Well, here it is again, Monday morning and time to start that diet yet again. You know the routine. You start a diet on Monday morning and all goes well until the luncheon Wednesday. You arrive and realize right off you cannot make yourself eat just the salad. Maybe you don’t do too badly but then out comes the dessert table. Oh well, you will just have a small bite. Thirty minutes later you have had just a small bite of six different cakes and two pies. As you leave you promise yourself you will get right back on track. Then you are invited out to your very favorite place for dinner and your friend is paying. Since you have already blown your diet you accept, thinking oh well, I will start back on my diet Monday morning. By now Uncle Bud has the entire Coffee Club in stitches because most of us have been guilty of doing just what he has said.

Uncle Bud asked us to allow him to get serious for the next few minutes so he can tell us a few things that may help us the next time we are tempted to eat too much and wait until the next Monday to start over. He begins: If you are overweight or obese just getting around can be a challenge. Carrying extra pounds can make it harder walking a quarter-mile, lifting 10 pounds, or rising from an armless chair. The burden of these problems may get harder as you get older.

And because excess weight plays a role in so many common and deadly diseases, overweight and obesity can cut years off your life. A New England Journal of Medicine study that followed more than half a million 50 to 71 year-olds for a decade found an increase of 20% to 40% in death rates among people who were overweight at midlife. Among obese people, the death rate was two to three times as high.

A 2010 study in the same journal, which pooled findings from 19 studies that followed nearly 1.5 million adults 19 to 84 years old for a similar period of time, found that the risk of death increased along with body size, ranging from 44% higher for those who were mildly obese to 250% higher for those with a BMI of 40 to 50.

So let me ask you this, if losing weight can help you feel better physically and emotionally and may help you live a longer and healthier life wouldn’t it be wise to work toward getting those excess pounds gone. Keep this in mind, you don’t have to lose a tremendous amount of weight to become healthier. Even a modest weight loss of 5% to 10% of your starting weight can lead to significant health benefits. Some examples:

People with high blood pressure who lost a modest 10 pounds over six months reduced their systolic blood pressure by 2.8 mm Hg and their diastolic blood pressure by 2.5 mm Hg. These reductions in blood pressure were equivalent to the reductions brought about by treatment with some blood pressure medications.
Weight loss is so effective that many people with high blood pressure can stop taking blood pressure medicine after they lose weight, for as long as they are able to keep it off.
In a study of people who were at risk for type 2 diabetes, those who lost just 7% of their weight and exercised about 30 minutes a day cut their risk of diabetes by nearly 60%.

Uncle Bud realizes that knowing the importance of losing weight does not make it easy to stick to a diet. He reminds us he had to get help from professionals and encourages us to do the same.

You can get everything you need to help you make a lifestyle change by going to WeightoWellness. Give them a call at 205-994-2393. Visit them on the web at www.weightowellnessllc.com. Remember summer is on it’s way.