Weight Management

Learning how to lose weight and maintain it may be one of hardest things to do on the lifestyle chart. The longer I practice the more evident it becomes that weight is more than just calories in and calories out. For health care professionals to reduce such a complex process to an equation isn't realistic to all who struggle with the issue of weight. So often people hear messages such as "just watch your diet," "push away from the table," or "eat less." If it were that easy there wouldn't be such a weight epidemic in America, where more than one in three adults is overweight.

The dieting process has a 95% failure rate, yet many still hold out for that "one last time." Truly dieting does not work, and for health care professionals to continue prescribing a treatment with a 95% failure rate is quite unreasonable.

So where do we begin with helping those who need or want to lose weight? One of the things I address with my clients is hunger and satiation. Hunger and satiation are two difficult and highly subjective terms to define. The diet approach keeps people invested in allowing a "program" to define how much one eats, what particular foods to consume, when to eat them, and possibly where and why to eat them. Part of learning to fuel your body is figuring out how to balance each meal to give you the most satisfaction physically and emotionally, the amounts needed to satisfy you versus make you feel over full, and how often your body likes to be fueled. Each person's needs are different and allowing a Registered Dietitian to help you fine tune your meals, see what particular foods work for you during the day and which do not, which food combinations allow you to feel energetic versus sluggish, satisfied versus overfull, can be critical to healing your relationship with food.

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