Interview: Tipping the scale in your favorBy CHRISTINE DELL'AMORE
UPI Consumer Health Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Nov. 28 (UPI) -- Shed a few pounds recently? Congrats. But don't celebrate just yet. Keeping yourself at a healthy weight is more of a marathon effort than a sprint, and many people drop out of the race early.
That's why Rena Wing, professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown Medical School in Providence, R.I., led a study to see if people who weighed themselves daily and acted quickly to ward off more weight gain were better at staying lean.
Turns out they were. In the study, published in October in the New England Journal of Medicine, people who weighed themselves did not regain as much weight during the 18-monthlong program than those who didn't step on the scale. United Press International talked with Wing about the habits of successful weight loss.
Q. You're not focusing on weight loss, but rather weight gain after a loss. Is that a novel approach?
A. Most people have focused on weight loss. If they've done anything with weight-loss maintenance, it's a tag-on to an initial program. We felt weight-loss maintenance was a key problem in its own right, and we wanted to direct attention to it.
Q. Why is it important to focus on weight maintenance?
A. First, it's important for people to lose the weight. But (long-term weight loss) is not going to happen if they lose the weight and then regain it. (If you) lose just 10 percent of your body weight and maintain it, there's a marked health impact. In addition to programs to lose weight, there should also be ones to keep it off.
(In the study), we focused on people who had lost weight within two years -- that's when individuals are at greatest risk of regaining. If you've kept it off for 10 years, (you know the skills that work for you). The skills for maintenance are different than those for losing.
Q. What is the "self-regulation" technique?
A. The best way of getting accurate information (about how you're doing) is to use the scale as a source, just as you would use blood-sugar monitoring if you had diabetes.
Say you're trying to maintain (yourself at) 150, and you (weigh in) within 2 pounds. That's normal fluctuation, so consider yourself doing great. If it's up 3 or 4 pounds, that's beyond the normal daily fluctuation. We use a traffic-light approach: 2 pounds is the green zone, and 3 to 4 is the yellow zone, which means be cautious and think about what's going on. If you have gained 5 pounds, that's the red light. Then we encourage people to take action -- to do something to get their weight back down.
(We're talking about) people who lost weight successfully (in the past), so it could mean (going back to) what they did before. We (also) told people about low-fat, low-calorie diets as one approach to use if they've gotten in the red.
Some people have said, "You've made people too tied to the scale." But if you're asking someone to drive on the road, you suggest they keep their eyes on road, and that's really how we're trying to picture the scale, (as a tool on the) weight-loss maintenance road.
Q. What weight-loss maintenance strategies worked for people?
A. We encouraged people to gradually increase their physical activity until they were doing approximately an hour a day of physical activity. That doesn't have to be all at once -- it could be a walk in the morning, at lunchtime or in the evening, or doing an aerobic dance class.
Getting an hour of day of physical activity seems to be a characteristic of people who have successfully lost weight and maintained it. This comes from information we've gleaned from the National Weight Control Registry, which includes (more than 5,000 people who have lost 30 pounds or more and kept it off for a year), and we're trying to teach it to people who had recently lost weight and see if the strategies could work for them.
Q. What about people who say they're too busy to make these changes?
A. If someone says they don't have time, I say find five or 10 minutes in the morning and evening, and start with small little bouts. People start to find the time. You can't just say to someone, "Do 40 minutes of exercise all at once." If you get to a meeting five minutes early, take a walk. If you get to the airport 20 minutes early, walk in the airport. If you get people thinking about it, there are many times in the day to get small amounts of time to be active.
Q. So weight loss needs to be a comprehensive approach?
A. Yes. Many people feel once they've lost the weight, they've achieved success -- they say, "I can do it on my own." That's often incorrect. In the study, one-third of the participants were randomly assigned to maintain their weight loss on their own; within this group only 30 percent were able to keep from gaining 5 pounds or more over the next 18 months.
Given that, weight-loss programs and commercial programs need to focus on how people maintain weight loss. People are going to realize they need ongoing help with the maintenance part.
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To register for the National Weight Control Registry visit www.nwcr.ws.
Source:
http://www.upi.com/ConsumerHealthDaily/vie...28-043210-2397r