Raleigh, NC Are you looking for an easy way to lose weight? You are not alone. According to the Food and Drug Administration, an estimated 50 million people will go on diets this year. While some may lose weight, less than 5% of dieters maintain their goal weight.
As a result, many of these people will turn to fad diet pill and products whose sales are driven by unproven claims and clever marketing. The Federal Trade Commission estimated that 37 billion dollars was spent last year on diet pills, products, and programs. The sad truth is that most of these products don’t work.
Many products will promise fast weight loss without diet or exercise. One popular product suggests that by fasting on their special weight loss product you can lose ten pounds in a weekend. While it is possible to loss that much weight in a weekend, you will be losing predominately water – not fat.
The only way to burn fat is to take in through eating less calories than you expend through daily activity.
To give you some perspective, running a marathon will only burn about a pound of fat. So to actually lose 10 pounds of fat in a 48 hour period the typical 150 pound person would need to run 240 miles while not eating anything!
Another weight loss claims is made by a popular home gym equipment manufacturer. They suggest that you can do twice the work in one effortless motion. Unfortunately, you can’t do “work” without “effort”. Just type work into your word processor – they are actually synonyms.
So how do we lose those unwanted pounds? And more importantly, how do we keep them off?
Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh founded The National Weight Control Registry to find answers to these questions. And those answers were not found in a bottle of pills.
The National Weight Control Registry surveyed people who had lost at least 30 pounds and kept it off for at least a year. What they found was that moderation, determination, and exercise were the real keys to long term success.
Almost all participants went on a balanced diet. Sorry carb cutters, but less then 10% used a fad diet that eliminated one or more type of food completely. In fact, most of the participants found that eliminating foods completely led to failure – not success.
Very few participants reported using a fat loss supplement. In contrast, over 75% of participants exercised more than two and a half hours per week.
What these successful dieters had learned was that to maintain weight loss, they had to make changes they could live with forever.
If you have tried unsuccessfully to lose weight in the past, don’t get down on yourself. Most of the study registrants had failed at several previous attempts towards weight loss.
John Kuzora has over ten years of professional experience in the fitness industry. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Nutritional Science and nationally recognized certifications in personal training, strength and conditioning, and flexibility. He was an All-American college football player and is featured in the College Football Hall of Fame. He continued his football career after college, playing two years in the New York Giants organization. John is also a member of American Mensa, the high IQ society. He currently owns Kuzora Personal Training, a private fitness studio in Wakefield. He can be reached at 569-9929.
