For Lasting Weight Loss, Little Things Can Mean a Lot
You know the numbers: One of every two Americans is overweight or obese, a condition that sets the stage for a wide variety of health problems, from heart disease and high blood pressure to cancer and diabetes.
Why Americans--despite relatively high incomes and education levels, and almost universal access to affordable, high-quality foods--continue to be among the most overweight people in the world is a lingering question.
No one suggests that there is one simple solution to the obesity epidemic sweeping the nation.
“Do we know why this is happening?” said William Dietz, director of nutrition and physical activity at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “No. But it’s certainly the best judgment that weight problems are caused by modest daily increases in energy intake or decreases in physical activity.”
In other words, it’s not dramatic episodes of gluttony that are doing us in. It’s more an accumulation of small choices--a hundred calories of extra dessert there, a little bit more time in the Barcalounger there--that add up, over time, to big weight gains and serious health risks.
But there is also good news: What a lot of small changes can do to endanger our health, a corresponding number of small changes can help undo.
Look at the arithmetic. It’s roughly 20 pounds per person that stand between 48 million Americans and a healthy body weight. These are the men and women who have a body mass index, or BMI, of 25 to 29.9, and are overweight but not considered obese.
Twenty pounds of weight is the equivalent of 70,000 calories, counting 3,500 calories per pound. Spread those 70,000 calories over a year, and that works out to 191 calories per day. In other words, if you can trim just 191 calories a day from your eating--and/or burn off some of those calories by adding physical activity--you can lose those 20 pounds in 365 days.
To demonstrate how small, simple changes can add up to significant weight loss, Pennsylvania State University professor of nutrition Barbara Rolls, her assistant Angela Sabol and graduate student Elizabeth Bell made some calculations based on the latest government Dietary Guidelines. The guidelines were issued in draft form in January by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services.
Even the Penn State experts were surprised by the results: “The impact of those small changes is huge!” Rolls noted. Switching from 16 ounces of 2% milk daily to skim would trim 7.4 pounds over the course of a year. Adding 100 calories of daily exercise--the equivalent of walking a mile in 15 to 20 minutes--could typically burn 36,500 calories over a year, enough to cut your weight by about 10 pounds over a year if you made no other changes.
We then added more items to the list and asked Idamarie LaQuatra, a registered dietitian for Shape-Up America, a nonprofit fitness group, to calculate the potential weight loss. Like the Penn State team, LaQuatra found significant calorie savings.
The suggestions are not meant to be a blueprint for weight loss, just an illustration of how some small changes can have a big impact on your health. And all of the suggestions make a dicey assumption: that one can keep the rest of one’s dietary input and exercise fixed. In other words, if replacing those afternoon Oreos with an apple means you eat more at dinner, the whole premise falls apart.
The caveat is that no one recipe for losing weight works for everyone. Says Rolls: “People need to individualize these approaches.”
In fact, the Weight Loss Registry, an ongoing survey of 3,000 men and women who have shed at least 60 pounds and kept it off for at least six years, has found the same thing. Led by Brown University’s Rena Wing, a clinical psychologist and weight loss expert, who works with scientists at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Colorado’s Health Sciences Center, the registry shows that successful dieters need multiple attempts to find the right approach.
Small changes may not work for everyone. But “small changes that you live with are the changes most likely to be sustained,” said Kelly Brownell, professor of psychology and director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders in New Haven, Conn.
Little alterations can also help dieters avoid the pitfall of thinking weight loss must be painful.
“People get into this mind-set that managing weight is so difficult,” said Rolls, co-author of “Volumetrics: Feel Full on Fewer Calories” (HarperCollins, 2000). “They want to lose all the weight right away. But if they are prepared to be patient, it’s much more realistic to think about weight loss in the long term and to make small changes that aren’t going to make you feel deprived.”
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How Long It Takes to Lose
Average number of days required to lose weight for a given calorie deficit:
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Daily To lose To lose To lose To lose To lose caloric 5 pounds 10 pounds 15 pounds 20 pounds 25 pounds deficit 100 175 350 525 700 875 200 87 175 262 350 438 300 58 116 175 232 292 400 44 88 131 176 219
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Source: “Nutrition for Health, Fitness and Sport,” by Melvin Williams (WCB McGraw Hill, 1999)
