Obesity

Preventing Weight Gain

By Valerie Saw

Being overweight can lead to different medical conditions like diabetes, heart disease, certain cancers, osteoarthritis and sleep apnea.

Everyone, regardless of age and weight, should be conscious of obesity prevention. Even those with a healthy weight can benefit from using obesity prevention strategies.

If you are at a healthy weight, you can prevent weight gain by continuing your healthy habits and adopting new healthy habits. However, if you are overweight or obese, your first step should be to prevent further weight gain, by making healthy changes to your lifestyle and eating habits.

Strategies to Prevent Weight Gain

To prevent weight gain, you can start by analyzing your behavior and environment. What you eat, how much you eat, and all your physical activities play a part in controlling your weight. The environment where you live may contribute to your eating or exercising habits. In this century where everything is dominated by speed and convenience.

For example, automatic machines make us less active. Also, more people are consuming fast food or processed food, that are high in calories, fat and added sugars. Even larger portions of food leads to unhealthy eating behaviors.

You can keep a dairy of your daily food intake, or have a shopping guide or list of healthy recipes. Menu helpers or planners can also help.

Besides analyzing your eating habits, you need to start cultivating them. Organizations everywhere all agree on the importance of adopting healthy habits to prevent obesity.

Weight Management

Effective weight management requires a change of behavior, and that is a lifelong commitment that includes:

1. Healthy eating, which emphasizes on reducing calories and fat. And also an increase in vegetables, fruits and whole grains.

2. Regular exercising of a moderate intensity. Physical activity on at least 3 days a week. Each session should be 30 minutes