The Good News About Being Overweight

If you’ve been heavy for most of your reproductive years, you already know what the drawbacks are: lack of respect, poor self-image, perhaps even poor health. But here’s the good news: in essence you have been weightlifting all those years, and so you should have strong bones and more muscle than you thought possible. As you age, then, you should not lose bone and essential body mass as fast as thin women.

Now for the bad news. That extra weight puts you at a higher risk for many diseases.

There is more good news, however. You only have to lose ten to twenty percent of your total weight to gain the health benefits. And ten to twenty percent is easy to lose. You don’t even have to diet. Diets don’t work anyway, which you already know; you’ve probably tried dozens of them over the years.

So how do you lose weight without dieting? Follow these five simple guidelines:

1. Walk almost everyday, working up to six hours a week. It’s one of the best ways of burning fat.
2. Air bicycle if you can. (This can be included as part of your walking time.) It helps tone your abdomen.
3. Drink six to eight glasses of water a day. Drink water in place of sodas, sugar-free sodas, and juice, etc.; those don’t count as your water intake.
4. Replace the starch (bread, rice, pasta) in one meal with a large raw vegetable salad. Go easy on the lettuce; it soaks up salad dressing and doesn’t really have much nutritional value.
5. Put away the scale. Fat weighs less than muscle, so at first your fat loss may be offset by muscle gain, which is good news in that muscle burns more calories than fat, and eventually it will help you lose more weight.

 Good luck. Let me know how you do.

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