Great weight-loss expectations
By Karen Collins, R.D.
SPECIAL TO MSNBC
Sept. 10 — “It just isn’t working,” you say, and you give up
on an important diet or exercise resolution. It’s tempting to toss in the towel when
you don’t get results fast enough. One way to overcome this temptation is to develop
healthy habits that don’t feel like torture. Equally important, however, is to have
realistic expectations in the first place.
STUDIES SHOW that exercise is one of the main influences on long-term weight
control. But for most people, exercise works slowly.
For someone who has been a “couch potato” for a number of years to
start a walking program is a big accomplishment. Yet each pound of fat loss requires
burning an extra 3,500 calories more than are taken in. Research shows that a person who
weighs 180 pounds and walks three days a week for 30 minutes at a medium-paced three miles
per hour would take almost four months to lose a pound. Someone hoping to lose a few
pounds a week would have given up long before that.
Exercise can produce greater results. The acronym FIT — for Frequency,
Intensity and Time — tells you how to increase the benefits. Instead of walking three
days each week, which is considered the minimum for maintaining your current level of
fitness, walking five or six days a week will allow the calorie-burning to add up more
quickly. Or once you’ve conditioned yourself to walking three miles per hour, you can
increase that to a brisk four miles per hour and burn about an extra 50 calories a
session. Interval training, in which you periodically push a bit harder, is a great way to
burn more calories and increase your level of fitness. Or, if you can manage an hour
instead of just a half hour of walking, you double the calories you burn. The hour can be
broken up and spread through the day.
Studies show that even by combining these strategies, it would take you five to
six weeks to lose a pound. Your average weight loss would be eight to 10 pounds per year.
This is plenty to improve fitness and gradually reduce your weight, but if you feel a need
to lose weight a little faster, add some other strategies.
Weight-training exercise to increase muscle is one way to burn more calories.
Muscle tissue burns more calories than does body fat. In studies of weight-training
programs, in about 12 weeks people who add three pounds of muscle (while losing fat) can
burn an extra 120 to 200 calories per day.
Look at your eating habits, too. By cutting back on portions or skipping a snack
that was purely habit, many people can easily eliminate 200 extra calories a day without
going hungry at all. That 200 calories daily can mean loss of almost half a pound a week.
By combining these strategies, weight loss can proceed at the rate of a half to
one pound per week. This is the rate experts recommend to safely lose mainly fat tissue,
without loss of muscle tissue or slowing down metabolic rate. A year from now you’ll
be a lot better off than the people who spend the year stopping and starting less sensible
exercise and diet resolutions.
These types of exercise and eating changes have been shown in many studies to
produce a wide range of other benefits long before weight loss stacks up. You’ll find
it easier to carry things and climb stairs. You’ll have more energy and feel less
stressed. Notice and celebrate these and other changes in how you feel, and the temptation
to forsake your resolutions will simply fade away.
Karen Collins is a registered dietitian with the American
Institute for Cancer Research in Washington, D.C.
