Comprehensive Medical Weight Loss
Weight Loss Strategies for patients of Clinical Nutrition Center in Denver, CO.
When you’ve got a lot going on, reasons to skip your workout can fly at you from every direction. For a lot of people, the desire to exercise is hampered down by very legitimate time concerns. There are carpools, there are meetings and there are mouths at home that have to be fed. Obligations like these can quickly turn into weight loss obstacles if you let them.
You want to lose weight, but despite your best intentions there are new obstacles to overcome every day. Donuts in the break room, lunch meetings with co-workers, long evenings that make cooking a healthy meal next to impossible—these are factors that a lot of people face, but you don’t need to let them interfere with your weight loss plans.
Hours after dinner, the murmur of late-night television echoes through the house as you begin your transition from the couch to the bed. But before calling it a night, there is one more trip to the kitchen. What will it be tonight: A small bowl of ice cream, a handful of crackers, or maybe a warm mug of hot chocolate?
Many people have trouble making exercise a consistent part of their lives, but there may be a simple solution: exercising at home. When you don’t even have to leave the house to exercise, the barriers between you and a workout become significantly fewer, and your excuses start to sound pretty hollow.
For many years I have told my patients that obesity is not a problem of eating too much and exercising too little, in spite of this common stereotype that has been propagated everywhere from the lay press to physician beliefs. We have had good science to support that in fact obesity should be considered a disease and not simply a result of conscious behaviors dating back to the discovery of leptin, a hormone that fat cells make which governs appetite regulation, back in 1994. In 1998 our National Institute of Health recognized obesity as a disease. And today the American Medical Association adopted new policy recognizing obesity as a disease.
Once you’ve started medical weight loss, you have the chance to reassess your attitude towards healthy eating. Not only is it possible to teach yourself to love healthy foods—with time, you may find that you enjoy them much more than the empty calories that were once part of your diet.
Supersize, king size, extra value—these are a few of the words that demonstrate how out of control portions are in this country. Restaurants serve up burgers that could feed four, give out unlimited soda refills and add on side dishes with enough calories for an entire meal. We order this food in the name of value, but our waistlines are really the ones paying for it.
It is hard for me to believe that with what we know about obesity in 2013, it is still not considered a disease by our health insurance industry, and medical weight loss remains an out-of-pocket expense for most obese individuals. For the past 10 years, I've enjoyed watching patients in Denver with obesity get medical weight loss treatment at CNC and dramatically improve their lives.
Do our emotions influence our eating habits? The answer for most people is an unequivocal "Yes, but I wish I had more control." Think about the times you are likely to overeat. Happy occasions? When you're sad, nervous, angry? What kinds of foods do you eat during these times of emotion?
Sometimes social support can guide you through the roughest moments of a medical weight loss program. When you are ready to give up and give in to the couch and that bag of potato chips, your closest friends can encourage you to keep moving forward and give you the positive energy to push towards your goals.
