If you are planning on embarking on a lifestyle diet plan, you are far from alone. In fact, more than half of the entire adult population of the United States is currently trying to lose weight, though the amount of weight varies by quite a bit. Losing weight successfully often involves a lifestyle diet plan as well as plan of exercise, but it is also true and important to note the weight loss will truly look different for – and on – everyone.
Unfortunately, weight is a problem here in the United States, where at least one third of all adults can be medically classified as obese. When you add in the people that are merely overweight, we suddenly see that people who are not a healthy weight make up an astounding two thirds of the adult population. Of course, weight gain has become a problem among children and adolescents as well, and people who start off life with an unhealthily heavy weight are likely to carry that through to adulthood as well.
As we all know, there are many risks associated with obesity and simply just being overweight. Sleep apnea becomes likely, a condition requiring medical treatment as it can stop your breathing as you sleep, something that is detrimental to you on a number of different levels. Type 2 diabetes has also become prevalent, with people who are even just slightly overweight being diagnosed with the condition. Joint problems become more likely as the obese person ages, as the sometimes massive amounts of additional weight put undue stress on the joints throughout their bodies – but particularly their knees. When an obese person becomes pregnant, the pregnancy is usually considered to be a high risk pregnancy, with the risk of developing gestational diabetes higher than in a pregnant woman of a healthy rate, and often even results in an emergency C section, a major surgery that can be difficult to recover from. In fact, obesity is considered to be one of the leading causes of preventable death here in the United States, second only behind smoking.
But losing weight, especially large amounts of it, can be very difficult. For the eighty percent of people who are trying to lose weight on their own, it can oftentimes feel like an uphill battle. In fact, fifty percent of all of those trying to lose weight say that they feel like they are failing primarily because they don’t have the willpower to go through the process of it alone. Losing weight is not easy, and it involves a total lifestyle change, from diet to exercise to even where you spend time with your friends and the activities that you do with your family. This change can feel incredibly jarring and can be overwhelming and daunting at times – this is a normal part of the process, of adjusting your life to your new normal. But for those who don’t have support, this can lead to slips and relapses and even additional weight gain.
Hiring a professional like a nutritionist or a personal health coach can help. They can create a lifestyle diet plan, which can help to retrain you to seek out healthy foods. A lifestyle diet plan is not dieting, per se, because a lifestyle diet plan is not temporary but is meant to represent a new and better way of eating. However, a lifestyle diet plan, while an important and even crucial component of any weight loss journey, is typically not enough on its own. Exercise must be incorporated in as well. Aside from helping you to create a lifestyle diet plan, a personal health coach can guide you through workouts and help your through the process of creating a workout plan that is filled with workouts that, simply put, work for you. There are many different ways to exercise, and all of them are worthy ways to get some weight off and some muscle on. After a certain point, it shouldn’t be about the numbers on the scale but about the strength that you are able to build instead. Losing weight is difficult, but it is absolutely possible for anyone to do.
