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What’s One Cookie? Not Much, Say Doctors
What with First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move intitiative to combat childhood obesity, there’s a lot of attention right now on small, doable lifestyule changes that can improve health.
But as doctors acknowledge, it’s going to take more than simply switching from soda to water and taking a short walk around the block to cause significant weight loss.
Theoretically, cutting as little as 100 calories from your diet and adding in 100 calories worth of exercise every day should lead to weight loss. But the body adapts to those small changes pretty easily, and as you drop a couple pounds from making these changes you need fewer calories. Aside from those biological changes, we often compensate for these changes by eating more calories at another meal.
This is especially important in dealing with childhood obesity. Parents want to avoid being too radical with the dietary and exercise changes to avoid setting up food issues or body shame — but nothing short of a lifestyle overhaul for the whole family is really going to be very effective.
Doctors like the small-changes approach, though, because they can lead to bigger ones. A short walk around the block can lead to a longer one and then maybe even to a jog, and cutting soda for water can lead to swapping a cookie for an apple. And even those small steps can lead to an important victory — stopping weight gain.
And there are a lot of positive effects to healthy lifestyle changes, even if you never lose a pound. “I’m not saying throw up your hands and forget about it,” Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, head of Rockefeller University’s molecular genetics lab, told the New York Times Well blog. “Instead of focusing on weight or appearance, focus on people’s health. There are things people can do to improve their health significantly that don’t require normalizing your weight.”
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1 Comment
GP commented on Mar 03 10 at 7:13 amI think the issue is that people who need to lose weight are OVEREATING to the tune of more than 1 cookie, or 100 calories. I mean, if you reduce by 100 calories a day and increase your exercise by 100 calories a day, that is still going to net most people a weight loss of less than 2 lbs a month…so they either may not notice, or it is so slow it doesn’t matter. All one has to do is do the math. Go online and find a calorie calculator, it tells you how many calories you need each day to maintain or lose weight. You may have to do it for a few weeks and gauge up or down depending on your personal specifics. You *do* need to record and count calories and figure them out. Statistics show that most people WAY underestimated their calorie intake. I know I used to. Also the numbers you see that you have to eat may look daunting at first, but after a few seeks of creatively hitting the new mark, you’ll get used to it. This has been my personal experience. But of course “everyone is different”. Still the math is the math when it comes to calories in/calories out. The art is in making it tolerable and even enjoyable with fewer calories.
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