Successful, long-term weight loss involves making small tweaks to lifestyle habits that you can maintain for years. The sum of these small parts will amount to significant improvements in physical and mental health, allowing your body and mind to recover.
Registered dietitian Kathleen M . Zelman offered several habits that can make patients with weight loss intentions likelier to succeed. Before we discuss those habits, let’s look at the relationships weight has with back pain and sleep.
Weight and back pain
The American Obesity Association reports that chronic pain, especially back pain, is widely experienced by the more than 30% of Americans categorized as obese. It’s important for those individuals to achieve weight loss so that they can reduce back pain as well: the excess pounds amplify the force experienced by the musculoskeletal system in the back.
The spine of an overweight person will often become misaligned. As you become healthier, you will naturally reduce back pain.
Weight and sleep
One habit that we can highlight prior to looking at Zelman’s list is consistent high-quality sleep. Recent research featured in The Lancet and The Journal of the American Medical Association revealed that lack of sleep could cause the appetite to rise and the metabolism to slow down.
The two studies suggest that sleep deprivation can lead to the following complications:
- Hunger that continues unabated, regardless of how much you have eaten. Lack of sleep diminishes the hormone cortisol, which helps keep hunger at an appropriate level.
- Additional storage of fat. Sleep deprivation could make it more difficult to process carbs, ramping up the quantity of blood sugar. “Excess blood sugar promotes the overproduction of insulin,” explains Michael J. Breus, PhD, “which can lead to the storage of body fat and insulin resistance.”
4 strong weight-loss habits
- Don’t go shopping when hungry. Make a list before you leave for the store. You need to make sure that what you get at the grocery is healthy enough to have in your house.
- Eat meals consistently. You will be less likely to make severe compromises to your diet if your body is getting food on a regular schedule.
- Don’t eat out of a bag. It’s easy to overeat if you haven’t laid out all your portions on a plate.
- Keep any additional food on the stove. Don’t entice yourself by making it easily accessible in bowls on your kitchen table.
Partners for success
To succeed with weight loss and reduce your back pain, the habits listed above can help, and we can too. Our medical weight loss programs were designed with the dual expertise of our doctors and nutritionists. Danisa Suarez called her family’s experience “the best medical service we have received!” Get relief now!
