenomenon is called muscle atrophy. With muscle
atrophy, a person is then subject to double time in gaining back the lost weight in muscles and at the same time keeping the fat deposit levels low.
Exercise is still needed.
To stay healthy while losing weight is probably your biggest life challenge. To achieve it requires both a reduced caloric intake along with adequate exercise.
The first couple of weeks will usually have no significant results. It just doesn't happen that quickly, and you need patience which will keep your stress levels under control. The body will still have to adapt and change its metabolic paradigm.
It is quite normal to see a larger weight loss in the first week or two, but this is usually the excess water in your system. Significant and steady weight loss of 2 to 3 pounds would occur from the start of the third week of consistent dieting with regular exercise. After two or three months, your weight will reduce at a lesser level, such as one or two pounds a week.
If you can endure 2 or 3 months, you'll find it easier to accept for a longer term.
Staying healthy while losing weight takes time to achieve. There are no shortcuts, and patience is needed. Stress levels need to be kept low, and staying calm and stoic about the whole challenge of getting your health back is needed.
One final tip about your diet. I accept that my dieting problem is definitely an addiction. You should consider if yours is too. Or maybe you are just having a good time much too often, while eating out. That's how it was for me, before it became an addiction.
Always stay aware of what is happening in your life, as it is then easier to make minor adjustments, rather than suddenly find you need to lose 150 pounds.
Fred Farah
Diet for Weight Loss Blog
